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Title: There's Pippins and Cheese to Come

Author: Charles S. Brooks

Release date: November 1, 2003 [eBook #10023]
                Most recently updated: December 19, 2020

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Ted Garvin, Josephine Paolucci and PG Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THERE'S PIPPINS AND CHEESE TO COME ***




Produced by Ted Garvin, Josephine Paolucci and PG Distributed Proofreaders




Other Books by the Same Author:

  "Journeys to Bagdad"
  _Sixth printing_.

  "Chimney-Pot Papers"
  _Third printing_.

  "Hints to Pilgrims"




THERE'S PIPPINS

AND

CHEESE TO COME

BY

CHARLES S. BROOKS

1917


Illustrated by Theodore Diedricksen, Jr.




TO MY FATHER AND MOTHER




CONTENTS

I. There's Pippins and Cheese to Come

II. On Buying Old Books

III. Any Stick Will Do to Beat a Dog

IV. Roads of Morning

V. The Man of Grub Street Comes from His Garret

VI. Now that Spring is Here

VII. The Friendly Genii

VIII. Mr. Pepys Sits in the Pit

IX. To an Unknown Reader

X. A Plague of All Cowards

XI. The Asperities of the Early British Reviewers

XII. The Pursuit of Fire




THERE'S PIPPINS AND CHEESE TO COME




There's Pippins and Cheese To Come


In my noonday quest for food, if the day is fine, it is my habit to shun
the nearer places of refreshment. I take the air and stretch myself. Like
Eve's serpent I go upright for a bit. Yet if time presses, there may be had
next door a not unsavory stowage. A drinking bar is nearest to the street
where its polished brasses catch the eye. It holds a gilded mirror to such
red-faced nature as consorts within. Yet you pass the bar and come upon a
range of tables at the rear.

Now, if you yield to the habits of the place you order a rump of meat.
Gravy lies about it like a moat around a castle, and if there is in you the
zest for encounter, you attack it above these murky waters. "This castle
hath a pleasant seat," you cry, and charge upon it with pike advanced. But
if your appetite is one to peck and mince, the whiffs that breathe upon the
place come unwelcome to your nostrils. In no wise are they like the sweet
South upon your senses. There is even a suspicion in you--such is your
distemper--that it is too much a witch's cauldron in the kitchen, "eye of
newt, and toe of frog," and you spy and poke upon your food. Bus boys bear
off the crockery as though they were apprenticed to a juggler and were only
at the beginning of their art. Waiters bawl strange messages to the cook.
It's a tongue unguessed by learning, yet sharp and potent. Also, there
comes a riot from the kitchen, and steam issues from the door as though the
devil himself were a partner and conducted here an upper branch. Like the
man in the old comedy, your belly may still ring dinner, but the tinkle is
faint. Such being your state, you choose a daintier place to eat.

Having now set upon a longer journey--the day being fine and the sidewalks
thronged--you pass by a restaurant that is but a few doors up the street.
A fellow in a white coat flops pancakes in the window. But even though the
pancake does a double somersault and there are twenty curious noses pressed
against the glass, still you keep your course uptown.

Nor are you led off because a near-by stairway beckons you to a Chinese
restaurant up above. A golden dragon swings over the door. Its race has
fallen since its fire-breathing grandsire guarded the fruits of the
Hesperides. Are not "soys" and "chou meins" and other such treasures of the
East laid out above? And yet the dragon dozes at its post like a sleepy
dog. No flame leaps up its gullet. The swish of its tail is stilled. If it
wag at all, it's but in friendship or because a gust of wind has stirred it
from its dreams.

I have wondered why Chinese restaurants are generally on the second story.
A casual inquiry attests it. I know of one, it is true, on the ground
level, yet here I suspect a special economy. The place had formerly been a
German restaurant, with Teuton scrolls, "Ich Dien," and heraldries on its
walls. A frugal brush changed the decoration. From the heart of a Prussian
blazonry, there flares on you in Chinese yellow a recommendation to try
"Our Chicken Chop Soy." The quartering of the House of Hohenzollern wears a
baldric in praise of "Subgum Noodle Warmein," which it seems they cook to
an unusual delicacy. Even a wall painting of Rip Van Winkle bowling at
tenpins in the mountains is now set off with a pigtail. But the chairs were
Dutch and remain as such. Generally, however, Chinese restaurants are on
the second story. Probably there is a ritual from the ancient days of Ming
Ti that Chinamen when they eat shall sit as near as possible to the sacred
moon.

But hold a bit! In your haste up town to find a place to eat, you are
missing some of the finer sights upon the way. In these windows that
you pass, the merchants have set their choicest wares. If there is any
commodity of softer gloss than common, or one shinier to the eye--so
that your poverty frets you--it is displayed here. In the window of the
haberdasher, shirts--mere torsos with not a leg below or head above--yet
disport themselves in gay neckwear. Despite their dismemberment they are
tricked to the latest turn of fashion. Can vanity survive such general
amputation? Then there is hope for immortality.

But by what sad chance have these blithe fellows been disjointed? If
a gloomy mood prevails in you--as might come from a bad turn of the
market--you fancy that the evil daughter of Herodias still lives around the
corner, and that she has set out her victims to the general view. If there
comes a hurdy-gurdy on the street and you cock your ear to the tune of
it, you may still hear the dancing measure of her wicked feet. Or it is
possible that these are the kindred of Holofernes and that they have supped
guiltily in their tents with a sisterhood of Judiths.

Or we may conceive--our thoughts running now to food--that these gamesome
creatures of the haberdasher had dressed themselves for a more recent
banquet. Their black-tailed coats and glossy shirts attest a rare occasion.
It was in holiday mood, when they were fresh-combed and perked in their
best, that they were cut off from life. It would appear that Jack Ketch the
headsman got them when they were rubbed and shining for the feast. We'll
not squint upon his writ. It is enough that they were apprehended for some
rascality. When he came thumping on his dreadful summons, here they were
already set, fopped from shoes to head in the newest whim. Spoon in hand
and bib across their knees--lest they fleck their careful fronts--they
waited for the anchovy to come. And on a sudden they were cut off from
life, unfit, unseasoned for the passage. Like the elder Hamlet's brother,
they were engaged upon an act that had no relish of salvation in it. You
may remember the lamentable child somewhere in Dickens, who because of an
abrupt and distressing accident, had a sandwich in its hand but no mouth
to put it in. Or perhaps you recall the cook of the Nancy Bell and his
grievous end. The poor fellow was stewed in his own stew-pot. It was the
Elderly Naval Man, you recall--the two of them being the ship's sole
survivors on the deserted island, and both of them lean with hunger--it was
the Elderly Naval Man (the villain of the piece) who "ups with his heels,
and smothers his squeals in the scum of the boiling broth."

And yet by looking on these torsos of the haberdasher, one is not brought
to thoughts of sad mortality. Their joy is so exultant. And all the things
that they hold dear--canes, gloves, silk hats, and the newer garments on
which fashion makes its twaddle--are within reach of their armless sleeves.
Had they fingers they would be smoothing themselves before the glass. Their
unbodied heads, wherever they may be, are still smiling on the world,
despite their divorcement. Their tongues are still ready with a jest, their
lips still parted for the anchovy to come.

A few days since, as I was thinking--for so I am pleased to call my muddy
stirrings--what manner of essay I might write and how best to sort and lay
out the rummage, it happened pat to my needs that I received from a friend
a book entitled "The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened." Now, before
it came I had got so far as to select a title. Indeed, I had written the
title on seven different sheets of paper, each time in the hope that by
the run of the words I might leap upon some further thought. Seven times I
failed and in the end the sheets went into the waste basket, possibly
to the confusion of Annie our cook, who may have mistaken them for a
reiterated admonishment towards the governance of her kitchen--at the
least, a hint of my desires and appetite for cheese and pippins.

"The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened" is a cook book. It is due you
to know this at once, otherwise your thoughts--if your nature be
vagrant--would drift towards family skeletons. Or maybe the domestic traits
prevail and you would think of dress-clothes hanging in camphorated bags
and a row of winter boots upon a shelf.

I am disqualified to pass upon the merits of a cook book, for the reason
that I have little discrimination in food. It is not that I am totally
indifferent to what lies on the platter. Indeed, I have more than a tribal
aversion to pork in general, while, on the other hand, I quicken joyfully
when noodles are interspersed with bacon. I have a tooth for sweets, too,
although I hold it unmanly and deny it as I can. I am told also--although
I resent it--that my eye lights up on the appearance of a tray of French
pastry. I admit gladly, however, my love of onions, whether they come
hissing from the skillet, or lie in their first tender whiteness. They
are at their best when they are placed on bread and are eaten largely at
midnight after society has done its worst.

A fine dinner is lost within me. A quail is but an inferior chicken--a poor
relation outside the exclusive hennery. Terrapin sits low in my regard,
even though it has wallowed in the most aristocratic marsh. Through such
dinners I hack and saw my way without even gaining a memory of my progress.
If asked the courses, I balk after the recital of the soup. Indeed, I am so
forgetful of food, even when I dine at home, that I can well believe that
Adam when he was questioned about the apple was in real confusion. He had
or he had not. It was mixed with the pomegranate or the quince that Eve had
sliced and cooked on the day before.

A dinner at its best is brought to a single focus. There is one dish
to dominate the cloth, a single bulk to which all other dishes are
subordinate. If there be turkey, it should mount from a central platter.
Its protruding legs out-top the candles. All other foods are, as it were,
privates in Caesar's army. They do no more than flank the pageant. Nor may
the pantry hold too many secrets. Within reason, everything should be
set out at once, or at least a gossip of its coming should run before.
Otherwise, if the stew is savory, how shall one reserve a corner for the
custard? One must partition himself justly--else, by an over-stowage at the
end, he list and sink.

I am partial to picnics--the spreading of the cloth in the woods or beside
a stream--although I am not avid for sandwiches unless hunger press me.
Rather, let there be a skillet in the company and let a fire be started!
Nor need a picnic consume the day. In summer it requires but the late
afternoon, with such borrowing of the night as is necessary for the
journey home. You leave the street car, clanking with your bundles like an
itinerant tinman. You follow a stream, which on these lower stretches, it
is sad to say, is already infected with the vices of the city. Like many a
countryman who has come to town, it has fallen to dissipation. It shows the
marks of the bottle. Further up, its course is cleaner. You cross it in the
mud. Was it not Christian who fell into the bog because of the burden on
his back? Then you climb a villainously long hill and pop out upon an open
platform above the city.

The height commands a prospect to the west. Below is the smoke of a
thousand suppers. Up from the city there comes the hum of life, now
somewhat fallen with the traffic of the day--as though Nature already
practiced the tune for sending her creatures off to sleep. You light a
fire. The baskets disgorge their secrets. Ants and other leviathans think
evidently that a circus has come or that bears are in the town. The chops
and bacon achieve their appointed destiny. You throw the last bone across
your shoulder. It slips and rattles to the river. The sun sets. Night like
an ancient dame puts on her jewels:

  And now that I have climbed and won this height,
  I must tread downward through the sloping shade
  And travel the bewildered tracks till night.
  Yet for this hour I still may here be stayed
  And see the gold air and the silver fade
  And the last bird fly into the last light.

By these confessions you will see how unfit I am to comment on the old cook
book of Sir Kenelm Digby. Yet it lies before me. It may have escaped your
memory in the din of other things, that in the time when Oliver Cromwell
still walked the earth, there lived in England a man by the name of Kenelm
Digby, who was renowned in astrology and alchemy, piracy, wit, philosophy
and fashion. It appears that wherever learning wagged its bulbous head, Sir
Kenelm was of the company. It appears, also, that wherever the mahogany did
most groan, wherever the possets were spiced most delicately to the nose,
there too did Sir Kenelm bib and tuck himself. With profundity, as
though he sucked wisdom from its lowest depth, he spouted forth on the
transmutation of the baser metals or tossed you a phrase from Paracelsus.
Or with long instructive finger he dissertated on the celestial universe.
One would have thought that he had stood by on the making of it and that
his judgment had prevailed in the larger problems. Yet he did not neglect
his trencher.

And now as time went on, the richness of the food did somewhat dominate his
person. The girth of his wisdom grew no less, but his body fattened. In
a word, the good gentleman's palate came to vie with his intellect. Less
often was he engaged upon some dark saying of Isidore of Seville. Rather,
even if his favorite topic astrology were uppermost about the table, his
eye travelled to the pantry on every change of dishes. His fingers, too,
came to curl most delicately on his fork. He used it like an epicure,
poking his viands apart for sharpest scrutiny. His nod upon a compote was
much esteemed.

Now mark his further decline! On an occasion--surely the old rascal's head
is turned!--he would be found in private talk with his hostess, the Lady of
Middlesex, or with the Countess of Monmouth, not as you might expect, on
the properties of fire or on the mortal diseases of man, but--on subjects
quite removed. Society, we may be sure, began to whisper of these snug
parleys in the arbor after dinner, these shadowed mumblings on the balcony
when the moon was up--and Lady Digby stiffened into watchfulness. It was
when they took leave that she saw the Countess slip a note into her lord's
fingers. Her jealousy broke out. "Viper!" She spat the words and seized her
husband's wrist. Of course the note was read. It proved, however, that Sir
Kenelm was innocent of all mischief. To the disappointment of the gossips,
who were tuned to a spicier anticipation, the note was no more than a
recipe of the manner that the Countess was used to mix her syllabub, with
instruction that it was the "rosemary a little bruised and the limon-peal
that did quicken the taste." Advice, also, followed in the postscript on
the making of tea, with counsel that "the boiling water should remain upon
it just so long as one might say a _miserere_." A mutual innocence being
now established, the Lady Digby did by way of apology peck the Countess on
the cheek.

Sir Kenelm died in 1665, full of years. In that day his fame rested chiefly
on his books in physic and chirurgery. His most enduring work was still to
be published--"The Closet Opened."

It was two years after his death that his son came upon a bundle of his
father's papers that had hitherto been overlooked. I fancy that he went
spying in the attic on a rainy day. In the darkest corner, behind the
rocking horse--if such devices were known in those distant days--he came
upon a trunk of his father's papers. "Od's fish," said Sir Kenelm's son,
"here's a box of manuscripts. It is like that they pertain to alchemy or
chirurgery." He pulled out a bundle and held it to the light--such light as
came through the cobwebs of the ancient windows. "Here be strange matters,"
he exclaimed. Then he read aloud: "My Lord of Bristol's Scotch collops are
thus made: Take a leg of fine sweet mutton, that to make it tender, is
kept as long as possible may be without stinking. In winter seven or eight
days"--"Ho! Ho!" cried Sir Kenelm's son. "This is not alchemy!" He drew out
another parchment and read again: "My Lord of Carlile's sack posset, how
it's made: Take a pottle of cream and boil in it a little whole cinnamon
and three or four flakes of mace. Boil it until it simpreth and bubbleth."

By this time, as you may well imagine, Sir Kenelm's son was wrought to an
excitement. It is likely that he inherited his father's palate and that the
juices of his appetite were stirred. Seizing an armful of the papers, he
leaped down the attic steps, three at a time. His lady mother thrust a
curled and papered head from her door and asked whether the chimney were
afire, but he did not heed her. The cook was waddling in her pattens. He
cried to her to throw wood upon the fire.

That night the Digby household was served a delicacy, red herrings broiled
in the fashion of my Lord d'Aubigny, "short and crisp and laid upon a
sallet." Also, there was a wheaten flommery as it was made in the West
Country--for the cook chose quite at random--and a slip-coat cheese as
Master Phillips proportioned it. Also, against the colic, which was
ravishing the country, the cook prepared a metheglin as Lady Stuart mixed
it--"nettles, fennel and grumel seeds, of each two ounces being small-cut
and mixed with honey and boiled together." It is on record that the Lady
Digby smiled for the first time since her lord had died, and when the
grinning cook bore in the platter, she beat upon the table with her spoon.

The following morning, Sir Kenelm's son posted to London bearing the
recipes, with a pistol in the pocket of his great coat against the crossing
of Hounslow Heath. He went to a printer at the Star in Little Britain whose
name was H. Brome.

Shortly the book appeared. It was the son who wrote the preface: "There
needs no Rhetoricating Floscules to set it off. The Authour, as is well
known, having been a Person of Eminency for his Learning, and of Exquisite
Curiosity in his Researches. Even that Incomparable Sir Kenelme Digbie
Knight, Fellow of the Royal Society and Chancellour to the Queen Mother,
(Et omen in Nomine) His name does sufficiently Auspicate the Work." The
sale of the book is not recorded. It is supposed that the Lady Middlesex,
so many of whose recipes had been used, directed that her chair be carried
to the shop where the book was for sale and that she bought largely of it.
The Countess of Dorset bought a copy and spelled it out word for word to
her cook. As for the Lady Monmouth, she bought not a single copy, which
neglect on coming to the Digbys aroused a coolness.

To this day it is likely that a last auspicated volume still sits on its
shelf with the spice jars in some English country kitchen and that a worn
and toothless cook still thumbs its leaves. If the guests about the table
be of an antique mind, still will they pledge one another with its honeyed
drinks, still will they pipe and whistle of its virtues, still will they--

"EAT"--A flaring sign hangs above the sidewalk. By this time, in our
noonday search for food, we have come into the thick of the restaurants. In
the jungle of the city, here is the feeding place. Here come the growling
bipeds for such bones and messes as are thrown them.

The waiter thrusts a card beneath my nose. "Nice leg of lamb, sir?" I waved
him off. "Hold a bit!" I cried. "You'll fetch me a capon in white broth as
my Lady Monmouth broileth hers. Put plentiful sack in it and boil it until
it simpreth!" The waiter scratched his head. "The chicken pie is good," he
said. "It's our Wednesday dish." "Varlet!" I cried--then softened. "Let it
be the chicken pie! But if the cook knoweth the manner that Lord Carlile
does mix and pepper it, let that manner be followed to the smallest
fraction of a pinch!"





On Buying Old Books


By some slim chance, reader, you may be the kind of person who, on a visit
to a strange city, makes for a bookshop. Of course your slight temporal
business may detain you in the earlier hours of the day. You sit with
committees and stroke your profound chin, or you spend your talent in the
market, or run to and fro and wag your tongue in persuasion. Or, if you be
on a holiday, you strain yourself on the sights of the city, against being
caught in an omission. The bolder features of a cathedral must be grasped
to satisfy a quizzing neighbor lest he shame you later on your hearth, a
building must be stuffed inside your memory, or your pilgrim feet must wear
the pavement of an ancient shrine. However, these duties being done and the
afternoon having not yet declined, do you not seek a bookshop to regale
yourself?

Doubtless, we have met. As you have scrunched against the shelf not to
block the passage, but with your head thrown back to see the titles up
above, you have noticed at the corner of your eye--unless it was one of
your blinder moments when you were fixed wholly on the shelf--a man in
a slightly faded overcoat of mixed black and white, a man just past the
nimbleness of youth, whose head is plucked of its full commodity of hair.
It was myself. I admit the portrait, though modesty has curbed me short of
justice.

Doubtless, we have met. It was your umbrella--which you held villainously
beneath your arm--that took me in the ribs when you lighted on a set of
Fuller's Worthies. You recall my sour looks, but it was because I had
myself lingered on the volumes but cooled at the price. How you smoothed
and fingered them! With what triumph you bore them off! I bid you--for I
see you in a slippered state, eased and unbuttoned after dinner--I bid you
turn the pages with a slow thumb, not to miss the slightest tang of their
humor. You will of course go first, because of its broad fame, to the page
on Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and their wet-combats at the Mermaid. But
before the night is too far gone and while yet you can hold yourself from
nodding, you will please read about Captain John Smith of Virginia and his
"strange performances, the scene whereof is laid at such a distance, they
are cheaper credited than confuted."

In no proper sense am I a buyer of old books. I admit a bookish quirk
maybe, a love of the shelf, a weakness for morocco, especially if it is
stained with age. I will, indeed, shirk a wedding for a bookshop. I'll
go in "just to look about a bit, to see what the fellow has," and on an
occasion I pick up a volume. But I am innocent of first editions. It is
a stiff courtesy, as becomes a democrat, that I bestow on this form
of primogeniture. Of course, I have nosed my way with pleasure along
aristocratic shelves and flipped out volumes here and there to ask their
price, but for the greater part, it is the plainer shops that engage me. If
a rack of books is offered cheap before the door, with a fixed price upon a
card, I come at a trot. And if a brown dust lies on them, I bow and sniff
upon the rack, as though the past like an ancient fop in peruke and buckle
were giving me the courtesy of its snuff box. If I take the dust in my
nostrils and chance to sneeze, it is the fit and intended observance toward
the manners of a former century.

I have in mind such a bookshop in Bath, England. It presents to the street
no more than a decent front, but opens up behind like a swollen bottle.
There are twenty rooms at least, piled together with such confusion of
black passages and winding steps, that one might think that the owner
himself must hold a thread when he visits the remoter rooms. Indeed, such
are the obscurities and dim turnings of the place, that, were the legend of
the Minotaur but English, you might fancy that the creature still lived in
this labyrinth, to nip you between his toothless gums--for the beast grows
old--at some darker corner. There is a story of the place, that once a raw
clerk having been sent to rummage in the basement, his candle tipped off
the shelf. He was left in so complete darkness that his fears overcame his
judgment and for two hours he roamed and babbled among the barrels. Nor was
his absence discovered until the end of the day when, as was the custom,
the clerks counted noses at the door. When they found him, he bolted up the
steps, nor did he cease his whimper until he had reached the comforting
twilight of the outer world. He served thereafter in the shop a full two
years and had a beard coming--so the story runs--before he would again
venture beyond the third turning of the passage; to the stunting of his
scholarship, for the deeper books lay in the farther windings.

Or it may appear credible that in ages past a jealous builder contrived the
place. Having no learning himself and being at odds with those of better
opportunity, he twisted the pattern of the house. Such was his evil temper,
that he set the steps at a dangerous hazard in the dark, in order that
scholars--whose eyes are bleared at best--might risk their legs to the end
of time. Those of strict orthodoxy have even suspected the builder to have
been an atheist, for they have observed what double joints and steps and
turnings confuse the passage to the devouter books--the Early Fathers in
particular being up a winding stair where even the soberest reader might
break his neck. Be these things as they may, leather bindings in sets of
"grenadier uniformity" ornament the upper and lighter rooms. Biography
straggles down a hallway, with a candle needed at the farther end. A room
of dingy plays--Wycherley, Congreve and their crew--looks out through an
area grating. It was through even so foul an eye, that when alive, they
looked upon the world. As for theology, except for the before-mentioned
Fathers, it sits in general and dusty convention on the landing to the
basement, its snuffy sermons, by a sad misplacement--or is there an
ironical intention?--pointing the way to the eternal abyss below.

It was in this shop that I inquired whether there was published a book on
piracy in Cornwall. Now, I had lately come from Tintagel on the Cornish
coast, and as I had climbed upon the rocks and looked down upon the sea, I
had wondered to myself whether, if the knowledge were put out before me, I
could compose a story of Spanish treasure and pirates. For I am a prey to
such giddy ambition. A foul street--if the buildings slant and topple--will
set me thinking delightfully of murders. A wharf-end with water lapping
underneath and bits of rope about will set me itching for a deep-sea plot.
Or if I go on broader range and see in my fancy a broken castle on a hill,
I'll clear its moat and sound trumpets on its walls. If there is pepper
in my mood, I'll storm its dungeon. Or in a softer moment I'll trim its
unsubstantial towers with pageantry and rest upon my elbow until I fall
asleep. So being cast upon the rugged Cornish coast whose cliffs are so
swept with winter winds that the villages sit for comfort in the hollows,
it was to be expected that my thoughts would run toward pirates.

There is one rock especially which I had climbed in the rain and fog of
early morning. A reckless path goes across its face with a sharp pitch to
the ocean. It was so slippery and the wind so tugged and pulled to throw me
off, that although I endangered my dignity, I played the quadruped on the
narrower parts. But once on top in the open blast of the storm and safe
upon the level, I thumped with desire for a plot. In each inlet from the
ocean I saw a pirate lugger--such is the pleasing word--with a keg of rum
set up. Each cranny led to a cavern with doubloons piled inside. The
very tempest in my ears was compounded out of ships at sea and wreck and
pillage. I needed but a plot, a thread of action to string my villains on.
If this were once contrived, I would spice my text with sailors' oaths and
such boasting talk as might lie in my invention. Could I but come upon a
plot, I might yet proclaim myself an author.

With this guilty secret in me I blushed as I asked the question. It seemed
sure that the shopkeeper must guess my purpose. I felt myself suspected as
though I were a rascal buying pistols to commit a murder. Indeed, I seem
to remember having read that even hardened criminals have become confused
before a shopkeeper and betrayed themselves. Of course, Dick Turpin and
Jerry Abershaw could call for pistols in the same easy tone they ordered
ale, but it would take a practiced villainy. But I in my innocence wanted
nothing but the meager outline of a pirate's life, which I might fatten to
my uses.

But on a less occasion, when there is no plot thumping in me, I still feel
a kind of embarrassment when I ask for a book out of the general demand. I
feel so like an odd stick. This embarrassment applies not to the request
for other commodities. I will order a collar that is quite outside the
fashion, in a high-pitched voice so that the whole shop can hear. I could
bargain for a purple waistcoat--did my taste run so--and though the
sidewalk listened, it would not draw a blush. I have traded even for
women's garments--though this did strain me--without an outward twitch.
Finally, to top my valor, I have bought sheet music of the lighter kind and
have pronounced the softest titles so that all could hear. But if I desire
the poems of Lovelace or the plays of Marlowe, I sidle close up to the
shopkeeper to get his very ear. If the book is visible, I point my thumb at
it without a word.

It was but the other day--in order to fill a gap in a paper I was
writing--I desired to know the name of an author who is obscure although
his work has been translated into nearly all languages. I wanted to know a
little about the life of the man who wrote _Mary Had a Little Lamb_, which,
I am told, is known by children over pretty much all the western world. It
needed only a trip to the Public Library. Any attendant would direct me to
the proper shelf. Yet once in the building, my courage oozed. My question,
though serious, seemed too ridiculous to be asked. I would sizzle as I
met the attendant's eye. Of a consequence, I fumbled on my own devices,
possibly to the increase of my general knowledge, but without gaining what
I sought.

They had no book in the Bath shop on piracy in Cornwall. I was offered
instead a work in two volumes on the notorious highwaymen of history, and
for a moment my plot swerved in that direction. But I put it by. To pay the
fellow for his pains--for he had dug in barrels to his shoulders and had a
smudge across his nose--I bought a copy of Thomson's "Castle of Indolence,"
and in my more energetic moods I read it. And so I came away.

On leaving the shop, lest I should be nipped in a neglect, I visited the
Roman baths. Then I took the waters in the Assembly Room. It was Sam
Weller, you may recall, who remarked, when he was entertained by the select
footmen, that the waters tasted like warm flat-irons. Finally, I viewed
the Crescent around which the shirted Winkle ran with the valorous Dowler
breathing on his neck. With such distractions, as you may well imagine,
Cornish pirates became as naught. Such mental vibration as I had was now
gone toward a tale of fashion in the days when Queen Anne was still alive.
Of a consequence, I again sought the bookshop and stifling my timidity, I
demanded such volumes as might set me most agreeably to my task.

I have in mind also a bookshop of small pretension in a town in Wales. For
purely secular delight, maybe, it was too largely composed of Methodist
sermons. Hell fire burned upon its shelves with a warmth to singe so poor a
worm as I. Yet its signboard popped its welcome when I had walked ten miles
of sunny road. Possibly it was the chair rather than the divinity that
keeps the place in memory. The owner was absent on an errand, and his
daughter, who had been clumping about the kitchen on my arrival, was
uninstructed in the price marks. So I read and fanned myself until his
return.

Perhaps my sluggishness toward first editions--to which I have hinted
above--comes in part from the acquaintance with a man who in a linguistic
outburst as I met him, pronounced himself to be a numismatist and
philatelist. One only of these names would have satisfied a man of less
conceit. It is as though the pteranodon should claim also to be the
spoon-bill dinosaur. It is against modesty that one man should summon all
the letters. No, the numismatist's head is not crammed with the mysteries
of life and death, nor is a philatelist one who is possessed with the
dimmer secrets of eternity. Rather, this man who was so swelled with
titles, eked a living by selling coins and stamps, and he was on his way
to Europe to replenish his wares. Inside his waistcoat, just above his
liver--if he owned so human an appendage--he carried a magnifying glass.
With this, when the business fit was on him, he counted the lines and dots
upon a stamp, the perforations on its edge. He catalogued its volutes, its
stipples, the frisks and curlings of its pattern. He had numbered the very
hairs on the head of George Washington, for in such minutiae did the value
of the stamp reside. Did a single hair spring up above the count, it would
invalidate the issue. Such values, got by circumstance or accident--resting
on a flaw--founded on a speck--cause no ferment of my desires.

For the buying of books, it is the cheaper shops where I most often prowl.
There is in London a district around Charing Cross Road where almost every
shop has books for sale. There is a continuous rack along the sidewalk,
each title beckoning for your attention. You recall the class of
street-readers of whom Charles Lamb wrote--"poor gentry, who, not having
wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open
stalls." It was on some such street that these folk practiced their
innocent larceny. If one shopkeeper frowned at the diligence with which
they read "Clarissa," they would continue her distressing adventures across
the way. By a lingering progress up the street, "Sir Charles Grandison"
might be nibbled down--by such as had the stomach--without the outlay of
a single penny. As for Gibbon and the bulbous historians, though a whole
perusal would outlast the summer and stretch to the colder months, yet with
patience they could be got through. However, before the end was come even a
hasty reader whose eye was nimble on the page would be blowing on his nails
and pulling his tails between him and the November wind.

But the habit of reading at the open stalls was not only with the poor. You
will remember that Mr. Brownlow was addicted. Really, had not the Artful
Dodger stolen his pocket handkerchief as he was thus engaged upon his book,
the whole history of Oliver Twist must have been quite different. And Pepys
himself, Samuel Pepys, F.R.S., was guilty. "To Paul's Church Yard," he
writes, "and there looked upon the second part of Hudibras, which I buy
not, but borrow to read." Such parsimony is the curse of authors. To thumb
a volume cheaply around a neighborhood is what keeps them in their garrets.
It is a less offence to steal peanuts from a stand. Also, it is recorded in
the life of Beau Nash that the persons of fashion of his time, to pass a
tedious morning "did divert themselves with reading in the booksellers'
shops." We may conceive Mr. Fanciful Fopling in the sleepy blink of those
early hours before the pleasures of the day have made a start, inquiring
between his yawns what latest novels have come down from London, or whether
a new part of "Pamela" is offered yet. If the post be in, he will prop
himself against the shelf and--unless he glaze and nod--he will read
cheaply for an hour. Or my Lady Betty, having taken the waters in the
pump-room and lent her ear to such gossip as is abroad so early, is now
handed to her chair and goes round by Gregory's to read a bit. She is
flounced to the width of the passage. Indeed, until the fashion shall
abate, those more solid authors that are set up in the rear of the shop,
must remain during her visits in general neglect. Though she hold herself
against the shelf and tilt her hoops, it would not be possible to pass. She
is absorbed in a book of the softer sort, and she flips its pages against
her lap-dog's nose.

But now behold the student coming up the street! He is clad in shining
black. He is thin of shank as becomes a scholar. He sags with knowledge. He
hungers after wisdom. He comes opposite the bookshop. It is but coquetry
that his eyes seek the window of the tobacconist. His heart, you may be
sure, looks through the buttons at his back. At last he turns. He pauses on
the curb. Now desire has clutched him. He jiggles his trousered shillings.
He treads the gutter. He squints upon the rack. He lights upon a treasure.
He plucks it forth. He is unresolved whether to buy it or to spend the
extra shilling on his dinner. Now all you cooks together, to save your
business, rattle your pans to rouse him! If within these ancient buildings
there are onions ready peeled--quick!--throw them in the skillet that the
whiff may come beneath his nose! Chance trembles and casts its vote--eenie
meenie--down goes the shilling--he has bought the book. Tonight he will
spread it beneath his candle. Feet may beat a snare of pleasure on the
pavement, glad cries may pipe across the darkness, a fiddle may scratch its
invitation--all the rumbling notes of midnight traffic will tap in vain
their summons upon his window.




Any Stick Will Do To Beat A Dog


Reader, possibly on one of your country walks you have come upon a man with
his back against a hedge, tormented by a fiend in the likeness of a dog.
You yourself, of course, are not a coward. You possess that cornerstone of
virtue, a love for animals. If at your heels a dog sniffs and growls, you
humor his mistake, you flick him off and proceed with unbroken serenity. It
is scarcely an interlude to your speculation on the market. Or if you work
upon a sonnet and are in the vein, your thoughts, despite the beast, run
unbroken to a rhyme. But pity this other whose heart is less stoutly
wrapped! He has gone forth on a holiday to take the country air, to thrust
himself into the freer wind, to poke with his stick for such signs of
Spring as may be hiding in the winter's leaves. Having been grinding in an
office he flings himself on the great round world. He has come out to smell
the earth. Or maybe he seeks a hilltop for a view of the fields that lie
below patched in many colors, as though nature had been sewing at her
garments and had mended the cloth from her bag of scraps.

On such a journey this fellow is travelling when, at a turn of the road, he
hears the sound of barking. As yet there is no dog in sight. He pauses. He
listens. How shall one know whether the sound comes up a wrathful gullet or
whether the dog bays at him impersonally, as at the distant moon? Or maybe
he vents himself upon a stubborn cow. Surely it is not an idle tune he
practices. He holds a victim in his mind. There is sour venom on his
churlish tooth. Is it best to go roundabout, or forward with such a nice
compound of innocence, boldness and modesty as shall satisfy the beast? If
one engross oneself on something that lies to the lee of danger, it allays
suspicion. Or if one absorb oneself upon the flora--a primrose on the
river's brim--it shows him clear and stainless. The stupidest dog should
see that so close a student can have no evil in him. Perhaps it would be
better to throw away one's stick lest it make a show of violence. Or it may
be concealed along the outer leg. Ministers of Grace defend us, what an
excitement in the barnyard! Has virtue no reward? Shall innocence perish
off the earth? Not one dog, but many, come running out. There has gone
a rumor about the barn that there is a stranger to be eaten, and it's
likely--if they keep their clamor--there will be a bone for each. Note how
the valor oozes from the man of peace! Observe his sidling gait, his skirts
pulled close, his hollowed back, his head bent across his shoulder, his
startled eye! Watch him mince his steps, lest a lingering heel be nipped!
Listen to him try the foremost dog with names, to gull him to a belief that
they have met before in happier circumstances! He appeals mutely to the
farmhouse that a recall be sounded. The windows are tightly curtained. The
heavens are comfortless.

You remember the fellow in the play who would have loved war had they not
digged villainous saltpetre from the harmless earth. The countryside, too,
in my opinion, would be more peaceful of a summer afternoon were it not
overrun with dogs. Let me be plain! I myself like dogs--sleepy dogs
blinking in the firelight, friendly dogs with wagging tails, young dogs in
their first puppyhood with their teeth scarce sprouted, whose jaws have not
yet burgeoned into danger, and old dogs, too, who sun themselves and give
forth hollow, toothless, reassuring sounds. When a dog assumes the cozy
habits of the cat without laying off his nobler nature, he is my friend. A
dog of vegetarian aspect pleases me. Let him bear a mild eye as though he
were nourished on the softer foods! I would wish every dog to have a full
complement of tail. It's the sure barometer of his warm regard. There's no
art to find his mind's construction in the face. And I would have him with
not too much curiosity. It's a quality that brings him too often to the
gate. It makes him prone to sniff when one sits upon a visit. Nor do I like
dogs addicted to sudden excitement. Lethargy becomes them better. Let them
be without the Gallic graces! In general, I like a dog to whom I have been
properly introduced, with an exchange of credentials. While the dog is by,
let his master take my hand and address me in softest tones, to cement the
understanding! At bench-shows I love the beasts, although I keep to the
middle of the aisle. The streets are all the safer when so many of the
creatures are kept within.

Frankly, I would enjoy the country more, if I knew that all the dogs were
away on visits. Of course, the highroad is quite safe. Its frequent traffic
is its insurance. Then, too, the barns are at such a distance, it is only a
monstrous anger can bring the dog. But if you are in need of direction you
select a friendly white house with green shutters. You swing open the gate
and crunch across the pebbles to the door. To the nearer eye there is a
look of "dog" about the place. Or maybe you are hot and thirsty, and there
is a well at the side of the house. Is it better to gird yourself to danger
or to put off your thirst until the crossroads where pop is sold?

Or a lane leads down to the river. Even at this distance you hear the
shallow brawl of water on the stones. A path goes off across a hill, with
trees beckoning at the top. There is a wind above and a wider sweep of
clouds. Surely, from the crest of the hill the whole county will lie before
you. Such tunes as come up from the world below--a school-bell, a rooster
crowing, children laughing on the road, a threshing machine on the lower
meadows--such tunes are pitched to a marvellous softness. Shall we follow
the hot pavement, or shall we dare those lonely stretches?

There is a kind of person who is steeped too much in valor. He will cross a
field although there is a dog inside the fence. Goodness knows that I would
rather keep to the highroad with such humility as shall not rouse the
creature. Or he will shout and whistle tunes that stir the dogs for miles.
He slashes his stick against the weeds as though in challenge. One might
think that he went about on unfeeling stalks instead of legs as children
walk on stilts, or that a former accident had clipped him off above the
knees and that he was now jointed out of wood to a point beyond the biting
limit. Or perhaps the clothes he wears beneath--the inner mesh and very
balbriggan of his attire--is of so hard a texture that it turns a tooth. Be
these defenses as they may, note with what bravado he mounts the wall! One
leg dangles as though it were baited and were angling for a bite.

There is a French village near Quebec whose population is chiefly dogs.
It lies along the river in a single street, not many miles from the point
where Wolfe climbed to the Plains of Abraham. There are a hundred houses
flat against the roadway and on the steps of each there sits a dog. As I
went through on foot, each of these dogs picked me up, examined me nasally
and passed me on, not generously as though I had stood the test, but rather
in deep suspicion that I was a queer fellow, not to be penetrated at first,
but one who would surely be found out and gobbled before coming to the
end of the street. As long as I would eventually furnish forth the common
banquet, it mattered not which dog took the first nip. Inasmuch as I would
at last be garnished for the general tooth, it would be better to wait
until all were gathered around the platter. "Good neighbor dog," each
seemed to say, "you too sniff upon the rogue! If he be honest, my old nose
is much at fault." Meantime I padded lightly through the village, at first
calling on the dogs by English names, but later using such wisps as I had
of French. "Aucassin, mon pauvre chien. Voici, Tintagiles, alors donc mon
cherie. Je suis votre ami," but with little effect.

But the dogs that one meets in the Canadian woods are of the fiercest
breed. They border on the wolf. They are called huskies and they are so
strong and so fleet of foot that they pull sleds for hours across the
frozen lakes at almost the speed of a running horse. It must be confessed
that they are handsome and if it happens to be your potato peelings and
discarded fish that they eat, they warm into friendliness. Indeed, on these
occasions, one can make quite a show of bravery by stroking and dealing
lightly with them. But once upon a time in an ignorant moment two other
campers and myself followed a lonely railroad track and struck off on a
path through the pines in search of a certain trapper on a fur farm. The
path went on a broken zigzag avoiding fallen trees and soft hollows,
conducting itself on the whole with more patience than firmness. We walked
a quarter of a mile, but still we saw no cabin. The line of the railroad
had long since disappeared. An eagle wheeled above us and quarrelled at our
intrusion. Presently to test our course and learn whether we were coming
near the cabin, we gave a shout. Immediately out of the deeper woods there
came a clamor that froze us. Such sounds, it seemed, could issue only from
bloody and dripping jaws. In a panic, as by a common impulse we turned and
ran. Yet we did not run frankly as when the circus lion is loose, but in a
shamefaced manner--an attempt at a retreat in good order--something between
a walk and a run. At the end of a hundred yards we stopped. No dogs had
fallen on us. Danger had not burst its kennel. We hallooed again, to rouse
the trapper. At last, after a minute of suspense, came his answering voice,
the sweetest sound to be imagined. Whereupon I came down from my high stump
which I had climbed for a longer view.

I am convinced that I am not alone in my--shall I say diffidence?--toward
dogs. Indeed, there is evidence from the oldest times that mankind, in its
more honest moments, has confessed to a fear of dogs. In recognition of
this general fear, the unmuzzled Cerberus was put at the gate of Hades.
It was rightly felt that when the unhappy pilgrims got within, his fifty
snapping heads were better than a bolt upon the door. It was better for
them to endure the ills they had, than be nipped in the upper passage. He,
also, who first spoke the ancient proverb, _Let sleeping dogs lie_, did no
more than voice the caution of the street. And he, also, who invented the
saying that the world is going to the bow-wows, lodged his deplorable
pessimism in fitting words.

It was Daniel who sat with the lions. But there are degrees of bravery. On
Long Street, within sight of my window--just where the street gets into its
most tangled traffic--there has hung for many years the painted signboard
of a veterinary surgeon. Its artist was in the first flourish of youth. Old
age had not yet chilled him when he mixed his gaudy colors. The surgeon's
name is set up in modest letters, but the horse below flames with color.
What a flaring nostril! What an eager eye! How arched the neck! Here is a
wrath and speed unknown to the quadrupeds of this present Long Street. Such
mild-eyed, accumbent, sharp-ribbed horses as now infest the curb--mere
whittlings from a larger age--hang their heads at their degeneracy. Indeed,
these horses seem to their owners not to be worth the price of a nostrum.
If disease settles in them, let them lean against a post until the fit is
past! And of a consequence, the doctor's work has fallen off. It has
become a rare occasion when it is permitted him to stroke his chin in
contemplation of some inner palsy. Therefore to give his wisdom scope,
the doctor some time since announced the cellar of the building to be a
hospital for dogs. Must I press the analogy? I have seen the doctor with
bowl and spoon in hand take leave of the cheerful world. He opens the
cellar door. A curdling yelp comes up the stairs. In the abyss below there
are twenty dogs at least, all of them sick, all dangerous. Not since Orion
led his hunting pack across the heavens has there been so fierce a sound.
The door closes. There is a final yelp, such as greets a bone. Doubtless,
by this time, they are munching on the doctor. Good sir, had you lived in
pre-apostolic days, your name would have been lined with Daniel's in the
hymn. I might have spent my earliest treble in your praise.

But there are other kinds of dogs. Gentlest of readers, have you ever
passed a few days at Tunbridge Wells? It lies on one of the roads that run
from London to the Channel and for several hundred years persons have gone
there to take the waters against the more fashionable ailments. Its chief
fame was in the days when rich folk, to ward off for the season a touch of
ancestral gout, travelled down from London in their coaches. We may fancy
Lord Thingumdo crossing his sleek legs inside or putting his head to the
window on the change of horses. He has outriders and a horn to sound his
coming. His Lordship has a liver that must be mended, but also he has
a weakness for the gaming table. Or Lady Euphemia, wrapped in silks,
languishes mornings in her lodgings with a latest novel, but goes forth at
noon upon the Pantilles to shop in the stalls. A box of patches must be
bought. A lace flounce has caught her eye. Bless her dear eyes, as she
bends upon her purchase she is fair to look upon. The Grand Rout is set for
tonight. Who knows but that the Duke will put the tender question and will
ask her to name the happy day?

But these golden days are past. Tunbridge Wells has sunk from fashion. The
gaming tables are gone. A band still plays mornings in the Pantilles--or
did so before the war--but cheaper gauds are offered in the shops. Emerald
brooches are fallen to paste. In all the season there is scarcely a single
demand for a diamond garter. If there were now a Rout, the only dancers
would be stiff shadows from the past. The healing waters still trickle from
the ground and an old woman serves you for a penny, but the miracle has
gone. The old world is cured and dead.

Tunbridge Wells is visited now chiefly by old ladies whose husbands--to
judge by the black lace caps--have left Lombard Street for heaven. At the
hotel where I stopped, which was at the top of the Commons outside the
thicker town, I was the only man in the breakfast room. Two widows, each
with a tiny dog on a chair beside her, sat at the next table. This was
their conversation:

"Did you hear her last night?"

"Was it Flossie that I heard?"

"Yes. The poor dear was awake all night. She got her feet wet yesterday
when I let her run upon the grass."

But after breakfast--if the day is sunny and the wind sits in a favoring
quarter--one by one the widows go forth in their chairs. These are wicker
contrivances that hang between three wheels. Burros pull them, and men walk
alongside to hold their bridles. Down comes the widow. Down comes a maid
with her wraps. Down comes a maid with Flossie. The wraps are adjusted. The
widow is handed in. Her feet are wound around with comforters against a
draft. Her salts rest in her lap. Her ample bag of knitting is safe aboard.
Flossie is placed beside her. Proot! The donkey starts.

All morning the widow sits in the Pantilles and listens to the band and
knits. Flossie sits on the flagging at her feet with an intent eye upon the
ball of worsted. Twice in a morning--three times if the gods are kind--the
ball rolls to the pavement. Flossie has been waiting so long for this
to happen. It is the bright moment of her life--the point and peak of
happiness. She darts upon it. She paws it exultantly for a moment. Brief is
the rainbow and brief the Borealis. The finger of Time is swift.

The poppy blooms and fades. The maid captures the ball of worsted and
restores it.

It lies in the widow's lap. The band plays. The needles click to a long
tune. The healing waters trickle from the ground. The old woman whines
their merits. Flossie sits motionless, her head cocked and her eye upon the
ball. Perhaps the god of puppies will again be good to her.




ROADS OF MORNING


My grandfather's farm lay somewhere this side of the sunset, so near that
its pastures barely missed the splash of color. But from the city it was a
two hours' journey by horse and phaeton. My grandfather drove. I sat next,
my feet swinging clear of the lunchbox. My brother had the outside, a place
denied to me for fear that I might fall across the wheel. When we were
all set, my mother made a last dab at my nose--an unheeded smudge having
escaped my vigilance. Then my grandfather said, "Get up,"--twice, for the
lazy horse chose to regard the first summons as a jest. We start. The great
wheels turn. My brother leans across the guard to view the miracle. We
crunch the gravel. We are alive for excitement. My brother plays we are
a steamboat and toots. I toot in imitation, but higher up as if I were a
younger sort of steamboat. We hold our hands on an imaginary wheel and
steer. We scorn grocery carts and all such harbor craft. We are on a long
cruise. Street lights will guide us sailing home.

Of course there were farms to the south of the city and apples may have
ripened there to as fine a flavor, and to the east, also, doubtless there
were farms. It would be asking too much that the west should have all the
haystacks, cherry trees and cheese houses. If your judgment skimmed upon
the surface, you would even have found the advantage with the south. It was
prettier because more rolling. It was shaggier. The country to the south
tipped up to the hills, so sharply in places that it might have made its
living by collecting nickels for the slide. Indeed, one might think that a
part of the city had come bouncing down the slope, for now it lay resting
at the bottom, sprawled somewhat for its ease. Or it might appear--if your
belief runs on discarded lines--that the whole flat-bottomed earth had been
fouled in its celestial course and now lay aslant upon its beam with its
cargo shifted and spilled about.

The city streets that led to the south, which in those days ended in lanes,
popped out of sight abruptly at the top of the first ridge. And when the
earth caught up again with their level, already it was dim and purple and
tall trees were no more than a roughened hedge. But what lay beyond that
range of hills--what towns and cities--what oceans and forests--how beset
with adventure--how fearful after dark--these things you could not see,
even if you climbed to some high place and strained yourself on tiptoe. And
if you walked from breakfast to lunch--until you gnawed within and were but
a hollow drum--there would still be a higher range against the sky. There
are misty kingdoms on this whirling earth, but the ways are long and steep.

The lake lay to the north with no land beyond, the city to the east. But to
the west--

Several miles outside the city as it then was, and still beyond its
clutches, the country was cut by a winding river bottom with sharp edges of
shale. Down this valley Rocky River came brawling in the spring, over-fed
and quarrelsome. Later in the year--its youthful appetite having caught an
indigestion--it shrunk and wasted to a shadow. By August you could cross it
on the stones. The uproar of its former flood was marked upon the shale and
trunks of trees here and there were wedged, but now the river plays drowsy
tunes upon the stones. There is scarcely enough movement of water to flick
the sunlight. A leaf on its idle current is a lazy craft whose skipper
nods. There were hickory trees on the point above. May-apples grew in the
deep woods, and blackberries along the fences. And in the season sober
horses plowed up and down the fields with nodding heads, affirming their
belief in the goodness of the soil and their willingness to help in its
fruition.

Yet the very core of this valley in days past was a certain depth of water
at a turn of the stream. There was a clay bank above it and on it small
naked boys stood and daubed themselves. One of them put a band of clay
about himself by way of decoration. Another, by a more general smudge, made
himself a Hottentot and thereby gave his manners a wider scope and license.
But by daubing yourself entire you became an Indian and might vent yourself
in hideous yells, for it was amazing how the lungs grew stouter when the
clay was laid on thick. Then you tapped your flattened palm rapidly against
your mouth and released an intermittent uproar in order that the valley
might he warned of the deviltry to come. You circled round and round and
beat upon the ground in the likeness of a war dance. But at last, sated
with scalps, off you dived into the pool and came up a white man. Finally,
you stood on one leg and jounced the water from your ear, or pulled a
bloodsucker from your toes before he sapped your life--for this tiny
creature of the rocks was credited with the gift of prodigious inflation,
and might inhale you, blood, sinews, suspenders and all, if left to his
ugly purpose.

Farms should not be too precisely located; at least this is true of farms
which, like my grandfather's, hang in a mist of memory. I read once of a
wonderful spot--quite inferior, doubtless, to my grandfather's farm--which
was located by evil directions intentionally to throw a seeker off.
Munchausen, you will recall, in the placing of his magic countries, was not
above this agreeable villainy. Robinson Crusoe was loose and vague in the
placing of his island. It is said that Izaak Walton waved a hand obscurely
toward the stream where he had made a catch, but could not be cornered to a
nice direction, lest his pool be overrun. In early youth, I myself went, on
a mischievous hint, to explore a remote region which I was told lay in the
dark behind the kindling pile. But because I moved in a fearful darkness,
quite beyond the pale light from the furnace room, I lost the path. It did
not lead me to the peaks and the roaring waters.

But the farm was reached by more open methods. Dolly and the phaeton were
the chief instruments. First--if you were so sunk in ignorance as not to
know the road--you inquired of everybody for the chewing gum factory, to be
known by its smell of peppermint. Then you sought the high bridge over the
railroad tracks. Beyond was Kamm's Corners. Here, at a turn of the road,
was a general store whose shelves sampled the produce of this whole fair
world and the factories thereof. One might have thought that the proprietor
emulated Noah at the flood by bidding two of each created things to find a
place inside.

Beyond Kamm's Corners you came to the great valley. When almost down the
hill you passed a house with broken windows and unkept grass. This house,
by report, was haunted, but you could laugh at such tales while the morning
sun was up. At the bottom of the hill a bridge crossed the river, with
loose planking that rattled as though the man who made nails was dead.

Beyond the bridge, at the first rise of ground, the horse stopped--for I
assume that you drove a sagacious animal--by way of hint that every one
of sound limb get out and walk to the top of the hill. A suspicious horse
turned his head now and again and cast his eye upon the buggy to be sure
that no one climbed in again.

Presently you came to the toll-gate at the top and paid its keeper five
cents, or whatever large sum he demanded. Then your grandfather--if by
fortunate chance you happened to have one--asked after his wife and
children, and had they missed the croup; then told him his corn was looking
well.

My grandfather--for it is time you knew him--lived with us. Because of a
railway accident fifteen years before in which one of his legs was cut off
just below the knee, he had retired from public office. Several years of
broken health had been followed by years that were for the most part free
from suffering. My own first recollection reverts to these better years.
I recall a tall man--to my eyes a giant, for he was taller even than my
father--who came into the nursery as I was being undressed. There was a
wind in the chimney, and the windows rattled. He put his crutches against
the wall. Then taking me in his arms, he swung me aloft to his shoulder
by a series of somersaults. I cried this first time, but later I came to
demand the performance.

Once, when I was a little older, I came upon one of his discarded wooden
legs as I was playing in the garret of the house. It was my first
acquaintance with such a contrivance. It lay behind a pile of trunks and I
was, at the time, on my way to the center of the earth, for the cheerful
path dove into darkness behind the chimney. You may imagine my surprise. I
approached it cautiously. I viewed it from all sides by such dusty light as
fell between the trunks. Not without fear I touched it. It was unmistakably
a leg--but whose? Was it possible that there was a kind of Bluebeard in the
family, who, for his pleasure, lopped off legs? There had been no breath of
such a scandal. Yet, if my reading and studies were correct, such things
had happened in other families not very different from ours; not in our own
town maybe, but in such near-by places as Kandahar and Serendib--places
which in my warm regard were but as suburbs to our street, to be gained if
you persevered for a hundred lamp-posts. Or could the leg belong to Annie
the cook? Her nimbleness with griddle-cakes belied the thought: And once,
when the wind had swished her skirts, manifestly she was whole and sound.
Then all at once I knew it to be my grandfather's. Grown familiar, I pulled
it to the window. I tried it on, but made bad work of walking.

To the eye my grandfather had two legs all the way down and, except for
his crutches and an occasional squeak, you would not have detected his
infirmity. Evidently the maker did no more than imitate nature, although,
for myself, I used to wonder at the poverty of his invention. There would
be distinction in a leg, which in addition to its usual functions, would
also bend forward at the knee, or had a surprising sidewise joint--and
there would be profit, too, if one cared to make a show of it. The greatest
niggard on the street would pay two pins for such a sight.

As my grandfather was the only old gentleman of my acquaintance, a wooden
leg seemed the natural and suitable accompaniment of old age. Persons, it
appeared, in their riper years, cast off a leg, as trees dropped their
leaves. But my grandmother puzzled me. Undeniably she retained both of
hers, yet her hair was just as white, and she was almost as old. Evidently
this law of nature worked only with men. Ladies, it seemed, were not
deciduous. But how the amputation was effected in men--whether by day or
night--how the choice fell between the right and left--whether the wooden
leg came down the chimney (a proper entrance)--how soon my father would go
the way of all masculine flesh and cast his off--these matters I could not
solve. The Arabian Nights were silent on the subject. Aladdin's uncle,
apparently, had both his legs. He was too brisk in villainy to admit a
wooden leg. But then, he was only an uncle. If his history ran out to the
end, doubtless he would go with a limp in his riper days. The story of the
Bible--although it trafficked in such veterans as Methuselah--gave not a
hint. Abraham died full of years. Here would have been a proper test--but
the book was silent.

My grandfather in those days had much leisure time. He still kept an office
at the rear of the house, although he had given up the regular practice
of the law. But a few old clients lingered on, chiefly women who carried
children in their arms and old men without neckties who came to him for
free advice. These he guided patiently in their troubles, and he would sit
an hour to listen to a piteous story. In an extremity he gave them money,
or took a well-meant but worthless note. Often his callers overran the
dinner hour and my mother would have to jingle the dinner bell at the door
to rouse them. Occasionally he would be called on for a public speech, and
for several days he would be busy at his desk. Frequently he presided at
dinners and would tell a story and sing a song, for he had a fine bass
voice and was famous for his singing.

He read much in those last years in science. When he was not reading
Trowbridge to his grandchildren, it was Huxley to himself. But when his
eyes grew tired, he would on an occasion--if there was canning in the
house--go into the kitchen where my mother and grandmother worked, and help
pare the fruit. Seriously, as though he were engaged upon a game, he would
cut the skin into thinnest strips, unbroken to the end, and would hold up
the coil for us to see. Or if he broke it in the cutting it was a point
against him in the contest.

His diversion rather than his profit was the care and rental of about
twenty small houses, some of which he built to fit his pensioners. My
brother and myself often made the rounds with him in the phaeton. At most
of the houses he was affectionately greeted as "Jedge" and was held in long
conversations across the fence. And to see an Irishman was to see a friend.
They all knew him and said, "Good mornin'," as we passed. He and they were
good Democrats together.

I can see in memory a certain old Irishman in a red flannel shirt, with his
foot upon the hub, bending across the wheel and gesticulating in an endless
discussion of politics or crops, while my brother and I were impatient to
be off. Dolly was of course patient, for she had long since passed her
fretful youth. If by any biological chance it had happened that she had
been an old lady instead of a horse, she would have been the kind that
spent her day in a rocker with her knitting. Any one who gave Dolly an
excuse for standing was her friend. There she stood as though she wished
the colloquy to last forever.

It was seldom that Dolly lost her restraint. She would, indeed, when she
came near the stable, somewhat hasten her stride; and when we came on our
drives to the turning point and at last headed about for home, Dolly would
know it and show her knowledge by a quickening of the ears and the quiver
of a faint excitement. Yet Dolly lost her patience when there were flies.
Then she threw off all repression and so waved her tail that she regularly
got it across the reins. This stirred my grandfather to something not
far short of anger. How vigorously would he try to dislodge the reins
by pulling and jerking! Dolly only clamped down her tail the harder.
Experience showed that the only way was to go slowly and craftily and
without heat or temper--a slackening of the reins--a distraction of Dolly's
attention--a leaning across the dashboard--a firm grasping of the tail out
near the end--a sudden raising thereof. Ah! It was done. We all settled
back against the cushions. Or perhaps a friendly fly would come to our
assistance and Dolly would have to use her tail in another direction.

The whip was seldom used. Generally it stood in its socket. It was
ornamental like a flagstaff. It forgot its sterner functions. But Dolly
must have known the whip in some former life, for even a gesture toward the
socket roused her. If it was rattled she mended her pace for a block. But
if on a rare occasion my grandfather took it in his hand, Dolly lay one ear
back in our direction, for she knew then he meant business. And what an
excitement would arise in the phaeton! We held on tight for fear that she
might take it into her mild old head to run away.

But Dolly had her moments. One sunny summer afternoon while she grazed
peacefully in the orchard, with her reins wound around the whip handle--the
appropriate place on these occasions--she was evidently stung by a bee. My
brother was at the time regaling himself in a near-by blackberry thicket.
He looked up at an unusual sound. Without warning, Dolly had leaped to
action and was tearing around the orchard dragging the phaeton behind
her. She wrecked the top on a low hanging branch, then hit another tree,
severing thereby all connection between herself and the phaeton, and at
last galloped down the lane to the farm house, with the broken shafts and
harness dangling behind her. Kipling's dun "with the mouth of a bell and
the heart of Hell and the head of the gallows-tree," could hardly have
shown more spirit. It was as though one brief minute of a glorious youth
had come back to her. It was a last spurting of an old flame before it sunk
to ash.

My grandfather gave his leisure to his grandchildren. He carved for us with
his knife, with an especial knack for willow whistles. He showed us the
colors that lay upon the world when we looked at it through one of the
glass pendants of the parlor chandelier. He sat by us when we played
duck-on-the-rock. He helped us with our kites and gave a superintendence to
our toys. It is true that he was superficial with tin-tags and did not know
the difference in value between a Steam Engine tag--the rarest of them
all--and a common Climax, but we forgave him as one forgives a friend who
is ignorant of Persian pottery. He employed us as gardeners and put a
bounty on weeds. We watered the lawn together, turn by turn. When I was
no more than four years old, he taught us to play casino with him--and
afterwards bezique. How he cried out if he got a royal sequence! With what
excitement he announced a double bezique! Or if one of us seemed about to
score and lacked but a single card, how intently he contended for the last
few tricks to thwart our declaration! And if we got it despite his lead
of aces, how gravely he squinted on the cards against deception, with his
glasses forward on his nose!

When he took his afternoon nap and lay upon his back on the sofa in the
sitting-room, we made paper pin-wheels to see whether his breath would
stir them. This trick having come to his notice by a sudden awakening, he
sometimes thereafter played to be asleep and snored in such a mighty gust
that the wheels spun. He was like a Dutch tempest against a windmill.

If a Dime Museum came to town we made an afternoon of it. He took us to all
the circuses and gave us our choice of side-shows. We walked up and
down before the stretches of painted canvas, balancing in our desire a
sword-swallower against an Indian Princess. Most of the fat women and all
the dwarfs that I have known came to my acquaintance when in company with
my grandfather. As a young man, it was said, he once ran away from home to
join a circus as an acrobat, having acquired the trick of leaping upon a
running horse. I fancy that his knack of throwing us to his shoulder by a
double somersault was a recollection of his early days. You may imagine
with what awe we looked on him even though he now went on crutches. He was
the epitome of adventure, the very salt of excitement. It was better having
him than a pirate in the house. When the circus had gone and life was drab,
he was our tutor in the art of turning cart-wheels and making hand-stands
against the door.

And once, when we were away from him, he walked all morning about the
garden and in his loneliness he gathered into piles the pebbles that we had
dropped.

I was too young to know my grandfather in his active days when he was
prominent in public matters. His broader abilities are known to others. But
though more than twenty years have passed since his death, I remember his
tone of voice, his walk, his way of handling a crutch, all his tricks of
speech and conduct as though he had just left the room. And I can think of
nothing more beautiful than that a useful man who has faced the world for
seventy years and has done his part, should come back in his old age to the
nursery and be the playfellow of his grandchildren.

But the best holiday was a trip to the farm.

This farm--to which in our slow trot we have been so long a time in
coming--lay for a mile on the upper land, and its grain fields and pastures
looked down into the valley. The buildings, however, were set close to the
road and fixed their interest on such occasional wagons as creaked by. A
Switzer occupied the farm, who owned, in addition to the more immediate
members of his family, a cuckoo clock whose weights hung on long cords
which by Saturday night reached almost to the floor. When I have sat at his
table, I have neglected cheese and the lesser foods, when the hour came
near, in order not to miss the cuckoo's popping out. And in the duller
spaces, when the door was shut, I have fancied it sitting in the dark and
counting the minutes to itself.

The Switzer's specialty was the making of a kind of rubber cheese which one
could learn to like in time. Of the processes of its composition, I can
remember nothing except that when it was in the great press the whey ran
from its sides, but this may be common to all cheeses. I was once given a
cup of this whey to drink and I brightened, for until it was in my mouth,
I thought it was buttermilk. Beyond was the spring-house with cans of milk
set in the cool water and with a trickling sound beneath the boards. From
the spring-house there started those mysterious cow-paths that led down
into the great gorge that cut the farm. Here were places so deep that only
a bit of the sky showed and here the stones were damp. It was a place that
seemed to lie nearer to the confusion when the world was made, and rocks
lay piled as though a first purpose had been broken off. And to follow a
cow-path, regardless of where it led, was, in those days, the essence of
hazard; though all the while from the pastures up above there came the flat
safe tinkling of the bells.

The apple orchard--where Dolly was stung by the bee--was set on a fine
breezy place at the brow of the hill with the valley in full sight. The
trees themselves were old and decayed, but they were gnarled and crotched
for easy climbing. And the apples--in particular a russet--mounted to a
delicacy. On the other side of the valley, a half mile off as a bird would
fly, were the buildings of a convent, and if you waited you might hear
the twilight bell. To this day all distant bells come to my ears with a
pleasing softness, as though they had been cast in a quieter world. Stone
arrow-heads were found in a near-by field as often as the farmer turned up
the soil in plowing. And because of this, a long finger of land that put
off to the valley, was called Indian Point. Here, with an arm for pillow,
one might lie for a long hour on a sunny morning and watch the shadows of
clouds move across the lowland. A rooster crows somewhere far off--surely
of all sounds the drowsiest. A horse in a field below lifts up its head and
neighs. The leaves practice a sleepy tune. If one has the fortune to keep
awake, here he may lie and think the thoughts that are born of sun and
wind.

And now, although it is not yet noon, hunger rages in us. The pancakes, the
syrup, the toast and the other incidents of breakfast have disappeared
the way the rabbit vanishes when the magician waves his hand. The horrid
Polyphemus did not so crave his food. And as yet there is no comforting
sniff from the kitchen. Scrubbing and other secular matters engage the
farmer's wife. There is as yet not a faintest gurgle in the kettle.

To divert ourselves, we climb three trees and fall out of one. Is twelve
o'clock never to come? Have Time and the Hour grown stagnant? We eat apples
and throw the cores at the pig to hear him grunt. Is the great round sun
stuck? Have the days of Joshua come again? We walk a rail fence. Is it not
yet noon? Shrewsbury clock itself--reputed by scholars the slowest of all
possible clocks--could not so hold off. I snag myself--but it is nothing
that shows when I sit.

Ah! At last! My grandfather is calling from the house. We run back and
find that the lunch is ready and is laid upon a table with a red oil-cloth
cover. We apply ourselves. Silence....

The journey home started about five o'clock. There was one game we always
played. Each of us, having wisely squinted at the sky, made a reckoning and
guessed where we would be when the sun set. My grandfather might say the
high bridge. I named the Sherman House. But my brother, being precise,
judged it to a fraction of a telegraph pole. Beyond a certain turn--did we
remember?--well, it would be exactly sixteen telegraph poles further on.
What an excitement there was when the sun's lower rim was already below the
horizon! We stood on our knees and looked through the little window at
the back of the phaeton. With what suspicion we regarded my grandfather's
driving! Or if Dolly lagged, did it not raise a thought that she, too, was
in the plot against us? The sun sets. We cry out the victor.

The sky flames with color. Then deadens in the east. The dusk is falling.
The roads grow dark. Where run the roads of night? While there is light,
you can see the course they keep across the country--the dust of horses'
feet--a bridge--a vagrant winding on a hill beyond. All day long they are
busy with the feet of men and women and children shouting. Then twilight
comes, and the roads lead home to supper and the curling smoke above the
roof. But at night where run the roads? It's dark beyond the candle's
flare--where run the roads of night.

My brother and I have become sleepy. We lop over against my grandfather--

We awake with a start. There is a gayly lighted horse-car jingling beside
us. The street lights show us into harbor. We are home at last.




The Man Of Grub Street Comes From His Garret


I have come to live this winter in New York City and by good fortune I
have found rooms on a pleasant park. This park, which is but one block in
extent, is so set off from the thoroughfares that it bears chiefly the
traffic that is proper to the place itself. Grocery carts jog around and
throw out their wares. Laundry wagons are astir. A little fat tailor on an
occasion carries in an armful of newly pressed clothing with suspenders
hanging. Dogs are taken out to walk but are held in leash, lest a taste of
liberty spoil them for an indoor life. The center of the park is laid out
with grass and trees and pebbled paths, and about it is a high iron fence.
Each house has a key to the enclosure. Such social infection, therefore, as
gets inside the gates is of our own breeding. In the sunny hours nurses and
children air themselves in this grass plot. Here a gayly painted wooden
velocipede is in fashion. At this minute there are several pairs of fat
legs a-straddle this contrivance. It is a velocipede as it was first made,
without pedals. Beau Brummel--for the velocipede dates back to him--may
have walked forth to take the waters at Tunbridge Wells on a vehicle not
far different, but built to his greater stature. There is also a trickle
of drays and wagons across the park--a mere leakage from the streets, as
though the near-by traffic in the pressure had burst its pipes. But only at
morning and night when the city collects or discharges its people, are the
sidewalks filled. Then for a half hour the nozzle of the city plays a full
stream on us.

The park seems to be freer and more natural than the streets outside. A man
goes by gesticulating as though he practiced for a speech. A woman adjusts
her stocking on the coping below the fence with the freedom of a country
road. A street sweeper, patched to his office, tunes his slow work to fit
the quiet surroundings. Boys skate by or cut swirls upon the pavement in
the privilege of a playground.

My work--if anything so pleasant and unforced can carry the name--is
done at a window that overlooks this park. Were it not for several high
buildings in my sight I might fancy that I lived in one of the older
squares of London. There is a look of Thackeray about the place as though
the Osbornes might be my neighbors. A fat man who waddles off his steps
opposite, if he would submit to a change of coat, might be Jos Sedley
starting for his club to eat his chutney. If only there were a crest above
my bell-pull I might even expect Becky Sharp in for tea. Or occasionally I
divert myself with the fancy that I am of a still older day and that I have
walked in from Lichfield--I choose the name at hazard--with a tragedy in my
pocket, to try my fortune. Were it not for the fashion of dress in the park
below and some remnant of reason in myself, I could, in a winking moment,
persuade myself that my room is a garret and my pen a quill. On such
delusion, before I issued on the street to seek my coffee-house, I would
adjust my wig and dust myself of snuff.

But for my exercise and recreation--which for a man of Grub Street is
necessary in the early hours of afternoon when the morning fires have
fallen--I go outside the park. I have a wide choice for my wanderings. I
may go into the district to the east and watch the children play against
the curb. If they pitch pennies on the walk I am careful to go about, for
fear that I distract the throw. Or if the stones are marked for hop-scotch,
I squeeze along the wall. It is my intention--from which as yet my
diffidence withholds me--to present to the winner of one of these contests
a red apple which I shall select at a corner stand. Or an ice wagon pauses
in its round, and while the man is gone there is a pleasant thieving of
bits of ice. Each dirty cheek is stuffed as though a plague of mumps had
fallen on the street. Or there may be a game of baseball--a scampering
on the bases, a home-run down the gutter--to engage me for an inning.
Or shinny grips the street. But if a street organ comes--not a mournful
one-legged box eked out with a monkey, but a big machine with an extra man
to pull--the children leave their games. It was but the other day that I
saw six of them together dancing on the pavement to the music, with skirts
and pigtails flying. There was such gladness in their faces that the
musician, although he already had his nickel, gave them an extra tune. It
was of such persuasive gayety that the number of dancers at once went up to
ten and others wiggled to the rhythm. And for myself, although I am past my
sportive days, the sound of a street organ, if any, would inflame me to a
fox-trot. Even a surly tune--if the handle be quickened--comes from the box
with a brisk seduction. If a dirge once got inside, it would fret until it
came out a dancing measure.

In this part of town, on the better streets, I sometimes study the fashions
as I see them in the shops and I compare them with those of uptown stores.
Nor is there the difference one might suppose. The small round muff that
sprang up this winter in the smarter shops won by only a week over the
cheaper stores. Tan gaiters ran a pretty race. And I am now witness to
a dead heat in a certain kind of fluffy rosebud dress. The fabrics are
probably different, but no matter how you deny it, they are cut to a common
pattern.

In a poorer part of the city still nearer to the East River, where
smells of garlic and worse issue from cellarways, I came recently on
a considerable park. It was supplied with swings and teeters and drew
children on its four fronts. Of a consequence the children of many races
played together. I caught a Yiddish answer to an Italian question. I fancy
that a child here could go forth at breakfast wholly a Hungarian and come
home with a smack of Russian or Armenian added. The general games that
merged the smaller groups, aided in the fusion. If this park is not already
named--a small chance, for it shows the marks of age--it might properly be
called _The Park of the Thirty Nations_.

Or my inclination may take me to the lower city. Like a poor starveling
I wander in the haunts of wealth where the buildings are piled to forty
stories, and I spin out the ciphers in my brain in an endeavor to compute
the amount that is laid up inside. Also, lest I become discontented with my
poverty, I note the strain and worry of the faces that I meet. There is a
story of Tolstoi in which a man is whispered by his god that he may possess
such land as he can circle in a day. Until that time he had been living on
a fertile slope of sun and shadow, with fields ample for his needs. But
when the whisper came, at a flash, he pelted off across the hills. He ran
all morning, but as the day advanced his sordid ambition broadened and he
turned his course into a wider and still wider circle. Here a pleasant
valley tempted him and he bent his path to bring it inside his mark. Here
a fruitful upland led him off. As the day wore on he ran with a greater
fierceness, because he knew he would lose everything if he did not reach
his starting place before the sun went down. The sun was coming near the
rim of earth when he toiled up the last hill. His feet were cut by stones,
his face pinched with agony. He staggered toward the goal and fell across
it while as yet there was a glint of light. But his effort burst his heart.
Does the analogy hold on these narrow streets? To a few who sit in an inner
office, Mammon has made a promise of wealth and domination. These few run
breathless to gain a mountain. But what have the gods whispered to the ten
thousand who sit in the outer office, that they bend and blink upon their
ledgers? Have the gods whispered to them the promise of great wealth? Alas,
before them there lies only the dust and heat of a level road, yet they too
are broken at the sunset.

Less oppressive are the streets where commerce is more apparent. Here,
unless you would be smirched, it is necessary to walk fast and hold your
coat-tails in. Packing cases are going down slides. Bales are coming up in
hoists. Barrels are rolling out of wagons. Crates are being lifted in. Is
the exchange never to stop? Is no warehouse satisfied with what it has?
English, which until now you judged a soft concordant language, shows here
its range and mastery of epithet. And all about, moving and jostling the
boxes, are men with hooks. One might think that in a former day Captain
Cuttle had settled here to live and that his numerous progeny had kept the
place.

Often I ride on a bus top like a maharajah on an elephant, up near the
tusks, as it were, where the view is unbroken. I plan this trip so that I
move counter to the procession that goes uptown in the late afternoon. Is
there a scene like it in the world? The boulevards of Paris in times of
peace are hardly so gay. Fifth Avenue is blocked with motor cars. Fashion
has gone forth to select a feather. A ringlet has gone awry and must be
mended. The Pomeranian's health is served by sunlight. The Spitz must have
an airing. Fashion has wagged its head upon a Chinese vase--has indeed
squinted at it through a lorgnette against a fleck--and now lolls home to
dinner. Or style has veered an inch, and it has been a day of fitting. At
restaurant windows one may see the feeding of the over-fed. Men sit in club
windows and still wear their silk hats as though there was no glass between
them and the windy world. Footmen in boots and breeches sit as stiffly as
though they were toys grown large and had metal spikes below to hold them
to their boxes. They look like the iron firemen that ride on nursery
fire-engines. For all these sights the bus top is the best place.

And although we sit on a modest roof, the shopkeepers cater to us. For in
many of the stores, is there not an upper tier of windows for our use? The
commodities of this second story are quite as fine as those below. And the
waxen beauties who display the frocks greet us in true democracy with as
sweet a simper.

My friend G---- while riding recently on a bus top met with an experience
for which he still blushes.

There was a young woman sitting directly in front of him, and when he came
to leave, a sudden lurch threw him against her. When he recovered his
footing, which was a business of some difficulty, for the bus pitched upon
a broken pavement, what was his chagrin to find that a front button of
his coat had hooked in her back hair! Luckily G---- was not seized with a
panic. Rather, he labored cautiously--but without result. Nor could
she help in the disentanglement. Their embarrassment might have been
indefinitely prolonged--indeed, G---- was several blocks already down the
street--when he bethought him of his knife and so cut off the button. As he
pleasantly expressed it to the young woman, he would give her the choice of
the button or the coat entire.

Reader, are you inclined toward ferry boats? I cannot include those persons
who journey on them night and morning perfunctorily. These persons keep
their noses in their papers or sit snugly in the cabin. If the market is
up, they can hardly be conscious even that they are crossing a river.
Nor do I entirely blame them. If one kept shop on a breezy tip of the
Delectable Mountains with all the regions of the world laid out below,
he could not be expected to climb up for the hundredth time with a first
exhilaration, or to swing his alpenstock as though he were on a rare
holiday. If one had business across the Styx too often--although the
scenery on its banks is reputed to be unusual--he might in time sit below
and take to yawning. Father Charon might have to jog his shoulder to rouse
him when the boat came between the further piers.

But are you one of those persons who, not being under a daily compulsion,
rides upon a ferry boat for the love of the trip? Being in this class
myself, I laid my case the other night before the gateman, and asked
his advice regarding routes. He at once entered sympathetically into my
distemper and gave me a plan whereby with but a single change of piers
I might at an expense of fourteen cents cross the river four times at
different angles.

It was at the end of day and a light fog rested on the water. Nothing was
entirely lost, yet a gray mystery wrapped the ships and buildings. If New
Jersey still existed it was dim and shadowy as though its real life had
gone and but a ghost remained. Ferry boats were lighted in defiance of the
murk, and darted here and there at reckless angles. An ocean liner was
putting out, and several tugs had rammed their noses against her sides.
There is something engaging about a tug. It snorts with eagerness. It kicks
and splashes. It bursts itself to lend a hand. And how it butts with its
nose! Surely its forward cartilages are of triple strength, else in its
zest it would jam its nasal passages.

Presently we came opposite lower New York. Although the fog concealed the
outlines of the buildings, their lights showed through. This first hour of
dark is best, before the day's work is done and while as yet all of the
windows are lighted. The Woolworth Tower was suffused in a soft and shadowy
light. The other buildings showed like mountains of magic pin-pricks. It
was as though all the constellations of heaven on a general bidding had met
for conference.

The man of Grub Street, having by this time somewhat dispelled the fumes of
dullness from his head, descends from his ferry boat and walks to his quiet
park. There is a dull roar from the elevated railway on Third Avenue where
the last of the day's crowd goes home. The sidewalks are becoming empty.
There is a sheen of water on the pavement. In the winter murk there is a
look of Thackeray about the place as though the Sedleys or the Osbornes
might be his neighbors. If there were a crest above his bell-pull he might
even expect Becky Sharp in for tea.




Now that Spring is here


When the sun set last night it was still winter. The persons who passed
northward in the dusk from the city's tumult thrust their hands deep into
their pockets and walked to a sharp measure. But a change came in the
night. The north wind fell off and a breeze blew up from the south. Such
stars as were abroad at dawn left off their shrill winter piping--if it be
true that stars really sing in their courses--and pitched their voices to
April tunes. One star in particular that hung low in the west until the day
was up, knew surely that the Spring had come and sang in concert with the
earliest birds. There is a dull belief that these early birds shake off
their sleep to get the worm. Rather, they come forth at this hour to cock
their ears upon the general heavens for such new tunes as the unfaded
stars still sing. If an ear is turned down to the rummage of worms in the
earth--for to the superficial, so does the attitude attest--it is only that
the other ear may be turned upward to catch the celestial harmonies; for
birds know that if there is an untried melody in heaven it will sound first
across the clear pastures of the dawn. All the chirping and whistling
from the fields and trees are then but the practice of the hour. When the
meadowlark sings on a fence-rail she but cons her lesson from the stars.

It is on such a bright Spring morning that the housewife, duster in hand,
throws open her parlor window and looks upon the street. A pleasant park is
below, of the size of a city square, and already it stirs with the day's
activity. The housewife beats her cloth upon the sill and as the dust flies
off, she hears the cries and noises of the place. In a clear tenor she
is admonished that there is an expert hereabouts to grind her knives. A
swarthy baritone on a wagon lifts up his voice in praise of radishes and
carrots. His eye roves along the windows. The crook of a hungry finger will
bring him to a stand. Or a junkman is below upon his business. Yesterday
the bells upon his cart would have sounded sour, but this morning they
rattle agreeably, as though a brisker cow than common, springtime in her
hoofs, were jangling to her pasture. At the sound--if you are of country
training--you see yourself, somewhat misty through the years, barefoot in a
grassy lane, with stick in hand, urging the gentle beast. There is a subtle
persuasion in the junkman's call. In these tones did the magician, bawling
for old lamps, beguile Aladdin. If there were this morning in my lodging an
unrubbed lamp, I would toss it from the window for such magic as he might
extract from it. And if a fair Princess should be missing at the noon and
her palace be skipped from sight, it will follow on the rubbing of it.

The call of red cherries in the park--as you might guess from its Italian
source--is set to an amorous tune. What lady, smocked in morning cambric,
would not be wooed by such a voice? The gay fellow tempts her to a
purchase. It is but a decent caution--now that Spring is here--that the
rascal does not call his wares by moonlight. As for early peas this
morning, it is Pan himself who peddles them--disguised and smirched lest
he be caught in the deception--Pan who stamps his foot and shakes the
thicket--whose habit is to sing with reedy voice of the green willows that
dip in sunny waters. Although he now clatters his tins and baskets and
cries out like a merchant, his thoughts run to the black earth and the
shady hollows and the sound of little streams.

I have wondered as I have observed the housewives lingering at their
windows--for my window also looks upon the park--I have wondered that these
melodious street cries are not used generally for calling the wares of
wider sale. If a radish can be so proclaimed, there might be a lilt devised
in praise of other pleasing merceries--a tripping pizzicato for laces and
frippery--a brave trumpeting for some newest cereal. And should not the
latest book--if it be a tale of love, for these I am told are best offered
to the public in the Spring (sad tales are best for winter)--should not a
tale of love be heralded through the city by the singing of a ballad, with
a melting tenor in the part? In old days a gaudy rogue cried out upon the
broader streets that jugglers had stretched their rope in the market-place,
but when the bears came to town, the news was piped even to the narrowest
lanes that house-folk might bring their pennies.

With my thoughts set on the Spring I chanced to walk recently where the
theatres are thickest. It was on a Saturday afternoon and the walk was
crowded with amusement seekers. Presently in the press I observed a queer
old fellow carrying on his back a monstrous pack of umbrellas. He rang
a bell monotonously and professed himself a mender of umbrellas. He can
hardly have expected to find a customer in the crowd. Even a blinking
eye--and these street merchants are shrewd in these matters--must have told
him that in all this hurrying mass of people, the thoughts of no one ran
toward umbrellas. Rather, I think that he was taking an hour from the
routine of the day. He had trod the profitable side streets until truantry
had taken him. But he still made a pretext of working at his job and called
his wares to ease his conscience from idleness. Once when an unusually
bright beam of sunlight fell from between the clouds, he tilted up his hat
to get the warmth and I thought him guilty of a skip and syncopation in the
ringing of his bell, as if he too twitched pleasantly with the Spring and
his old sap was stirred.

I like these persons who ply their trades upon the sidewalk. My hatter--the
fellow who cleans my straw hat each Spring--is a partner of a bootblack.
Over his head as he putters with his soap and brushes, there hangs a rusty
sign proclaiming that he is famous for his cleaning all round the world. He
is so modest in his looks that I have wondered whether he really can read
the sign. Or perhaps like a true merchant, he is not squeamish at the
praise. As I have not previously been aware that any of his profession ever
came to general fame except the Mad Hatter of Wonderland, I have squinted
sharply at him to see if by chance it might be he, but there are no marks
even of a distant kinship. He does, however, bring my hat to a marvellous
whiteness and it may be true that he has really tended heads that are now
gone beyond Constantinople.

Bootblacks have a sense of rhythm unparalleled. Of this the long rag is
their instrument. They draw it once or twice across the shoe to set the key
and then they go into a swift and pattering melody. If there is an unusual
genius in the bootblack--some remnant of ancient Greece--he plays such a
lively tune that one's shoulders jig to it. If there were a dryad or other
such nimble creature on the street, she would come leaping as though
Orpheus strummed a tune, but the dance is too fast for our languid northern
feet.

Nowhere are apples redder than on a cart. Our hearts go out to Adam in the
hour of his temptation. I know one lady of otherwise careful appetite who
even leans toward dates if she may buy them from a cart. "Those dear dirty
dates," she calls them, but I cannot share her liking for them. Although
the cart is a beguiling market, dates so bought are too dusty to be eaten.
They rank with the apple-john. The apple-john is that mysterious leathery
fruit, sold more often from a stand than from a cart, which leans at the
rear of the shelf against the peppermint jars. For myself, although I do
not eat apple-johns, I like to look at them. They are so shrivelled and so
flat, as though a banana had caught a consumption. Or rather, in the older
world was there not a custom at a death of sending fruits to support the
lonesome journey? If so, the apple-john came untasted to the end. Indeed,
there is a look of old Egypt about the fruit. Whether my fondness for
gazing at apple-johns springs from a distant occasion when as a child I
once bought and ate one, or whether it arises from the fact that Falstaff
called Prince Hal a dried apple-john, is an unsolved question, but I like
to linger before a particularly shrivelled one and wonder what its youth
was like. Perhaps like many of its betters, it remained unheralded and
unknown all through its fresher years and not until the coming of its
wrinkled age was it at last put up to the common view. The apple-john sets
up kinship with an author.

The day of all fools is wisely put in April. The jest of the day resides in
the success with which credulity is imposed upon, and April is the month of
easiest credulity. Let bragging travellers come in April and hold us with
tales of the Anthropopagi! If their heads are said to grow beneath their
shoulders, still we will turn a credent ear. Indeed, it is all but sure
that Baron Munchausen came back from his travels in the Spring. When
else could he have got an ear? What man can look upon the wonders of the
returning year--the first blue skies, the soft rains, the tender sproutings
of green stalks without feeling that there is nothing beyond belief? If
such miracles can happen before his eyes, shall not the extreme range even
of travel or metaphysics be allowed? What man who has smelled the first
fragrance of the earth, has heard the birds on their northern flight and
has seen an April brook upon its course, will withhold his credence even
though the jest be plain?

I beg, therefore, that when you walk upon the street on the next day of
April fool, that you yield to the occasion. If an urchin points his finger
at your hat, humor him by removing it! Look sharply at it for a supposed
defect! His glad shout will be your reward. Or if you are begged piteously
to lift a stand-pipe wrapped to the likeness of a bundle, even though you
sniff the imposture, seize upon it with a will! It is thus, beneath these
April skies, that you play your part in the pageantry that marks the day.




The Friendly Genii


Do you not confess yourself to be several years past that time of greenest
youth when burnt cork holds its greatest charm? Although not fallen to a
crippled state, are you not now too advanced to smudge your upper lip and
stalk agreeably as a villain? Surely you can no longer frisk lightly in
a comedy. If you should wheeze and limp in an old man's part, with back
humped in mimicry, would you not fear that it bordered on the truth? But
doubtless there was a time when you ranged upon these heights--when Kazrac
the magician was not too heavy for your art. In those soaring days, let us
hope that you played the villain with a swagger, or being cast in a softer
role, that you won a pink and fluffy princess before the play was done.
Your earliest practice, it may be, was in rigging the parlor hangings as a
curtain with brown string from the pantry and safety pins. Although you had
no show to offer, you said "ding" three times--as is the ancient custom of
the stage when the actors are ready--and drew them wide apart. The cat
was the audience, who dozed with an ear twitching toward your activity. A
complaint that springs up in youth and is known as "snuffles" had kept you
out of school. It had gripped you hard at breakfast, when you were sunk in
fear of your lessons, but had abated at nine o'clock. Whether the cure came
with a proper healing of the nasal glands or followed merely on the ringing
of the school bell, must be left to a cool judgment.

Your theatre filled the morning. When Annie came on her quest for dust, you
tooted once upon your nose, just to show that a remnant of your infirmity
persisted, then put your golden convalescence on the making of your
curtain.

But in the early hours of afternoon when the children are once more upon
the street, you regret your illness. Here they come trooping by threes and
fours, carrying their books tied up in straps. One would think that they
were in fear lest some impish fact might get outside the covers to spoil
the afternoon. Until the morrow let two and two think themselves five at
least! And let Ohio be bounded as it will! Some few children skip ropes, or
step carefully across the cracks of the sidewalk for fear they spoil their
suppers. Ah!--a bat goes by--a glove--a ball! And now from a vacant lot
there comes the clamor of choosing sides. Is no mention to be made of
you--you, "molasses fingers"--the star left fielder--the timely batter?
What would you not give now for a clean bill of health? You rub your
offending nose upon the glass. What matters it with what deep rascality in
black mustachios you once strutted upon your boards? What is Hecuba to you?

My own first theatre was in the attic, a place of squeaks and shadows
to all except the valiant. In it were low, dark corners where the night
crawled in and slept. But in the open part where the roof was highest,
there was the theatre. Its walls were made of a red cambric of a flowered
pattern that still lingers with me, and was bought with a clatter of
pennies on the counter, together with nickels that had escaped my
extravagance at the soda fountain.

A cousin and I were joint proprietors. In the making of it, the hammer and
nails were mine by right of sex, while she stitched in womanish fashion on
the fabrics. She was leading woman and I was either the hero or the villain
as fitted to my mood. My younger cousin--although we scorned her for her
youth--was admitted to the slighter parts. She might daub herself with
cork, but it must be only when we were done. Nor did we allow her to carry
the paper knife--shaped like a dagger--which figured hugely in our plots.
If we gave her any word to speak, it was as taffy to keep her silent about
some iniquity that we had worked against her. In general, we judged her to
be too green and giddy for the heavy parts. At the most, she might take
pins at the door--for at such a trifle we displayed our talents--or play
upon the comb as orchestra before the rising of the curtain.

The usual approach to this theatre was the kitchen door, and those who came
to enjoy the drama sniffed at their very entrance the new-baked bread. A
pan of cookies was set upon a shelf and a row of apples was ranged along
the window sill. Of the ice-box around the corner, not a word, lest hunger
lead you off! As for the cook, although her tongue was tart upon a just
occasion and although she shooed the children with her apron, secretly she
liked to have them crowding through her kitchen.

Now if you, reader--for I assume you to be one of the gathering
audience--were of the kind careful on scrubbing days to scrape your feet
upon the iron outside and to cross the kitchen on the unwashed parts, then
it is likely that you stood in the good graces of the cook. Mark your
reward! As you journeyed upward, you munched upon a cookie and bit scallops
in its edge. Or if a ravenous haste was in you--as commonly comes up in the
middle afternoon--you waived this slower method and crammed yourself with
a recklessness that bestrewed the purlieus of your mouth. If your ears lay
beyond the muss, the stowage was deemed decent and in order.

Is there not a story in which children are tracked by an ogre through the
perilous wood by the crumbs they dropped? Then let us hope there is no ogre
lurking on these back stairs, for the trail is plain. It would be near the
top, farthest from the friendly kitchen, that the attack might come, for
there the stairs yielded to the darkness of the attic. There it was best
to look sharp and to turn the corners wide. A brave whistling kept out the
other noises.

It was after Aladdin had been in town that the fires burned hottest in us.
My grandfather and I went together to the matinee, his great thumb within
my fist. We were frequent companions. Together we had sat on benches in the
park and poked the gravel into patterns. We went to Dime Museums. Although
his eyes had looked longer on the world than mine, we seemed of an equal
age.

The theatre was empty as we entered. We carried a bag of candy against a
sudden appetite--colt's foot, a penny to the stick. Here and there ushers
were clapping down the seats, sounds to my fancy not unlike the first corn
within a popper. Somewhere aloft there must have been a roof, else the day
would have spied in on us, yet it was lost in the gloom. It was as though
a thrifty owner had borrowed the dusky fabrics of the night to make his
cover. The curtain was indistinct, but we knew it to be the Stratford
Church and we dimly saw its spire.

Now, on the opening of a door to the upper gallery, there was a scampering
to get seats in front, speed being whetted by a long half hour of waiting
on the stairs. Ghostly, unbodied heads, like the luminous souls of lost
mountaineers--for this was the kind of fiction, got out of the Public
Library, that had come last beneath my thumb--ghostly heads looked down
upon us across the gallery rail.

And now, if you will tip back your head like a paper-hanger--whose Adam's
apple would seem to attest a life of sidereal contemplation--you will see
in the center of the murk above you a single point of light. It is the
spark that will ignite the great gas chandelier. I strain my neck to the
point of breaking. My grandfather strains his too, for it is a game between
us which shall announce the first spurting of the light. At last! We cry
out together. The spark catches the vent next to it. It runs around the
circle of glass pendants. The whole blazes up. The mountaineers come to
life. They lean forward on their elbows.

From the wings comes the tuning of the violins. A flute ripples up and down
in a care-free manner as though the villain Kazrac were already dead and
virtue had come into its own. The orchestra emerges from below. Their
calmness is but a pretense. Having looked on such sights as lie behind the
curtain, having trod such ways, they should be bubbling with excitement.
Yet observe the bass viol! How sodden is his eye! How sunken is his gaze!
With what dull routine he draws his bow, as though he knew naught but
sleepy tunes! If there be any genie in the place, as the program says, let
him first stir this sad fellow from his melancholy!

We consult our programs. The first scene is the magician's cave where he
plans his evil schemes. The second is the Chinese city where he pretends to
be Aladdin's uncle. And for myself, did a friendly old gentleman offer me
lollypops and all-day-suckers--for so did the glittering baubles present
themselves across the footlights--like Aladdin I, too, would not have
squinted too closely on his claim. Gladly I would have gone off with him on
an all-day picnic toward the Chinese mountains.

We see a lonely pass in the hills, the cave of jewels (splendid to the eye
of childhood) where the slave of the lamp first appears, and finally the
throne-room with Aladdin seated safely beside his princess.

Who knows how to dip a pen within the twilight? Who shall trace the figures
of the mist? The play is done. We come out in silence. Our candy is but a
remnant. Darkness has fallen. The pavements are wet and shining, so that
the night might see his face, if by chance the old fellow looked our way.

All about there are persons hurrying home with dinner-pails, who, by their
dull eyes, seem never to have heard what wonders follow on the rubbing of a
lamp.

But how the fires leaped up--how ambition beat within us--how our attic
theatre was wrought to perfection--how the play came off and wracked the
neighborhood of its pins--with what grace I myself acted Aladdin--these
things must be written by a vain and braggart pen.




Mr. Pepys Sits in the Pit


When it happens that a man has risen to be a member of Parliament, the
Secretary of the British Navy and the President of the Royal Society, when
he has become the adviser of the King and is moreover the one really bright
spot in that King's reign, it is amazing that considerably more than one
hundred years after his death, when the navy that he nurtured dominates the
seven seas, that he himself on a sudden should be known, not for his larger
accomplishments, but as a kind of tavern crony and pot-companion. When he
should be standing with fame secure in a solemn though dusty niche in the
Temple of Time, it is amazing that he should be remembered chiefly for
certain quarrels with his wife and as a frequenter of plays and summer
gardens.

Yet this is the fate of Samuel Pepys. Before the return of the Stuarts he
held a poor clerkship in the Navy Office and cut his quill obscurely at
the common desk. At the Restoration, partly by the boost of influence, but
chiefly by his substantial merit, he mounted to several successively higher
posts. The Prince of Wales became his friend and patron and when he became
Lord High Admiral he took Pepys with him in his advancement. Thus in 1684,
Pepys became Secretary of the Navy. When later the Prince of Wales became
King James II, Pepys, although his office remained the same, came to quite
a pinnacle of administrative power. He was shrewd and capable in the
conduct of his position and brought method to the Navy Office. He was a
prime factor in the first development of the British Navy. Later victories
that were to sweep the seas may be traced in part to him. Nelson rides upon
his shoulders. These achievements should have made his fame secure. But
on a sudden he gained for posterity a less dignified although a more
interesting and enduring renown.

In life, Samuel Pepys walked gravely in majestical robe with full-bottomed
wig and with ceremonial lace flapping at his wrists. Every step, if his
portrait is to be believed, was a bit of pageantry. Such was his fame, that
if his sword but clacked a warning on the pavement, it must have brought
the apprentices to the windows. Tradesmen laid down their wares to get a
look at him. Fat men puffed and strained to gain the advantage of a sill.
Fashionable ladies peeped from brocaded curtains and ogled for his regard.
Or if he went by chair, the carriers held their noses up as though offended
by the common air. When he spoke before the Commons, the galleries were
hushed. He gave his days to the signing of stiff parchments--Admiralty
Orders or what not. He checked the King himself at the council table. In
short, he was not only a great personage, but also he was quite well aware
of the fact and held himself accordingly.

But now many years have passed, and Time, that has so long been at bowls
with reputations, has acquired a moderate skill in knocking them down. Let
us see how it fares with Pepys! Some men who have been roguish in their
lives have been remembered by their higher accomplishments. A string
of sonnets or a novel or two, if it catches the fancy, has wiped out a
tap-room record. The winning of a battle has obliterated a meanly spent
youth. It is true that for a while an old housewife who once lived on the
hero's street will shake a dubious finger on his early pranks. Stolen
apples or cigarettes behind the barn cram her recollection. But even a
village reputation fades. In time the sonnets and glorious battle have the
upper place. But things went the other way with Pepys. Rather, his fate
is like that of Zeus, who--if legend is to be trusted--was in his life a
person of some importance whose nod stirred society on Olympus, but who is
now remembered largely for his flirtations and his braggart conduct. A not
unlike evil has fallen on the magnificent Mr. Pepys.

This fate came to him because--as the world knows--it happened that for
a period of ten years in comparative youth, he wrote an interesting and
honest diary. He began this diary in 1659, while he was still a poor clerk
living with his wife in a garret, and ended it in 1669, when, although he
had emerged from obscurity, his greater honors had not yet been set on him.
All the facts of his life during this period are put down, whether good or
bad, small or large, generous or mean. He writes of his mornings spent in
work at his office, of his consultations with higher officials. There
is much running to and fro of business. The Dutch war bulks to a proper
length. Parliament sits through a page at a stretch. Pepys goes upon the
streets in the days of the plague and writes the horror of it--the houses
marked with red crosses and with prayers scratched beneath--the stench and
the carrying of dead bodies. He sees the great fire of London from his
window on the night it starts; afterwards St. Paul's with its roofs fallen.
He is on the fleet that brings Charles home from his long travels, and
afterwards when Charles is crowned, he records the processions and the
crowds. But also Pepys quarrels with his wife and writes it out on paper.
He debauches a servant and makes a note of it. He describes a supper at an
ale-house, and how he plays on the flute. He sings "Beauty Retire," a song
of his own making, and tells how his listeners "cried it up."

In consequence of this, Samuel Pepys is now known chiefly for his
attentions to the pretty actresses of Drury Lane, for kissing Nell Gwynne
in her tiring-room, for his suppers with "the jade" Mrs. Knipp, for his
love of a tune upon the fiddle, for coming home from Vauxhall by wherry
late at night, "singing merrily" down the river. Or perhaps we recall him
best for burying his wine and Parmazan cheese in his garden at the time
of the Fire, or for standing to the measure of Mr. Pin the tailor for a
"camlett cloak with gold buttons," or for sitting for his portrait in an
Indian gown which he "hired to be drawn in." Who shall say that this is not
the very portrait by which we have fancied him stalking off to Commons?
Could the apprentices have known in what a borrowed majesty he walked,
would they not have tossed their caps in mirth and pointed their dusky
fingers at him?

Or we remember that he once lived in a garret, and that his wife, "poor
wretch," was used to make the fire while Samuel lay abed, and that she
washed his "foul clothes"--that by degrees he came to be wealthy and
rode in his own yellow coach--that his wife went abroad in society "in
a flowered tabby gown"--that Pepys forsook his habits of poverty and
exchanged his twelve-penny seat in the theatre gallery for a place in the
pit--and that on a rare occasion (doubtless when he was alone and there was
but one seat to buy) he arose to the extravagance of a four-shilling box.

Consequently, despite the weightier parts of the diary, we know Pepys
chiefly in his hours of ease. Sittings and consultations are so dry. If
only the world would run itself decently and in silence! Even a meeting of
the Committee for Tangier--when the Prince of Wales was present and such
smaller fry as Chancellors--is dull and is matter for a skipping eye.

If a session of Parliament bulks to a fat paragraph and it happens that
there is a bit of deviltry just below at the bottom of the page--maybe no
more than a clinking of glasses (or perhaps Nell Gwynne's name pops in
sight)--bless us how the eye will hurry to turn the leaf on the chance
of roguery to come! Who would read through a long discourse on Admiralty
business, if it be known before that Pepys is engaged with the pretty Mrs.
Knipp for a trip to Bartholomew Fair to view the dancing horse, and that
the start is to be made on the turning of the page? Or a piece of scandal
about Lady Castlemaine, how her nose fell out of joint when Mrs. Stuart
came to court--such things tease one from the sterner business.

And for these reasons, we have been inclined to underestimate the
importance of Pepys' diary. Francis Jeffrey, who wrote long ago about
Pepys, evidently thought that he was an idle and unprofitable fellow and
that the diary was too much given to mean and petty things. But in reality
the diary is an historical mine. Even when Pepys plays upon the surface,
he throws out facts that can be had nowhere else. No one would venture to
write of Restoration life without digging through his pages. Pepys wrote in
a confused shorthand, maybe against the eye of his wife, from whom he had
reason to conceal his offenses. The papers lay undeciphered until 1825,
when a partial publication was made. There were additions by subsequent
editors until now it appears that the Wheatley text of 1893-1899 is final.
But ever since 1825, the diary has been judged to be of high importance in
the understanding of the first decade of the Restoration.

If some of the weightier parts are somewhat dry, there are places in which
a lighter show of personality is coincident with real historical data.
Foremost are the pages where Pepys goes to the theatre.

More than Charles II was restored in 1660. Among many things of more
importance than this worthless King, the theatre was restored. Since the
close of Elizabethan times it had been out of business. More than thirty
years before, Puritanism had snuffed out its candles and driven its
fiddlers to the streets. But Puritanism, in its turn, fell with the return
of the Stuarts. Pepys is a chief witness as to what kind of theatre it was
that was set up in London about the year 1660. It was far different from
the Elizabethan theatre. It came in from the Bankside and the fields to the
north of the city and lodged itself on the better streets and squares. It
no longer patterned itself on the inn-yard, but was roofed against the
rain. The time had been when the theatre was cousin to the bear-pit. They
were ranged together on the Bankside and they sweat and smelled like
congenial neighbors. But these days are past. Let Bartholomew Fair be as
rowdy as it pleases, let acrobats and such loose fellows keep to Southwark,
the theatre has risen in the world! It has put on a wig, as it were, it has
tied a ribbon to itself and has become fashionable. And although it has
taken on a few extra dissolute habits, they are of the genteelest kind and
will make it feel at home in the upper circles.

But also the theatre introduced movable scenery. There is an attempt toward
elaboration of stage effect. "To the King's playhouse--" says Pepys, "a
good scene of a town on fire." Women take parts. An avalanche of new plays
descends on it. Even the old plays that have survived are garbled to suit a
change of taste.

But if you would really know what kind of theatre it was that sprang up
with the Stuarts and what the audiences looked like and how they behaved,
you must read Pepys. With but a moderate use of fancy, you can set out with
him in his yellow coach for the King's house in Drury Lane. Perhaps hunger
nips you at the start. If so, you stop, as Pepys pleasantly puts it, for a
"barrel of oysters." Then, having dusted yourself of crumbs, you take the
road again. Presently you come to Drury Lane. Other yellow coaches are
before you. There is a show of foppery on the curb and an odor of smoking
links. A powdered beauty minces to the door. Once past the doorkeeper, you
hear the cries of the orange women going up and down the aisles. There is a
shuffling of apprentices in the gallery. A dandy who lolls in a box with a
silken leg across the rail, scrawls a message to an actress and sends it
off by Orange Moll. Presently Castlemaine enters the royal box with the
King. There is a craning of necks, for with her the King openly "do
discover a great deal of familiarity." In other boxes are other fine ladies
wearing vizards to hold their modesty if the comedy is free. A board breaks
in the ceiling of the gallery and dust falls in the men's hair and the
ladies' necks, which, writes Pepys, "made good sport." Or again, "A
gentleman of good habit, sitting just before us, eating of some fruit in
the midst of the play, did drop down as dead; being choked, but with much
ado Orange Moll did thrust her finger down his throat and brought him to
life again." Or perhaps, "I sitting behind in a dark place, a lady spit
backward upon me by a mistake, not seeing me, but after seeing her to be a
very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all."

At a change of scenes, Mrs. Knipp spies Pepys and comes to the pit door. He
goes with her to the tiring-room. "To the women's shift," he writes,
"where Nell was dressing herself, and was all unready, and is very pretty,
prettier than I thought.... But to see how Nell cursed for having so few
people in the pit, was pretty."--"But Lord! their confidence! and how
many men do hover about them as soon as they come off the stage, and how
confident they are in their talk!" Or he is whispered a bit of gossip, how
Castlemaine is much in love with Hart, an actor of the house. Then Pepys
goes back into the pit and lays out a sixpence for an orange. As the play
nears its end, footmen crowd forward at the doors. The epilogue is spoken.
The fiddles squeak their last. There is a bawling outside for coaches.

"Would it fit your humor," asks Mr. Pepys, when we have been handed to our
seats, "would it fit your humor, if we go around to the Rose Tavern for
some burnt wine and a breast of mutton off the spit? It's sure that some
brave company will fall in, and we can have a tune. We'll not heed the
bellman. We'll sit late, for it will be a fine light moonshine morning."




To an Unknown Reader


Once in a while I dream that I come upon a person who is reading a book
that I have written. In my pleasant dreams these persons do not nod
sleepily upon my pages, and sometimes I fall in talk with them. Although
they do not know who I am, they praise the book and name me warmly among
my betters. In such circumstance my happy nightmare mounts until I ride
foremost with the giants. If I could think that this disturbance of my
sleep came from my diet and that these agreeable persons arose from a
lobster or a pie, nightly at supper I would ply my fork recklessly among
the platters.

But in a waking state these meetings never come. If an article of mine is
ever read at all, it is read in secret like the Bible. Once, indeed, in a
friend's house I saw my book upon the table, but I suspect that it had been
dusted and laid out for my coming. I request my hostess that next time, for
my vanity, she lay the book face down upon a chair, as though the grocer's
knock intruded. Or perhaps a huckster's cart broke upon her enjoyment.
Let it be thought that a rare bargain--tender asparagus or the first
strawberries of the summer--tempted her off my pages! Or maybe there was
red rhubarb in the cart and the jolly farmer, as he journeyed up the
street, pitched it to a pleasing melody. Dear lady, I forgive you. But let
us hope no laundryman led you off! Such discord would have marred my book.

I saw once in a public library, as I went along the shelves, a volume of
mine which gave evidence to have been really read. The record in front
showed that it had been withdrawn one time only. The card was blank
below--but once certainly it had been read. I hope that the book went out
on a Saturday noon when the spirits rise for the holiday to come, and that
a rainy Sunday followed, so that my single reader was kept before his fire.
A dull patter on the window--if one sits unbuttoned on the hearth--gives
a zest to a languid chapter. The rattle of a storm--if only the room be
snug--fixes the attention fast. Therefore, let the rain descend as though
the heavens rehearsed for a flood! Let a tempest come out of the west! Let
the chimney roar as it were a lion! And if there must be a clearing, let
it hold off until the late afternoon, lest it sow too early a distaste for
indoors and reading! There is scarcely a bookworm who will not slip his
glasses off his nose, if the clouds break at the hour of sunset when the
earth and sky are filled with a green and golden light. I took the book off
the library shelf and timidly glancing across my shoulder for fear that
some one might catch me, I looked along the pages. There was a thumb mark
in a margin, and presently appeared a kindly stickiness on the paper as
though an orange had squirted on it. Surely there had been a human being
hereabouts. It was as certain as when Crusoe found the footprints in the
sand. Ah, I thought, this fellow who sits in the firelight has caught an
appetite. Perhaps he bit a hole and sucked the fruit, and the skin has
burst behind. Or I wave the theory and now conceive that the volume was
read at breakfast. If so, it is my comfort that in those dim hours it stood
propped against his coffee cup.

But the trail ended with the turning of the page. There were, indeed,
further on, pencil checks against one of the paragraphs as if here the book
had raised a faint excitement, but I could not tell whether they sprang
up in derision or in approval. Toward the end there were uncut leaves, as
though even my single reader had failed in his persistence.

Being swept once beyond a usual caution, I lamented to my friend F---- of
the neglect in which readers held me, to which the above experience in
a library was a rare exception. F---- offered me such consolation as he
could, deplored the general taste and the decadence of the times, and said
that as praise was sweet to everyone, he, as far as he himself was able,
offered it anonymously to those who merited it. He was standing recently
in a picture gallery, when a long-haired man who stood before one of the
pictures was pointed out to him as the artist who had painted it. At once
F---- saw his opportunity to confer a pleasure, but as there is a touch of
humor in him, he first played off a jest. Lounging forward, he dropped his
head to one side as artistic folk do when they look at color. He made a
knot-hole of his fingers and squinted through. Next he retreated across the
room and stood with his legs apart in the very attitude of wisdom. He cast
a stern eye upon the picture and gravely tapped his chin. At last when the
artist was fretted to an extremity, F---- came forward and so cordially
praised the picture that the artist, being now warmed and comforted,
presently excused himself in a high excitement and rushed away to start
another picture while the pleasant spell was on him.

Had I been the artist, I would have run from either F----'s praise or
disapproval. As an instance, I saw a friend on a late occasion coming from
a bookstore with a volume of suspicious color beneath his arm. I had been
avoiding that particular bookstore for a week because my book lay for sale
on a forward table. And now when my friend appeared, a sudden panic seized
me and I plunged into the first doorway to escape. I found myself facing a
soda fountain. For a moment, in my blur, I could not account for the
soda fountain, or know quite how it had come into my life. Presently an
interne--for he was jacketted as if he walked a hospital--asked me what I'd
have.

Still somewhat dazed, in my discomposure, having no answer ready, my
startled fancy ran among the signs and labels of the counter until I
recalled that a bearded man once, unblushing in my presence, had ordered
a banana flip. I got the fellow's ear and named it softly. Whereupon he
placed a dead-looking banana across a mound of ice-cream, poured on colored
juices as though to mark the fatal wound and offered it to me. I ate a few
bites of the sickish mixture until the streets were safe.

I do not know to what I can attribute my timidity. Possibly it arises from
the fact that until recently my writing met with uniform rejection and
failure. For years I wrote secretly in order that few persons might know
how miserably I failed. I answered upon a question that I had given up the
practice, that I now had no time for it, that I scribbled now and then
but always burned it. All that while I gave my rare leisure and my stolen
afternoons--the hours that other men give to golf and sleep and sitting
together--these hours I gave to writing. On a holiday I was at it early. On
Saturday when other folks were abroad, I sat at my desk. It was my grief
that I was so poor a borrower of the night that I blinked stupidly on my
papers if I sat beyond the usual hour. Writing was my obsession. I need no
pity for my failures, for although I tossed my cap upon a rare acceptance,
my deeper joy was in the writing. That joy repeated failures could not
blunt.

There are paragraphs that now lie yellow in my desk with their former
meaning faded, that still recall as I think of them the first exaltation
when I wrote them--feverishly in a hot emotion. In those days I thought
that I had caught the sunlight on my pen, and the wind and the moon and the
spinning earth. I thought that the valleys and the mountains arose from the
mist obedient to me. If I splashed my pen, in my warm regard it was the
roar and fury of the sea. It was really no more than my youth crying out.
And, alas, my thoughts and my feelings escaped me when I tried to put them
down on paper, although I did not know it then. Perhaps they were too
vagrant to be held. And yet these paragraphs that might be mournful records
of failure, fill me with no more than a tender recollection for the boy
who wrote them. The worn phrases now beg their way with broken steps. Like
shrill and piping minstrels they whine and crack a melody that I still
remember in its freshness.

But perhaps, reader, we are brothers in these regards. Perhaps you, too,
have faded papers. Or possibly, even on a recent date, you sighed your soul
into an essay or a sonnet, and you now have manuscript which you would like
to sell. Do not mistake me! I am not an editor, nor am I an agent for these
wares. Rather I speak as a friend who, having many such hidden sorrows,
offers you a word of comfort. To a desponding Hamlet I exclaim, "'Tis
common, my Lord." I have so many friends that have had an unproductive
fling toward letters, that I think the malady is general. So many books are
published and flourish a little while in their bright wrappers, but yours
and theirs and mine waste away in a single precious copy.

I am convinced that a close inspection of all desks--a federal matter as
though Capital were under fire--would betray thousands of abandoned novels.
There may be a few stern desks that are so cluttered with price-sheets and
stock-lists that they cannot offer harborage to a love tale. Standing desks
in particular, such as bookkeepers affect, are not always chinked
with these softer plots. And rarely there is a desk so smothered in
learning--reeking so of scholarship--as not to admit a lighter nook for
the tucking of a sea yarn. Even so, it was whispered to me lately that
Professor B----, whose word shakes the continent, holds in a lower drawer
no fewer than three unpublished historical novels, each set up with a full
quota of smugglers and red bandits. One of these stories deals scandalously
with the abduction of an heiress, but this must be held in confidence. The
professor is a stoic before his class, but there's blood in the fellow.

There is, therefore, little use in your own denial. You will recall that
once, when taken to a ruined castle, you brooded on the dungeons until a
plot popped into your head. You crammed it with quaint phrasing from the
chroniclers. You stuffed it with soldiers' oaths. "What ho! landlord,"
you wrote gayly at midnight, "a foaming cup, good sir. God pity the poor
sailors that take the sea this night!" And on you pelted with your plot to
such conflicts and hair-breadth escapes as lay in your contrivance.

These things you have committed. Good sir, we are of a common piece. Let us
salute as brothers! And therefore, as to a comrade, I bid you continue in
your ways. And that you may not lack matter for your pen, I warmly urge
you, when by shrewdest computation you have exhausted the plots of
adventure and have worn your villains thin, that you proceed in quieter
vein. I urge you to an April mood, for the winds of Spring are up and
daffodils nod across the garden. There is black earth in the Spring and
green hilltops, and there is also the breath of flowers along the fences
and the sound of water for your pen to prattle of.




A Plague of All Cowards


Having written lately against the dog, several acquaintances have asked me
to turn upon the cat, and they have been good enough to furnish me with
instances of her faithlessness. Also, a lady with whom I recently sat at
dinner, inquired of me on the passing of the fish, whether I had ever
properly considered the cow, which she esteemed a most mischievous animal.
One of them had mooed at her as she crossed a pasture and she had hastily
climbed a fence. I get a good many suggestions first and last. I was once
taken to a Turkish bath for no other reason--as I was afterwards told--than
that it might supply me with a topic. Odd books have been put in my way.
A basket of school readers was once lodged with me, with a request that I
direct my attention to the absurd selection of the poems. I have been urged
to go against car conductors and customs men. On one occasion I received a
paper of tombstone inscriptions, with a note of direction how others might
be found in a neighboring churchyard if I were curious. A lady in whose
company I camped last summer has asked me to give a chapter to it. We were
abroad upon a lake in the full moon--we were lost upon a mountain--twice a
canoe upset--there were the usual jests about cooking. These things might
have filled a few pages agreeably, yet so far they have given me only a
paragraph.

But I am not disposed toward any of these subjects, least of all the cat,
upon which I look--despite the coldness of her nature--as a harmless and
comforting appendage of the hearth-rug. I would no more prey upon her
morals than I would the morals of the andirons. I choose, rather, to slip
to another angle of the question and say a few words about cowards, among
whom I have already confessed that I number myself.

In this year of battles, when physical courage sits so high, the reader--if
he is swept off in the general opinion--will expect under such a title
something caustic. He will think that I am about to loose against all
cowards a plague of frogs and locusts as if old Egypt had come again. But
cowardice is its own punishment. It needs no frog to nip it. Even the
sharp-toothed locust--for in the days that bordered so close upon the
mastodon, the locust could hardly have fallen to the tender greenling we
know today--even the locust that once spoiled the Egyptians could not now
add to the grief of a coward.

And yet--really I hesitate. I blush. My attack will be too intimate; for I
have confessed that I am not the very button on the cap of bravery. I have
indeed stiffened myself to ride a horse, a mightier feat than driving him
because of the tallness of the monster and his uneasy movement, as though
his legs were not well socketed and might fall out on a change of gaits. I
have ridden on a camel in a side-show, but have found my only comfort in
his hump. I have stroked the elephant. In a solemn hour of night I have
gone downstairs to face a burglar. But I do not run singing to these
dangers. While your really brave fellow is climbing a dizzy staircase to
the moon--I write in figure--I would shake with fear upon a lower platform.

Perhaps you recall Mr. Tipp of the Elia essays. "Tipp," says his pleasant
biographer, "never mounted the box of a stage-coach in his life; or leaned
against the rails of a balcony; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet; or
looked down a precipice; or let off a gun." I cannot follow Tipp, it may
be, to his extreme tremors--my hair will not rise to so close a likeness of
the fretful porcupine--yet in a measure we are in agreement. We are, as it
were, cousins, with the mark of our common family strong on both of us.

There are persons who, when in your company on a country walk, will steal
apples, not with a decent caution from a tree along the fence, but far
afield. If there are grapes, they will not wait for a turn of the road,
but will pluck them in the open. Or maybe in your wandering you come on a
half-built house. You climb in through a window to look about. Here the
stairs will go. The ice-box will be set against this wall. But if your
companion is one of valor's minions, he will not be satisfied with this
safe and agreeable research--this mild speculation on bath-rooms--this
innocent placing of a stove. He must go aloft. He has seen a ladder and
yearns to climb it. The footing on the second story is bad enough. If you
fall between the joists, you will clatter to the basement. It is hard to
realize that such an open breezy place will ever be cosy and warm with
fires, and that sleepy folk will here lie snugly a-bed on frosty mornings.
But still the brazen fellow is not content. A ladder leads horribly to the
roof. For myself I will climb until the tip of my nose juts out upon the
world--until it sprouts forth to the air from the topmost timbers: But I
will go no farther. But if your companion sees a scaffold around a chimney,
he must perch on it. For him, a dizzy plank is a pleasant belvedere from
which to view the world.

The bravery of this kind of person is not confined to these few matters.
If you happen to go driving with him, he will--if the horse is of the kind
that distends his nostrils--on a sudden toss you the reins and leave you to
guard him while he dispatches an errand. If it were a motor car there would
be a brake to hold it. If it were a boat, you might throw out an anchor. A
butcher's cart would have a metal drag. But here you sit defenseless--tied
to the whim of a horse--greased for a runaway. The beast Dobbin turns his
head and holds you with his hard eye. There is a convulsive movement along
his back, a preface, it may be, to a sudden seizure. A real friend would
have loosed the straps that run along the horse's flanks. Then, if any
deviltry take him, he might go off alone and have it out.

I have in mind a livery stable in Kalamazoo. Myself and another man of
equal equestrianism were sent once to bring out a thing called a surrey and
a pair of horses. Do you happen to be acquainted with Blat's Horse Food? If
your way lies among the smaller towns, you must know its merits. They are
proclaimed along the fences and up the telegraph poles. Drinking-troughs
speak its virtues. Horses thrive on Blat's Food. They neigh for it. A
flashing lithograph is set by way of testament wherever traffic turns or
lingers. Do you not recall the picture? A great red horse rears himself
on his hind legs. His forward hoofs are extended. He is about to trample
someone under foot. His nostrils are wide. He is unduly excited. It cannot
be food, it must be drink that stirs him. He is a fearful spectacle.

There was such a picture on the wall of the stable.

"Have you any horses," I asked nervously, jerking my thumb toward the wall,
"any horses that have been fed on just ordinary food? Some that are a
little tired?"

For I remembered how Mr. Winkle once engaged horses to take the
Pickwickians out to Manor Farm and what mishaps befell them on the way.

"'He don't shy, does he?' inquired Mr. Pickwick.

"'Shy, sir?--He wouldn't shy if he was to meet a vagginload of monkeys with
their tails burnt off.'"

But how Mr. Pickwick dropped his whip, how Mr. Winkle got off his tall
horse to pick it up, how he tried in vain to remount while his horse went
round and round, how they were all spilt out upon the bridge and how
finally they walked to Manor Farm--these things are known to everybody with
an inch of reading.

"'How far is it to Dingley Dell?' they asked.

"'Better er seven mile.'

"'Is it a good road?'

"'No, t'ant.'...

"The depressed Pickwickians turned moodily away, with the tall quadruped,
for which they all felt the most unmitigated disgust, following slowly at
their heels."

"Have you any horses," I repeated, "that have not been fed on Blat's
Food--horses that are, so to speak, on a diet?"

In the farthest stalls, hidden from the sunlight and the invigorating
infection of the day, two beasts were found with sunken chests and hollow
eyes, who took us safely to our destination on their hands and knees.

As you may suspect, I do not enjoy riding. There is, it is true, one saddle
horse in North Carolina that fears me. If time still spares him, that horse
I could ride with content. But I would rather trust myself on the top of a
wobbly step-ladder than up the sides of most horses. I am not quite of a
mind, however, with Samuel Richardson who owned a hobby-horse and rode on
his hearth-rug in the intervals of writing "Pamela." It is likely that when
he had rescued her from an adventure of more than usual danger--perhaps her
villainous master has been concealed in her closet--perhaps he has been
hiding beneath her bed--it is likely, having brought her safely off, the
author locked her in the buttery against a fresh attack. Then he felt, good
man, in need of exercise. So while he waits for tea and muffins, he leaps
upon his rocking-horse and prances off. As for the hobby-horse itself, I
have not heard whether it was of the usual nursery type, or whether it was
built in the likeness of the leather camels of a German steamship.

I need hardly say that these confessions of my cowardice are for your ear
alone. They must not get abroad to smirch me. If on a country walk I have
taken to my heels, you must not twit me with poltroonery. If you charge me
with such faint-heartedness while other persons are present, I'll deny it
flat. When I sit in the company of ladies at dinner, I dissemble my true
nature, as doublet and hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat.
If then, you taunt me, for want of a better escape, I shall turn it to a
jest. I shall engage the table flippantly: Hear how preposterously the
fellow talks!--he jests to satisfy a grudge. In appearance I am whole as
the marble, founded as a rock.

But really some of us cowards are diverting persons. The lady who directed
me against the cow is a most delightful woman with whom I hope I shall
again sit at dinner. A witty lady of my acquaintance shivers when a
cat walks in the room. A man with whom I pass the time pleasantly and
profitably, although he will not admit a fear of ghosts, still will not
sleep in an empty house because of possible noises. I would rather spend a
Saturday evening in the company of the cowardly Falstaff than of the bold
Hotspur. If it were not for sack, villainous sack, and a few spots upon his
front, you would go far to find a better companion than the fat old Knight.
Bob Acres was not much for valor and he made an ass of himself when he went
to fight a duel, yet one could have sat agreeably at mutton with him.

But these things are slight. It matters little whether or not one can mount
a ladder comfortably. Now that motors have come in, horses stand remotely
in our lives. Nor is it of great moment whether or not we fear to be out of
fashion--whether we halt in the wearing of a wrong-shaped hat, or glance
fearfully around when we choose from a line of forks. Superstitions rest
mostly on the surface and are not deadly in themselves. A man can be true
of heart even if he will not sit thirteen at table. But there is a kind
of fear that is disastrous to them that have it. It is the fear of the
material universe in all its manifestations. There are persons, stout both
of chest and limb, who fear drafts and wet feet. A man who is an elephant
of valor and who has been feeling this long while a gentle contempt for
such as myself, will cry out if a soft breeze strikes against his neck. If
a foot slips to the gutter and becomes wet, he will dose himself. Achilles
did not more carefully nurse his heel. For him the lofty dome of air is
packed with malignant germs. The round world is bottled with contagion. A
strong man who, in his time, might have slain the Sofi, is as fearful of
his health as though the plague were up the street. Calamities beset him.
The slightest sniffling in his nose is the trumpet for a deep disorder.
Existence is but a moving hazard. Life for him, poor fellow, is but a room
with a window on the night and a storm beating on the casement. God knows,
it is better to grow giddy on a ladder than to think that this majestic
earth is such an universal pestilence.




The Asperities of the Early British Reviewers


Book reviewers nowadays direct their attention, for the most part, to the
worthy books and they habitually neglect those that seem beneath their
regard. On a rare occasion they assail an unprofitable book, but even this
is often but a bit of practice. They swish a bludgeon to try their hand.
They only take their anger, as it were, upon an outing, lest with too
close housing it grow pallid and shrink in girth. Or maybe they indulge
themselves in humor. Perhaps they think that their pages grow dull and that
ridicule will restore the balance. They throw it in like a drunken porter
to relieve a solemn scene. I fancy that editors of this baser sort keep on
their shelves one or two volumes for their readers' sport and mirth. I read
recently a review of an historical romance--a last faltering descendant of
the race--whose author in an endeavor to restore the past, had made too
free a use of obsolete words. With what playfulness was he held up to
scorn! Mary come up, sweet chuck! How his quaint phrasing was turned
against him! What a merry fellow it is who writes, how sharp and caustic!
There's pepper on his mood.

But generally, it is said, book reviews are too flattering. Professor
Bliss Perry, being of this opinion, offered some time ago a statement
that "Magazine writing about current books is for the most part bland,
complaisant, pulpy.... The Pedagogue no longer gets a chance at the gifted
young rascal who needs, first and foremost, a premonitory whipping; the
youthful genius simply stays away from school and carries his unwhipped
talents into the market place." At a somewhat different angle of the same
opinion, Dr. Crothers suggests in an essay that instead of being directed
to the best books, we need to be warned from the worst. He proposes to set
up a list of the Hundred Worst Books. For is it not better, he asks, to put
a lighthouse on a reef than in the channel? The open sea does not need a
bell-buoy to sound its depth.

On these hints I have read some of the book criticisms of days past to
learn whether they too were pulpy--whether our present silken criticism
always wore its gloves and perfumed itself, or whether it has fallen to
this smiling senility from a sterner youth. Although I am usually a rusty
student, yet by diligence I have sought to mend my knowledge that I might
lay it out before you. Lately, therefore, if you had come within our Public
Library, you would have found me in one of these attempts. Here I went,
scrimping the other business of the day in order that I might be at my
studies before the rush set in up town. Mine was the alcove farthest from
the door, where are the mustier volumes that fit a bookish student. So if
your quest was the lighter books--such verse and novels as present fame
attests--you did not find me. I was hooped and bowed around the corner. I
am no real scholar, but I study on a spurt. For a whole week together I may
read old plays until their jigging style infects my own. I have set myself
against the lofty histories, although I tire upon their lower slopes and
have not yet persisted to their upper and windier ridges. I have, also, a
pretty knowledge of the Queen Anne wits and feel that I must have dogged
and spied upon them while they were yet alive. But in general, although
I am curious in the earlier chapters of learning, I lag in the inner
windings. However, for a fortnight I have sat piled about with old reviews,
whose leather rots and smells, in order that I might study the fading
criticisms of the past.

Until rather near the end of the eighteenth century, those who made their
living in England by writing were chiefly publishers' hacks, fellows of
the Dunciad sucking their quills in garrets and selling their labor for a
crust, for the reading public was too small to support them. Or they
found a patron and gave him a sugared sonnet for a pittance, or strained
themselves to the length of an Ode for a berth in his household. Or
frequently they supported a political party and received a place in the
Red Tape Office. But even in politics, on account of the smallness of the
reading public and the politicians' indifference to its approval, their
services were of slight account. Too often a political office was granted
from a pocket borough in which a restricted electorate could be bought at a
trifling expense. To gain support inside the House of Commons was enough.
The greater public outside could be ignored. This attitude changed with
the coming of the French Revolution. Here was a new force unrealized
before--that of a crowd which, being unrepresented and with a real
grievance, could, when it liked, take a club and go after what it wanted.
For the first time in many years in England--such were the whiffs of
liberty across the Channel--the power of an unrepresented public came to be
known. It was not that the English crowd had as yet taken the club in its
hands, but there were new thoughts abroad in the world, and there was the
possibility to be regarded. To influence this larger public, therefore, men
who could write came little by little into a larger demand. And as
writers were comparatively scarce, all kinds--whether they wrote poems or
prose--were pressed into service. It is significant, too, that it was in
the decades subjected to the first influence of the French Revolution that
the English daily paper took its start as an agent to influence public
opinion.

It was therefore rather more than one hundred years ago that writers came
to a better prosperity. They came out of their garrets, took rooms on the
second floor, polished their brasses and became Persons. I can fancy that a
writer after spending a morning in the composition of a political article
on the whisper of a Cabinet Minister, wrote a sonnet after lunch, and
a book review before dinner. Let us see in what mood they took their
advancement! Let us examine their temper--but in book reviewing only, for
that alone concerns us! In doing this, we have the advantage of knowing the
final estimate of the books they judged. Like the witch, we have looked
into the seeds of time and we know "which grain will grow and which will
not."

In 1802, when the Edinburgh Review (which was the first of its line to
acquire distinction) came into being, the passion of the times found voice
in politics. Both Whigs and Tories had been alarmed by the excesses of the
French Revolution; both feared that England was drifting the way of France;
each had a remedy, but opposed and violently maintained. The Tories put the
blame of the Revolution on the compromises of Louis XVI, and accordingly
they were hostile to any political change. The Whigs, on the other
hand, saw the rottenness of England as a cause that would incite her to
revolution also, and they advocated reform while yet there was time. The
general fear of a revolution gave the government of England to the Tories,
and kept them in power for several decades. And England was ripe for
trouble. The government was but nominally representative. No Catholic,
Jew, Dissenter or poor man had a vote or could hold a seat in Parliament.
Industrially and economically the country was in the condition of France
in the year of Arthur Young's journey. The poverty was abject, the relief
futile and the hatred of the poor for the rich was inflammatory.
George III, slipping into feebleness and insanity, yet jealous of his
unconstitutional power, was a vacillating despot, quarrelling with his
Commons and his Ministers. Lord Eldon as Chancellor, but with as nearly the
control of a Premier as the King would allow, was the staunch upholder of
all things that have since been disproved and discarded. Bagehot said of
him that "he believed in everything which it is impossible to believe in."
France and Napoleon threatened across the narrow channel. England still
growled at the loss of her American colonies. It was as yet the England
of the old regime. The great reforms were to come thirty years later--the
Catholic Emancipation, the abolishment of slavery in the colonies, the
suppression of the pocket boroughs, the gross bribery of elections, the
cleaning of the poor laws and the courts of justice.

It was in this dark hour of English history that the writers polished their
brasses and set up as Persons. And if the leading articles that they wrote
of mornings stung and snapped with venom, it is natural that the book
reviews on which they spent their afternoons had also some vinegar in them,
especially if they concerned books written by those of the opposition. And
other writers, even if they had no political connection, borrowed their
manners from those who had. It was the animosities of party politics that
set the general tone. Billingsgate that had grown along the wharves of the
lower river, was found to be of service in Parliament and gave a spice and
sparkle even to a book review. Presently a large part of literary England
wore the tags of political preference. Writers were often as clearly
distinguished as were the ladies in the earlier day, when Addison wrote his
paper on party patches. There were seats of Moral Philosophy to be handed
out, under-secretaryships, consular appointments. It is not enough to say
that Francis Jeffrey was a reviewer, he was as well a Whig and was running
a Review that was Whig from the front cover to the back. Leigh Hunt was not
merely a poet, for he was also a radical, and therefore in the opinions of
Tories, a believer in immorality and indecency. No matter how innocent
a title might appear, it was held in suspicion, on the chance that it
assailed the Ministry or endangered the purity of England. William Gifford
was more than merely the editor of the Quarterly Review, for he was as well
a Tory editor whose duty it was to pry into Whiggish roguery. Lockhart and
Wilson, who wrote in Blackwood's, were Tories tooth and nail, biting and
scratching for party. Nowadays, literature, having found the public to be
its most profitable patron, works hard and even abjectly for its favor.
Although there are defects in the arrangement, it must be confessed that
the divorce of literature from politics contributes to the general peace of
the household.

The Edinburgh Review was founded in 1802, the Quarterly Review in 1809,
Blackwood's Magazine in 1817. These three won distinction among others of
less importance, and from them only I quote. In 1802, when Tory rule was
strongest and Lord Eldon flourished, there was living in Edinburgh a group
of young men who were for the most part briefless barristers. Their case
was worse because they were Whigs. Few cases came their way and no offices.
These young men were Francis Jeffrey, Francis Horner, Henry Brougham, and
there was also Sydney Smith who had just come to Edinburgh from an English
country parish. The eldest was thirty-one, the youngest twenty-three.
Although all of them had brilliant lives before them, not one of them had
made as yet more than a step toward his accomplishment. Sydney Smith had
been but lately an obscure curate, buried in the middle of Salisbury Plain,
away from all contact with the world. Francis Jeffrey had been a hack
writer in London, had studied medicine, had sought unsuccessfully a
government position in India, had written poor sonnets, and was now
lounging with but a scanty occupation in the halls of the law courts.
Francis Horner had just come to the Scottish bar straight from his studies.
Henry Brougham, who in days to come was to be Lord Chancellor of England
and to whose skill in debate the passing of the Great Reform bill of 1832
is partly due, is also just admitted to the practice of the law.

The founding of the Review was casual. These men were accustomed to meet of
an evening for general discussion and speculation. It happened one night as
they sat together--the place was a garret if legend is to be believed--that
Sydney Smith lamented that their discussions came to nothing, for they were
all Whigs, all converted to the cause; whereas if they could only bring
their opinions to the outside public they could stir opinion. From so
slight a root the Review sprouted. Sydney Smith was made editor and kept
the position until after the appearance of the first number, when Jeffrey
succeeded him. The Review became immediately a power, appearing quarterly
and striking its blows anonymously against a sluggish government, lashing
the Tory writers, and taking its part, which is of greater consequence, in
the promulgation of the Whig reforms which were to ripen in thirty years
and convert the old into modern England. In the destruction of outworn
things, it was, as it were, a magazine of Whig explosives.

The Quarterly Review was the next to come and it was Tory. John Murray, the
London publisher, had been the English distributor of the Edinburgh Review.
In 1809, two considerations moved him to found in London a review to rival
the Scotch periodical. First the Tory party was being hard hit by the
Edinburgh Review and there was need of defense and retaliation. In the
second place, John Murray saw that if his publishing house was to flourish,
it must provide this new form of literature that had become so popular.
For the very shortness of the essays and articles, in which extensive
conditions were summarized for quick digestion, had met with English
approval as well as Scotch. People had become accustomed, says Bagehot, of
taking "their literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches on a journey."
Murray appealed to George Canning, then in office, for assistance and was
introduced to William Gifford as a man capable of the undertaking, who
would also meet the favor of the government party. The rise of the
Quarterly Review was not brilliant. It did not fill the craving for
novelty, inasmuch as the Edinburgh was already in the field. Furthermore,
there is not the opportunity in defense for as conspicuous gallantry as in
offensive warfare.

It was eight years before another enduring review was started. William
Blackwood of Edinburgh had grown like Murray from a bookseller to a
publisher, and he, too, looked for a means of increasing his prestige. He
had launched a review the year previously, in 1816, but it had foundered
when it was scarcely off the ways. His second attempt he was determined
must be successful. His new editors were John G. Lockhart and John Wilson,
and the new policy, although nominally Tory, was first and last the
magazine's notoriety. It hawked its wares into public notice by sensational
articles and personal vilification. Wilson was thirty-two and Lockhart
twenty-three, yet they were as mischievous as boys. In their pages is found
the most abominable raving that has ever passed for literary criticism.
They did not need any party hatred to fire them. William Blackwood
welcomed any abuse that took his magazine out of "the calm of respectable
mediocrity." Anything that stung or startled was welcome to a place in its
pages.

So Blackwood's was published and Edinburgh city, we may be sure, set up a
roar of delight and anger. Never before had one's friends been so assailed.
Never before had one's enemies been so grilled. How pleasing for a Tory
fireside was the mud bath with which it defiled Coleridge, who was--and you
had always known it--"little better than a rogue." One's Tory dinner was
the more toothsome for the hot abuse of the Chaldee Manuscript. What stout
Tory, indeed, would doze of an evening on such a sheet! There followed
of course cases of libel. The editors even found it safer, after the
publication of the first number, to retire for a time to the country until
the city cooled.

I choose now to turn to the pages of these three reviews and set out before
you samples of their criticisms, in order that you may contrast them
with our own literary judgments. I warn you in fairness that I have been
disposed to choose the worst, yet there are hundreds of other criticisms
but little better. Of the three reviews, Blackwood's was the least
seriously political in its policy, yet its critical vilifications are the
worst. The Edinburgh Review, the most able of the three and the most in
earnest in politics, is the least vituperative. With this introduction, let
us shake the pepperpot and lay out the strong vinegar of our feast!

In the judgment of the Edinburgh Review, Tom Moore, who had just published
his "Odes and Epistles" but had not yet begun his Irish melodies, is a man
who "with some brilliancy of fancy, and some show of classical erudition
... may boast, if the boast can please him, of being the most licentious of
modern versifiers, and the most poetical of those who, in our times, have
devoted their talents to the propagation of immorality. We regard his book,
indeed, as a public nuisance.... He sits down to ransact the impure places
of his memory for inflammatory images and expressions, and commits them
laboriously in writing, for the purpose of insinuating pollution into the
minds of unknown and unsuspecting readers."

Francis Jeffrey wrote this, and Moore challenged him to fight. The police
interfered, and as Jeffrey put it, "the affair ended amicably. We have
since breakfasted together very lovingly. He has expressed penitence for
what he has written and declared that he will never again apply any little
talents he may possess to such purpose: and I have said that I shall be
happy to praise him whenever I find that he has abjured these objectionable
topics." It was Sydney Smith who said of Jeffrey he would "damn the solar
system--bad light--planets too distant--pestered with comets. Feeble
contrivance--could make a better with great ease."

Jeffrey reviewed Wordsworth and found in the "Lyrical Ballads"
"vulgarity, affectation and silliness." He is alarmed, moreover, lest
his "childishness, conceit and affectation" spread to other authors. He
proposes a poem to be called "Elegiac Stanzas to a Sucking Pig," and of
"Alice Fell" he writes that "if the publishing of such trash as this be
not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be
insulted." When the "White Doe of Rylstone" was published--no prime
favorite, I confess, of my own--Jeffrey wrote that it had the merit of
being the very worst poem he ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume. "It
seems to us," he wrote, "to consist of a happy union of all the faults,
without any of the beauties, which belong to his school of poetry. It is
just such a work, in short, as some wicked enemy of that, school might be
supposed to have devised, on purpose to make it ridiculous."

Lord Byron, on the publication of an early volume, is counselled "that he
do forthwith abandon poetry ... the mere rhyming of the final syllable,
even when accompanied by the presence of a certain number of feet ... is
not the whole art of poetry. We would entreat him to believe," continued
the reviewer, "that a certain portion of liveliness, somewhat of fancy, is
necessary to constitute a poem; and that a poem in the present day, to
be read, must contain at least one thought...." It was this attack that
brought forth Byron's "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."

As long as Jeffrey hoped to enlist Southey to write for the Edinburgh
Review, he treated him with some favor. But Southey took up with the
Quarterly. "The Laureate," says the Edinburgh presently, "has now been
out of song for a long time: But we had comforted ourselves with the
supposition that he was only growing fat and lazy.... The strain, however,
of this publication, and indeed of some that went before it, makes us
apprehensive that a worse thing has befallen him ... that the worthy
inditer of epics is falling gently into dotage."

Now for the Quarterly Review, if by chance it can show an equal spleen!

There lived in the early days of the nineteenth century a woman by the name
of Lady Morgan, who was the author of several novels and books of travel.
Although her record in intelligence and morals is good, John Croker,
who regularly reviewed her books, accuses her works of licentiousness,
profligacy, irreverence, blasphemy, libertinism, disloyalty and atheism.
There are twenty-six pages of this in one review only, and any paragraph
would be worth the quoting for its ferocity. After this attack it was
Macaulay who said he hated Croker like "cold boiled veal."

The Quarterly reviewed Keats' "Endymion," although the writer naively
states at the outset that he has not read the poem. "Not that we have been
wanting in our duty," he writes, "far from it--indeed, we have made efforts
almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it;
but with the fullest stretch of our perseverance we are forced to confess
that we have not been able to struggle beyond the first of the four
books...." Finally he questions whether Keats is the author's name, for
he doubts "that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a
rhapsody."

Leigh Hunt's "Rimini" the Quarterly finds to be an "ungrammatical,
unauthorized, chaotic jargon, such as we believe was never before spoken,
much less written.... We never," concludes the reviewer, "in so few lines
saw so many clear marks of the vulgar impatience of a low man, conscious
and ashamed of his wretched vanity, and labouring, with coarse flippancy,
to scramble over the bounds of birth and education, and fidget himself into
the stout-heartedness of being familiar with a Lord." In a later review,
Hunt is a propounder of atheism. "Henceforth," says the reviewer, "... he
may slander a few more eminent characters, he may go on to deride venerable
and holy institutions, he may stir up more discontent and sedition, but he
will have no peace of mind within ... he will live and die unhonoured
in his own generation, and, for his own sake it is to be hoped, moulder
unknown in those which are to follow."

Hazlitt belongs to a "class of men by whom literature is more than at any
period disgraced." His style is suited for washerwomen, a "class of
females with whom ... he and his friend Mr. Hunt particularly delight to
associate."

Shelley, writes the Quarterly, "is one of that industrious knot of authors,
the tendency of whose works we have in our late Numbers exposed to the
caution of our readers ... for with perfect deliberation and the steadiest
perseverance he perverts all the gifts of his nature, and does all the
injury, both public and private, which his faculties enable him to
perpetrate." His "poetry is in general a mere jumble of words and
heterogeneous ideas." "The Cloud" is "simple nonsense." "Prometheus
Unbound" is a "great storehouse of the obscure and unintelligible." In the
"Sensitive Plant" there is "no meaning." And for Shelley himself, he is
guilty of a great many terrible things, including verbiage, impiety,
immorality and absurdity.

Of Blackwood's Magazine the special victims were Keats and Hunt and
Coleridge. "Mr. Coleridge," says the reviewer, "... seems to believe that
every tongue is wagging in his praise--that every ear is open to imbibe the
oracular breathings of his inspiration ... no sound is so sweet to him as
that of his own voice ... he seems to consider the mighty universe itself
as nothing better than a mirror in which, with a grinning and idiot
self-complacency, he may contemplate the physiognomy of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge.... Yet insignificant as he assuredly is, he cannot put pen to
paper without a feeling that millions of eyes are fixed upon him...."

Leigh Hunt, says Blackwood, "is a man of extravagant pretensions ...
exquisitely bad taste and extremely vulgar modes of thinking." His
"Rimini" "is so wretchedly written that one feels disgust at its pretense,
affectation and gaudiness, ignorance, vulgarity, irreverence, quackery,
glittering and rancid obscenities."

Blackwood's wrote of the "calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy
of Endymion," and elsewhere of Keats' "prurient and vulgar lines, evidently
meant for some young lady east of Temple Bar.... It is a better and a wiser
thing," it commented, "to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so
back to the shop, Mr. John, back to 'plasters, pills and ointment
boxes.'" And even when Shelley wrote his "Adonais" on the death of Keats,
Blackwood's met it with a contemptible parody:

"Weep for my Tom cat! all ye Tabbies weep!"

Perhaps I have quoted enough. This is the parentage of our silken and
flattering criticism.

The pages of these old reviews rest yellow on the shelves. From them there
comes a smell of rotting leather, as though the infection spreads. The hour
grows late. Like the ghost of the elder Hamlet, I detect the morning to be
near.




The Pursuit of Fire


Reader, if by chance you have the habit of writing--whether they be sermons
to hurl across your pews, or sonnets in the Spring--doubtless you have
moments when you sit at your desk bare of thoughts. Mother Hubbard's
cupboard when she went to seek the bone was not more empty. In such plight
you chew your pencil as though it were stuff to feed your brain. Or if you
are of delicate taste, you fall upon your fingers. Or in the hope that
exercise will stir your wits, you pace up and down the room and press your
nose upon the window if perhaps the grocer's boy shall rouse you. Some
persons draw pictures on their pads or put pot-hooks on their letters--for
talent varies--or they roughen up their hair. I knew one gifted fellow
whose shoes presently would cramp him until he kicked them off, when at
once the juices of his intellect would flow. Genius, I am told, sometimes
locks its door and, if unrestrained, peels its outer wrappings. Or, in your
poverty, you run through the pages of a favorite volume, with a notebook
for a sly theft to start you off. In what dejection you have fallen! It is
best that you put on your hat and take your stupid self abroad.

Or maybe you think that your creative fire will blaze, if instead of
throwing in your wet raw thoughts, you feed it a few seasoned bits. You
open, therefore, the drawer of your desk where you keep your rejected and
broken fragments--for your past has not been prosperous--hopeful against
experience that you can recast one of these to your present mood. This
is mournful business. Certain paragraphs that came from you hot are now
patched and shivery. Their finer meaning has run out between the lines as
though these spaces were sluices for the proper drainage of the page. You
had best put on your hat. You will get no comfort from these stale papers.

One evening lately, being in this plight, I spread out before me certain
odds and ends. I had dug deeper than usual in the drawer and had brought up
a yellow stratum of a considerable age. I was poring upon these papers and
was wondering whether I could fit them to a newer measure, when I heard a
slight noise behind me. I glanced around and saw that a man had entered the
room and was now seated in a chair before the fire. In the common nature
of things this should have been startling, for the hour was late--twelve
o'clock had struck across the way--and I had thought that I was quite
alone. But there was something so friendly and easy in his attitude--he
was a young man, little more than a lanky boy--that instead of being
frightened, I swung calmly around for a better look. He sat with his legs
stretched before him and with his chin resting in his hand, as though in
thought. By the light that fell on him from the fire, I saw that he wore a
brown checked suit and that he was clean and respectable in appearance. His
face was in shadow.

"Good evening," I said, "you startled me."

"I am sorry," he replied. "I beg your pardon. I was going by and I saw your
light. I wished to make your acquaintance. But I saw at once that I was
intruding, so I sat here. You were quite absorbed. Would you mind if I
mended the fire?"

Without waiting for an answer, he took the poker and dealt the logs several
blows. It didn't greatly help the flame, but he poked with such enjoyment
that I smiled. I have myself rather a liking for stirring a fire. He set
another log in place. Then he drew from his pocket a handful of dried
orange peel. "I love to see it burn," he said. "It crackles and spits." He
ranged the peel upon the log where the flame would get it, and then settled
himself in the big chair.

"Perhaps you smoke?" I asked, pushing toward him a box of cigarettes.

He smiled. "I thought that you would know my habits. I don't smoke."

"So you were going by and came up to see me?" I asked.

"Yes. I was not sure that I would know you. You are a little older than I
thought, a little--stouter, but dear me, how you have lost your hair! But
you have quite forgotten me."

"My dear boy," I said, "you have the advantage of me. Where have I seen
you? There is something familiar about you and I am sure that I have seen
that brown suit before."

"We have never really known each other," the boy replied. "We met once, but
only for an instant. But I have thought of you since that meeting a great
many times. I lay this afternoon on a hilltop and wondered what you would
be like. But I hoped that sometimes you would think of me. Perhaps you have
forgotten that I used to collect railway maps and time-tables."

"Did you?" I replied. "So did I when I was a little younger than you are.
Perhaps if I might see your face, I would know you."

"It's nothing for show," he replied, and he kept it still in shadow. "Would
you mind," he said at length, "if I ate an apple?" He took one from his
pocket and broke it in his hands. "You eat half," he said.

I accepted the part he offered me. "Perhaps you would like a knife and
plate," I said. "I can find them in the pantry."

"Not for me," he replied. "I prefer to eat mine this way." He took an
enveloping bite.

"I myself care nothing for plates," I said. We ate in silence. Presently:
"You have my habit," I said, "of eating everything, skin, seeds and all."

"Everything but the stem," he replied.

By this time the orange peel was hissing and exploding.

"You are an odd boy," I said. "I used to put orange peel away to dry in
order to burn it. We seem to be as like as two peas."

"I wonder," he said, "if that is so." He turned in his chair and faced me,
although his face was still in shadow. "Doubtless, we are far different in
many things. Do you swallow grape seeds?"

"Hardly!" I cried. "I spit them out."

"I am glad of that." He paused. "It was a breezy hilltop where I lay. I
thought of you all afternoon. You are famous, of course?"

"Dear me, no!"

"Oh, I'm so sorry. I had hoped you might be. I had counted on it. It is
very disappointing. I was thinking about that as I lay on the hill. But
aren't you just on the point of doing something that will make you famous?"

"By no means."

"Dear me, I am so sorry. Do you happen to be married?"

"Yes."

"And would you mind telling me her name?"

I obliged him.

"I don't remember to have heard of her. I didn't think of that name once
as I lay upon the hill. Things don't turn out as one might expect. Now, I
would have thought--but it's no matter."

For a moment or so he was lost in thought, and then he spoke again: "You
were writing when I came into the room?"

"Nothing important."

The boy ran his fingers in his hair and threw out his arms impatiently.
"That's what I would like to do. I am in college, and I try for one of the
papers. But my stuff comes back. But this summer in the vacation, I am
working in an office. I run errands and when there is nothing else to do, I
study a big invoice book, so as to get the names of things that are bought.
There is a racket of drays and wagons outside the windows, and along in
the middle of the afternoon I get tired and thick in my head. But I write
Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings."

The boy stopped and fixed his eyes on me. "I don't suppose that you happen
to be a poet?"

"Not at all," I replied. "But perhaps you are one. Tell me about it!"

The boy took a turn at the fire with the poker, but it was chiefly in
embarrassment. Presently he returned to his chair. He stretched his long
arms upward above his head.

"No, I'm not," he said. "And yet sometimes I think that I have a kind of
poetry in me. Only I can't get it into words. I lay thinking about that,
too, on the hillside. There was a wind above my head, and I thought that I
could almost put words to the tune. But I have never written a single poem.
Yet, goodness me, what thoughts I have! But they aren't real thoughts--what
you would regularly call thoughts. Things go racing and tingling in my
head, but I can never get them down. They are just feelings."

As he spoke, the boy gazed intently through the chimney bricks out into
another world. The fireplace was its portal and he seemed to wait for the
fires to cool before entering into its possession. It was several moments
before he spoke again.

"I don't want you to think me ridiculous, but so few understand. If only I
could master the tools! Perhaps my thoughts are old, but they come to me
with such freshness and they are so unexpected. Could I only solve the
frets and spaces inside me here, I could play what tune I chose. But my
feelings are cold and stale before I can get them into thoughts. I have no
doubt, however, that they are just as real as those other feelings that in
time, after much scratching, get into final form and become poetry. I
know of course that a man's reach should exceed his grasp--it's hackneyed
enough--but just for once I would like to pull down something when I have
been up on tiptoe for a while.

"Sometimes I get an impression of pity--a glance up a dark hallway--an old
woman with a shawl upon her head--a white face at a window--a blind fiddler
in the street--but the impression is gone in a moment. Or a touch of beauty
gets me. It may be nothing but a street organ in the spring. Perhaps you
like street organs, too?"

"I do, indeed!" I cried. "There was one today outside my window and my feet
kept wiggling to it."

The boy clapped his hands. "I knew that you would be like that. I hoped for
it on the hill. As for me, when I hear one, I'm so glad that I could cry
out. In its lilt there is the rhythm of life. It moves me more than a
hillside with its earliest flowers. Am I absurd? It is equal to the pipe of
birds, to shallow waters and the sound of wind to stir me to thoughts of
April. Today as I came downtown, I saw several merry fellows dancing on
the curb. There are tunes, too, upon the piano that send me off. I play a
little myself. I see you have a piano. Do you still play?"

"A little, rather sadly," I replied.

"That's too bad, but perhaps you sing?"

"Even worse."

"Dear me, that's too bad. I have rather a voice myself. Well, as I was
saying, when I hear those tunes, I curl up with the smoke and blow forth
from the chimney. If I walk upon the street when the wind is up, and see a
light fleece of smoke coming from a chimney top, I think that down below
someone is listening to music that he likes, and that his thoughts ride
upon the night, like those white streamers of smoke. And then I think of
castles and mountains and high places and the sounds of storm. Or in fancy
I see a tower that tapers to the moon with a silver gleam upon it."

The strange boy lay back and laughed. "Musicians think that they are the
only ones that can hear the finer sounds. If one of us common fellows cocks
his ear, they think that only the coarser thumps get inside. And artists
think that they alone know the glory of color. I was thinking of that, this
afternoon. And yet I have walked under the blue sky. I have seen twilights
that these men of paint would botch on canvas. But both musicians and
artists have a vision that is greater than their product. The soul of a man
can hardly be recorded in black and white keys. Nor can a little pigment
which you rub upon your thumb be the measure of an artist. So I suppose
that is the way also with poets. It is not to be expected that they can
express themselves fully in words that they have borrowed from the kitchen.
When their genius flames up, it is only the lesser sparks that fall upon
their writing pads. It consoles me that a man should be greater than his
achievement. I who have done so little would otherwise be so forlorn."

"It's odd," I said, when he had fallen into silence, "that I used to feel
exactly as you do. It stirs an old recollection. If I am not mistaken, I
once wrote a paper on the subject."

The boy smiled dreamily. "But if small persons like myself," he began, "can
have such frenzies, how must it be with those greater persons who have
amazed the world? I have wondered in what kind of exaltation Shakespeare
wrote his storm in 'Lear.' There must have been a first conception greater
even than his accomplishment. Did he look from his windows at a winter
tempest and see miserable old men and women running hard for shelter? Did
a flash of lightning bare his soul to the misery, the betrayal and the
madness of the world? His supreme moment was not when he flung the
completed manuscript aside, or when he heard the actors mouth his lines,
but in the flash and throb of creation--in the moment when he knew that he
had the power in him to write 'Lear.' What we read is the cold forging,
wonderful and enduring, but not to be compared to the producing furnace."

The boy had spoken so fast that he was out of breath.

"Hold a bit!" I cried. "What you have said sounds familiar. Where could I
have heard it before?"

There was something almost like a sneer on the boy's face. "What a memory
you have! And perhaps you recall this brown suit, too. It's ugly enough to
be remembered. Now please let me finish what came to me this afternoon on
the hill! Prometheus," he continued, "scaled the heavens and brought back
fire to mortals. And he, as the story goes, clutched at a lightning bolt
and caught but a spark. And even that, glorious. Mankind properly accredits
him with a marvellous achievement. It is for this reason that I comfort
myself although I have not yet written a single line of verse."

"My dear fellow," I said, "please tell me where I have read something like
what you have spoken?"

The boy's answer was irrelevant. "You first tell me what you did with a
brown checked suit you once owned."

"I never owned but one brown suit," I replied, "and that was when I was
still in college. I think that I gave it away before it was worn out."

The boy once more clapped his hands. "Oh, I knew it, I knew it. I'll give
mine tomorrow to the man who takes our ashes. Now, won't you please play
the piano for me?"

"Assuredly. Choose your tune!"

He fumbled a bit in the rack and passing some rather good music, he held up
a torn and yellow sheet. "This is what I want," he said.

I had not played it for many years. After a false start or so--for it was
villainously set in four sharps for which I have an aversion--I got through
it. On a second trial I did better.

The boy made no comment. He had sunk down in his chair until he was quite
out of sight. "Well," I said, "what next?"

There was no answer.

I arose from the bench and glanced in his direction. "Hello," I cried,
"what has become of you?"

The chair was empty. I turned on all the lights. He was nowhere in sight. I
shook the hangings. I looked under my desk, for perhaps the lad was hiding
from me in jest. It was unlikely that he could have passed me to gain the
door, but I listened at the sill for any sound upon the stairs. The hall
was silent. I called without response. Somewhat bewildered I came back to
the hearth. Only a few minutes before, as it seemed, there had been a brisk
fire with a row of orange peel upon the upper log. Now all trace of the
peel was gone and the logs had fallen to a white ash.

I was standing perplexed, when I observed that a little pile of papers lay
on the rug just off the end of my desk as by a careless elbow. At least,
I thought, this impolite fellow has forgotten some of his possessions. It
will serve him right if it is poetry that he wrote upon the hilltop.

I picked up the papers. They were yellow and soiled, and writing was
scrawled upon them. At the top was a date--but it was twenty years old.
I turned to the last sheet. At least I could learn the boy's name. To my
amazement, I saw at the bottom in an old but familiar writing, not the
boy's name, but my own.

I gazed at the chimney bricks and their substance seemed to part before my
eyes. I looked into a world beyond--a fabric of moonlight and hilltop and
the hot fret of youth. Perhaps the boy had only been waiting for the fire
upon the hearth to cool to enter this other world of his restless ambition
and desire.

Reader, if by chance you have the habit of writing--let us confine
ourselves now to sonnets and such airy matter as rides upon the
night--doubtless, you sit sometimes at your desk bare of thoughts. The
juices of your intellect are parched and dry. In such plight, I beg you
not to fall upon your fingers or to draw pictures on your sheet. But most
vehemently, and with such emphasis as I possess, I beg you not to rummage
among your rejected and broken fragments in the hope of recasting a
withered thought to a present mood. Rather, before you sour and curdle,
it is good to put on your hat and take your stupid self abroad.






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