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Title:      Short Circuits (1938)
Author:     Stephen Leacock
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
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Language:   English
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Date first posted:          October 2003
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Short Circuits (1938)
Author:     Stephen Leacock






CONTENTS


I.  SHORT CIRCUITS IN THE SOCIAL CURRENT

Old Junk and New Money

"Speaking of India--"

How to Borrow Money

Life's Minor Contradictions

A Great Life in Our Midst

The Perfect Gift

Scenery and Signboards

The Life of John Mutation Smith

Inference as an Art

Our Get-Together Movement


II.  SHORT CIRCUITS IN THE OPEN AIR

A Lesson on the Links

The Family at Football

Life in the Open


III.  SAVE ME FROM MY FRIENDS

From My Friend the Deadbeat

From My Friend the Reporter

From My Friend with a Speech to Make

From My Friend the Guide


IV.  PEOPLE WE KNOW

The Man in the Pullman Car

The Criminal by Proxy

The People Just Back from Europe

The Man with the Adventure Story


V.  SHORT CIRCUITS IN EDUCATION

A Year at College

The Unintelligence Test

Easy Ways to Success

Fun as an Aid to Business

The Stamp-Album World


VI.  SHORT CIRCUITS BY RADIO AND CINEMA

If Only We Had the Radio Sooner

What the Radio Overheard

One Crowded Quarter Second

Done into Movies


VII.  SHORT CIRCUITS IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Things I Hardly Dare Whisper

Hands Across the Seas

If They Go on Swimming

If Mussolini Comes

This World-Championship Stuff

Get off the Earth


VIII.  BYGONE CURRENTS

The Lost World of Yesterday

Come Back to School

The Fall Fair and the Autumn Exposition

Extinct Monsters

The Passing of the Back Yard


IX.  SHORT CIRCUITS IN CURRENT LITERATURE

The Literary Sensations of 1929

Children's Poetry Revised

Illustrations I Can Do Without

Our Summer Pets

The Old Men's Page

A Guide to the Underworld

Love Me, Love My Letters

With the Authorities

Literature and the Eighteenth Amendment

The Hunt for a Heroine

Bedtime Stories for Grown-up People

Softening the Stories for the Children

The Great Detective


X.  THE EPILOGUE OF THIS BOOK: AN ELEGY NEAR A CITY FREIGHT YARD





SHORT CIRCUITS IN THE SOCIAL CURRENT



Old Junk and New Money


A LITTLE STUDY IN THE LATEST ANTIQUES


I went the other day into the beautiful home of my two good
friends, the Hespeler-Hyphen-Joneses, and I paused a moment, as my
eye fell on the tall clock that stood in the hall.

"Ah," said Hespeler-Hyphen-Jones, "I see you are looking at the
clock--a beautiful thing, isn't it?--a genuine antique."

"Does it go?" I asked.

"Good gracious, no!" exclaimed my two friends.  "But isn't it a
beautiful thing!"

"Did it ever go?"

"I doubt it," said Hespeler-Hyphen-Jones.  "The works, of course,
are by Salvolatile--one of the really GREAT clockmakers, you know.
But I don't know whether the works ever went.  That, I believe, is
one way in which you can always tell a Salvolatile.  If it's a
genuine Salvolatile, it won't go."

"In any case," I said, "it has no hands."

"Oh, dear, no," said Mrs. Jones.  "It never had, as far as we know.
We picked it up in such a queer little shop in Amalfi and the man
assured us that it never had had any hands.  He guaranteed it.
That's one of the things, you know, that you can tell by.  Charles
and I were terribly keen about clocks at that time and really
studied them, and the books all agreed that no genuine Salvolatile
has any hands."

"And was the side broken, too, when you got it," I asked.

"Ah, no," said my friend.  "We had that done by an expert in New
York after we got back.  Isn't it exquisitely done?  You see, he
has made the break to look exactly as if some one had rolled the
clock over and stamped on it.  Every genuine Salvolatile is said to
have been stamped upon like that.

"Of course, our break is only imitation, but it's extremely well
done, isn't it?  We go to Ferrugi's, that little place on Fourth
Avenue, you know, for everything that we want broken.  They have a
splendid man there.  He can break anything."

"Really!" I said.

"Yes, and the day when we wanted the clock done, Charles and I went
down to see him do it.  It was really quite wonderful, wasn't it,
Charles?"

"Yes, indeed.  The man laid the clock on the floor and turned it on
its side and then stood looking at it intently, and walking round
and round it and murmuring in Italian as if he were swearing at it.
Then he jumped in the air and came down on it with both feet."

"Did he?" I asked.

"Yes, and with such wonderful accuracy.  Our friend Mr. Appin-
Hyphen-Smith--the great expert, you know--was looking at our clock
last week and he said it was marvelous, hardly to be distinguished
from a genuine fractura."

"But he did say, didn't he, dear," said Mrs. Jones, "that the
better way is to throw a clock out of a fourth story window?  You
see, that was the height of the Italian houses in the Thirteenth
Century--is it the Thirteenth Century I mean, Charles?"

"Yes," said Charles.

"Do you know, the other day I made the silliest mistake about a
spoon.  I thought it was a Twelfth Century spoon and said so and in
reality it was only Eleven and a half.  Wasn't it, Charles?"

"Yes," said Charles.

"But do come into the drawing room and have some tea.  And, by the
way, since you are interested in antiques, do look please at my
teapot."

"It looks an excellent teapot," I said, feeling it with my hand,
"and it must have been very expensive, wasn't it?"

"Oh, not THAT one," interposed Mr. Hespeler-Hyphen-Jones.  "That is
nothing.  We got that here in New York at Hoffany's--to make tea
in.  It IS made of solid silver, of course, and all that, but even
Hoffany's admitted that it was made in America and was probably not
more than a year or so old and had never been used by anybody else.
In fact, they couldn't guarantee it in any way."

"Oh, I see," I said.

"But let me pour you out tea from it and then do look at the
perfect darling beside it.  Oh, don't touch it, please, it won't
stand up."

"Won't stand up?" I said.

"No," said Hespeler-Jones, "that's one of the tests.  We know from
that that it is genuine Swaatsmaacher.  None of them stand up."

"Where did you buy it?" I asked, "here?"

"Oh, heavens, no, you couldn't buy a thing like that here!  As a
matter of fact, we picked it up in a little gin shop in
Obehellandam in Holland.  Do you know Obehellandam?"

"I don't," I said.

"It's just the dearest little place, nothing but little wee smelly
shops filled with most delightful things--all antique, everything
broken.  They guarantee that there is nothing in the shop that
wasn't smashed at least a hundred years ago."

"You don't use the teapot to make tea," I said.

"Oh, no," said Mrs. Hespeler-Jones as she handed me a cup of tea
from the New York teapot.  "I don't think you could.  It leaks."

"That again is a thing," said her husband, "that the experts always
look for in a Swaatsmaacher.  If it doesn't leak, it's probably
just a faked-up thing not twenty years old."

"Is it silver?" I asked.

"Ah, no.  That's another test," said Mrs. Jones.  "The real
Swaatsmaachers were always made of pewter bound with barrel-iron
off the gin barrels.  They try to imitate it now by using silver,
but they can't get it."

"No, the silver won't take the tarnish," interjected her husband.
"You see, it's the same way with ever so many of the old things.
They rust and rot in a way that you simply cannot imitate.  I have
an old drinking horn that I'll show you presently--Ninth Century,
isn't it, dear?--that is all coated inside with the most beautiful
green slime, absolutely impossible to reproduce."

"Is it?" I said.

"Yes, I took it to Squeeziou's, the Italian place in London.  (They
are the great experts on horns, you know; they can tell exactly the
country and the breed of cow.)  And they told me that they had
tried in vain to reproduce that peculiar and beautiful rot.  One of
their head men said that he thought that this horn had probably
been taken from a dead cow that had been buried for fifty years.
That's what gives it its value, you know."

"You didn't buy it in London, did you?" I asked.

"Oh, no," answered Hespeler-Jones.  "London is perfectly
impossible--just as hopeless as New York.  You can't buy anything
real there at all."

"Then where do you get all your things?" I asked, as I looked round
at the collection of junk in the room.

"Oh, we pick them up here and there," said Mrs. Jones.  "Just in
any out-of-the-way corners.  That little stool we found at the back
of a cow stable in Loch Aberlocherty.  They were actually using it
for milking.  And the two others--aren't they beautiful? though
really it's quite wrong to have two chairs alike in the same room--
came from the back of a tiny little whiskey shop in Galway.  Such a
delight of an old Irishman sold them to us and he admitted that he
himself had no idea how old they were.  They might, he said, be
Fifteenth Century, or they might not.

"But, oh, Charles," my hostess interrupted herself to say, "I've
just had a letter from Jane (Jane is my sister, you know) that is
terribly exciting.  She's found a table at a tiny place in Brittany
that she thinks would exactly do in our card room.  She says that
its utterly unlike anything else in the room and has quite
obviously no connection with cards.  But let me read what she says--
let me see, yes, here's where it begins:

"'. . . a perfectly sweet little table.  It probably had four legs
originally and even now has two which, I am told, is a great find,
as most people have to be content with one.  The man explained that
it could either be leaned up against the wall or else suspended
from the ceiling on a silver chain.  One of the boards of the top
is gone, but I am told that that is of no consequence, as all the
best specimens of Brittany tables have at least one board out.'

"Doesn't that sound fascinating, Charles?  Do send Jane a cable at
once not to miss it."

                              *****

And when I took my leave a little later, I realized once and for
all that the antique business is not for me.




"Speaking of India--"


WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR HUSBAND TELLS IN COMPANY HIS SAME OLD STORY


I was at a dinner party the other night at which one of the guests,
as guests generally do, began to tell an old story of his, already
known to us all.

"What you say of India," he said, "reminds me of a rather
remarkable experience of mine in California--"

"Oh, James," interrupted his wife, "please don't tell that old
story over again."

The narrator, a modest man, blushed and came to a stop.  There was
a painful silence which lasted for some moments.  Then somebody
said, "Speaking of Mayor Thompson of Chicago--" and the party went
on again.

                              *****

But the incident left behind it a problem in my mind.  Should a
wife, or should a wife not, interrupt her husband to stop him
telling one of his wearisome old stories. . . .

If the husband could speak (most husbands are inarticulate) he
could certainly put up a good defense.  He could say:

"My dear Martha, you think this is an old story.  But if you knew
some of the ones that will be told by the other men if I don't tell
this, you'd think it brand new.  You think the story wearisome for
YOU.  But their wives think their stories wearisome for THEM.  All
the stories we are all going to tell tonight are old.  Of course
they are.  What do you think we are,--Shakespeare?  We can't sit
here and make up NEW stories.  If we could, we'd black our faces,
call ourselves coons and draw a hundred dollars a night in a New
York Revue.

"Moreover--listen to this as a second point.  An old story has
certain great advantages over a new one.  There's no strain in
listening to it.  You know just when it is all coming, and you can
slip in an extra oyster and bite off an extra piece of celery in
between the sentences, take a drink of dry ginger ale and be all
set for the big laugh at the end.

"And get this also--if you don't have stories at a dinner table
somebody will start Statistics.  And Statistics are worse than
stories in the ratio of eight to one.  There is, you must remember,
a certain type of man, who goes round filling himself up with
facts.  He knows how many miles of railway track there are in the
United States and the number of illiterates in Oklahoma.  At any
dinner party this man may be there: if he is, conversation turns
into a lecture.  Worse still there may be two of these men.  If
there are, conversation becomes an argument."

                              *****

Now, this is the worst of all.  Argument at a dinner party ruins
the whole evening for everybody.  One man says something,--let us
say,--about the Civil War,--and some one else contradicts him.--
"You'll pardon ME--" he says, and they're off.  They start
politely.  In two minutes they are speaking with warmth.  In four
minutes they hate one another worse than hell.  First they ask
themselves to pardon one another.  Then they begin referring one
another to books.--"Pardon me," says one, "if you consult any
history of the war, you'll see that Lincoln NEVER meant to set free
the slaves."--"Excuse me," says the other, "if you consult any
biography of Lincoln you'll see that he DID. . . ."

Now you notice that this point about Abraham Lincoln can't be
settled without at least a year's work in a library--and not even
then.

So the argument gets warmer.  The opponents refer one another to
books, then they tell one another to go to Washington and hunt it
up for themselves.  Finally they tell one another to go to hell.

Meantime there is a maid behind one of them trying to give him a
creamed celery out of a dish which he keeps knocking over, and a
maid pouring hot asparagus with drawn butter over the other one's
shirt front.

And the dinner party is a failure.  Those two men will carry their
quarrel right on after the men are left alone; they'll fetch it up
to the library, they'll keep it all through bridge and take it home
with them.

Think how much softer and easier if some one had said, "Talking
about California, reminds me of an episode in India." . . .  How
quietly the asparagus would have circulated then.

                              *****

And there is more to it than that.  There is, it seems to me, a
sort of humble pathos surrounding the gentle story teller wanting
to get his little anecdote in, and generally having to try several
times for an opening.

He begins among the oysters.

"Speaking of India--" he says.  But a wave of general conversation
washes over him.

Somewhere in the middle of the fish, there is a lull in the talk
and again he says,--"Speaking of India--"  "Now you really MUST
have some of that fish," interrupts his hostess.  And a burst of
talk about fish blows his topic into nothingness.  He tries next at
the roast.  "Speaking of India--" he says, and a maid drops gravy
over him.

And at last, at the happy last, he gets a real chance.--"Speaking
of India," he says, and then his wife breaks in with "Oh! James!"

                              *****

Madam, do you think it's fair?  It is, of course, a great trial for
a brilliant woman like you to have to drag around a husband like
him.  Of course he's a dud.  You ought really to have married
either Bernard Shaw or Mussolini.

But you didn't.  You just married an ordinary plain man like the
rest of us, with no particular aspirations to be a humorist, or a
raconteur, or a diseuse, or anything of the sort: anxious just to
take some little part in the talk about him.

So, next time, when he begins "Speaking of India--" won't you let
us hear what it was that happened there?




How to Borrow Money


THE PROCESS IS QUITE EASY, PROVIDED YOU BORROW ENOUGH


Have you ever, dear readers, had occasion to borrow money?  Have
you ever borrowed ten dollars under a rigorous promise of your word
of honor as a Christian to pay it back on your next salary day?
Have you ever borrowed as much as a million at a time?

If you have done these things, you cannot have failed to notice how
much easier it is to borrow ten thousand dollars than ten, how much
easier still to borrow a hundred thousand, and that when you come
at last to raising an international loan of a hundred million the
thing loses all difficulty.

Here below are the little scenes that take place on the occasion of
an ascending series of loans.


TABLEAU NO. I

The Scene in Which Hardup Jones Borrows Ten Dollars Till the First
of Next Month from His Friend, Canny Smith


"Say, look here, old man, I was wondering whether perhaps you
wouldn't mind letting me have ten dollars till the end of the
month--"

"Ten dollars!"

"Oh, I could give it back all right, for dead sure, just the minute
I get my salary."

"Ten dollars!!!"

"You see, I've got into an awful tangle--I owe seven and a half on
my board, and she said yesterday she'd have to have it.  And I
couldn't pay my laundry last week, so he said he wouldn't leave it,
and I got this cursed suit on the installment plan and they said
they'd seize my trunk, and--"

"Say, but Gol darn it, I lent you five dollars, don't you remember,
last November, and you swore you'd pay it back on the first and I
never got it till away after New Year's--"

"I know, I know.  But this is absolutely sure.  So help me, I'll
pay it right on the first, the minute I get my check."

"Yes, but you won't--"

"No, I swear I will--"

And after about half an hour of expostulations and protests of this
sort, having pledged his soul, his body, and his honor, the
borrower at last gets his ten dollars.


TABLEAU NO. II

The Scene in Which Mr. McDuff of the McDuff Hardware Store in
Central City (pop. 3,862) Borrows $1,000 from the Local Bank


The second degree in borrowing is represented by this scene in
which Mr. John McDuff, of McDuff Bros. Hardware Store (Everything
in Hardware), calls on the local bank manager with a view to
getting $1,000 to carry the business forward for one month till the
farmers' spring payments begin to come in.

Mr. McDuff is told by one of the (two) juniors in the bank to wait--
the manager is engaged for the moment.

The manager in reality is in his inner office, sorting out trout
flies.  But he knows what McDuff wants and he means to make him
wait for it and suffer for it.

When at last McDuff does get in, the manager is very cold and
formal.

"Sit down, Mr. McDuff," he says.  When they go fishing together,
the manager always calls McDuff "John."  But this is different.
McDuff is here to borrow money.  And borrowing money in Central
City is a criminal act.

"I came in about that loan," says McDuff.

The manager looks into a ledger.

"You're overdrawn seventeen dollars right now," he says.

"I know, but I'll be getting my accounts in any time after the
first."

Then follows a string of severe questions.  What are McDuff's daily
receipts?  What is his overhead?  What is his underfoot?  Is he a
church-goer?  Does he believe in a future life?

And at last even when the manager finally consents to lend the
thousand dollars (he always meant to do it), he begins tagging on
conditions:

"You'll have to get your partner to sign."

"All right."

"And you'd better get your wife to sign."

"All right."

"And your mother, she might as well sign too--"

There are more signatures on a country bank note for one month than
on a Locarno treaty.

And at last McDuff, of Everything in Hardware, having pledged his
receipts, his premises, his credit, his honor, his wife, and his
mother--gets away with the thousand dollars.


TABLEAU NO. III

How Mr. P. O. Pingpoint, of the Great Financial House of Pingpoint,
Pingpong and Company, New York and London, Borrows a Million
Dollars before Lunch


Here the scene is laid in a fitting setting.  Mr. Pingpoint is
shown into the sumptuous head office of the president of the First
National Bank.

"Ah, good morning," says the president as he rises to greet Mr.
Pingpoint, "I was expecting you.  Our general manager told me that
you were going to be good enough to call in.  Won't you take this
larger chair?--you'll find it easier."

"Ah, thank you.  You're very comfortable here."

"Yes, we rather think this a pleasant room.  And our board room, we
think, is even better.  Won't you let me show you our board room?"

"Oh, thanks, I'm afraid I hardly have the time.  I just came in for
a minute to complete our loan of a million dollars."

"Yes, our executive Vice-President said that you are good enough to
come to us.  It is very kind of you, I'm sure."

"Oh, not at all."

"And you are quite sure that a million is all that you care to
take?  We shall be delighted, you know, if you will take a million
and a half."

"Oh, scarcely.  A million, I think, will be ample just now; we can
come back, of course, if we want more."

"Oh, certainly, certainly."

"And do you want us to give any security, or anything of that
sort?"

"Oh, no, quite unnecessary."

"And is there anything you want me to sign while I am here?"

"Oh, no, nothing, the clerks will attend to all that."

"Well, thanks, then, I needn't keep you any longer."

"But won't you let me drive you up town?  My car is just outside.
Or, better still, if you are free, won't you come and eat some
lunch with me at the club?"

"Well, thanks, yes, you're really extremely kind."

And with this, quite painlessly and easily, the million dollars has
changed hands.

But even that is not the last degree.  Eclipsing that sort of
thing, both in case and in splendor, is the international loan, as
seen in--


TABLEAU NO. IV

The Scenes Which Accompany the Flotation of an Anglo-French Loan in
the American Market, of a Hundred Million Dollars, by the Right
Hon. Samuel Rothstein of England and the Vicomte Baton Rouge de
Chauve Souris of France


This occurrence is best followed as it appears in its triumphant
progress in the American press.

NEW YORK, Friday--An enthusiastic reception was given yesterday to
the Right Hon. Mr. Samuel Rothstein, of the British Cabinet, and to
the Vicomte de Chauve Souris, French plenipotentiary, on their
landing from the Stacquitania.  It is understood that they will
borrow $100,000,000.  The distinguished visitors expect to stay
only a few days.

NEW YORK, Saturday--An elaborate reception was given last evening
in the home of Mrs. Bildermont to the Right Hon. Samuel Rothstein
and the Baron de Chauve Souris.  It is understood that they are
borrowing a hundred million dollars.

NEW YORK, Monday--The Baron de Chauve Souris and the Right Hon.
Samuel Rothstein were notable figures in the Fifth Avenue church
parade yesterday.  It is understood that they will borrow a hundred
million dollars.

NEW YORK, Tuesday--The Baron de Chauve Souris and the Right Hon.
Samuel Rothstein attended a baseball game at the Polo Grounds.  It
is understood that they will borrow a hundred million dollars.

NEW YORK, Wednesday--At a ball given by Mr. and Mrs. Ashcoop-
Vandermore for the distinguished English and French pleni-
potentiaries, Mr. Samuel Rothstein and the Baron de Chauve
Souris, it was definitely stated that the loan which they are
financing will be limited to a hundred million dollars.

NEW YORK (Wall Street), Thursday--The loan of $100,000,000 was
subscribed this morning at eleven o'clock in five minutes.  The
Right Hon. Mr. Rothstein and the Baron Baton Rouge de Chauve Souris
left America at twelve noon, taking the money with them.  Both
plenipotentiaries expressed their delight with America.

"It is," said the Baron--"how do you call it?--a cinch."


EPILOGUE


And yet, six months later, what happened?  Who paid and who didn't?

Hardup Jones paid $5.40 within a month, $3.00 the next month and
the remaining one dollar and sixty cents two weeks later.

McDuff Bros. met their note and went fishing with the manager like
old friends.

The Pingpoint Syndicate blew up and failed for ten million dollars.

And the international loan got mixed up with a lot of others, was
funded, equated, spread out over fifty years, capitalized, funded
again--in short, it passed beyond all recognition.

And the moral is, when you borrow, borrow a whole lot.




Life's Minor Contradictions


THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THINGS AS THEY ARE AND AS THEY SEEM


Isn't it funny how different people and things are when you know
them from what you think they are when you don't know them?

For instance, everybody knows how much all distinguished people
differ in their private lives from what they appear to the public.
We all get used to being told in the papers such things as that in
his PRIVATE life Signor Mussolini is the very gentlest of men,
spending his time by preference among children and dolls; that in
his PRIVATE life Dean Inge, the "gloomy Dean" of St. Paul's
Cathedral, is hilariously merry; and that Mr. Chesterton, fat
though he appears in public, is in private life quite thin.

I myself had the pleasure not long ago of meeting the famous Mr.
Sandpile, at that time reputed to be the most powerful man in
America, and giving public exhibitions of muscular strength of a
most amazing character.  I was surprised to find that in his
private life Sandpile was not a strong man at all, but quite
feeble.  "Would you mind," he said to me, "handing me that jug?
It's too heavy for me to lift."

In the same way, I recall on one occasion walking down a street in
an English seaport town late one night with Admiral Beatty--I think
it was Admiral Beatty, either Beatty or Jellicoe.  "Would you
mind," he said, "letting me walk behind you?  I'm afraid of the
dark."  "You mean of course," I said, "only in your private life."
"Certainly," he answered.  "I don't mind it a damn in daylight."

Few people know that Mr. Henry Ford cannot drive a motor car, that
Mr. Rockefeller never has any money, and that Thomas Edison has
never been able to knit.

But lately I have been noticing that these contradictions extend
also to institutions and things in general.  Take for instance, a
circus.  In past generations it was supposed by many of the best
supposers that circus people were about as tough an "aggregation"
as it was possible to aggredge.  But not at all.  Quite the other
way.

Not long ago a circus came to our town and I had the pleasure of
spending some time with one of the clowns--he was studying for a
Ph.D. in private life--and of getting a good deal of information
from him as to what a modern circus is like when seen from the
inside.

I expressed my astonishment that he should be a clown and also a
Philosophy student.  "Not at all," he said, "there's nothing
unusual about that.  As a matter of fact, four of our clowns are in
philosophy, and the ringmaster himself is studying pal�ontology,
though he is still some distance from it.  Nearly all our clowns
are college men: they seem specially fitted for it somehow.

"And most of our trapeze ladies are college girls.  You can tell a
college girl on a trapeze at any time.  You must come over and see
us," he added, "we are having a little sort of gathering on Sunday
afternoon--one of our Fortnightly Teas.  We generally have a little
reading and discussions.  We take up some author or period and some
one reads a paper on it.  This afternoon we are to discuss the
Italian Renaissance and the bandmaster is to deal with Benvenuto
Cellini.

"We have a welfare Society, and a Luncheon Club, and our Big Sister
Movement.  As to drunkenness," he added, "the other day some one
brought in a bottle of Ontario four per cent beer and our manager
was terribly distressed about it.  He gave it to the kangaroo."

It seems impossible to doubt the truth of his words, especially
when we corroborate them with similar disclosures about other
institutions.

Take, for example, some information which I recently received in
regard to cowboys from a man who had just made a tour in the West.

"You are quite mistaken," he told me, "in imagining that the
western cowboy is the kind of 'bad man,' all dressed up in leather
fringes, that you read about in the half-dime novels.  As a matter
of fact, most of the cowboys nowadays are college men.  There seems
to be something in a college training which fits a man for cattle.

"They are principally law students.  Few of the cowboys of today
undertake to ride, for of course they don't need to.  They mostly
use cars in going after the cattle, and many of them, for that
matter, can't drive a car.  They have chauffeurs.  And in any case,
the cattle of today are very quiet and seldom move faster than a
walk or a run.

"The cowboy has naturally long since discarded his peculiar dress
and wears just a plain lounge suit with a thin duster and motor
goggles.  Of course, they change for dinner at night, especially
when invited out to dine with the Indians, or at one of the section
men's clubs beside the railway track.  But you ought to go out and
see them for yourself."

I admitted that I ought.

Meantime I notice the same kind of contradiction in another set of
institutions, but this time turned the other way around.  I'll give
as an example of it the newspaper account of the entertainment (it
is an annual affair) that was given in our town the other night
under the auspices of the Girls' Uplift Society in aid of the
Rescue Fund for Sunken Delinquents.

"The Revue put on last week by the Girls' Uplift Society in the
Basement of the Seventh Avenue Social Center certainly outclassed
any of the previous performances of the Society.  The chorus
dancing of the Rescue Squad was pronounced worthy of the Midnight
Follies of the metropolis itself, and the pastor in his remarks
spoke especially of the trapeze work of the Mothers' Aid.

"The pastor drew attention, however, to the fact that this year
more than ever there had been complaints about the young ladies
bringing flasks to their dressing rooms.  He himself--he admitted
it reluctantly--had not seen any of these flasks and could not
speak of the contents.  But the janitor had picked up twenty-six.
He himself, however, had looked all round the basement, but had
failed to find any.

"He deplored also the increasing prevalence of smoking at the
performances.  He himself saw no harm in a good cigar, for himself,
especially in a well-seasoned twenty-five-cent dark Habanana, which
he said beat Virgyptian tobacco hands down.  But he looked on a
cigarette as a mighty poor smoke."

When we add to the disclosures of this sort such minor and obvious
facts as that nowadays sailors can't swim, and clergymen swear, and
brewers don't drink, and actors can't act--we have to admit that we
live in a changing world.




A Great Life in Our Midst


JOE BROWN, CHAMPION PIE EATER


One's first impressions of Joe Brown, champion pie-eater, is that
of a quiet, unassuming man, of a stature in no way out of the
common, and having a frank, offhand manner that puts one at once at
one's ease.

"Sit right down," he said to the group of us (we were reporting for
the press), and he waved his hand towards the rocking-chairs on the
veranda.  "Sit right down.  Warm, ain't it?"

The words were simple, but spoken with a heartiness and good will
that made one at once feel at home.  It seemed hard to believe that
this was actually the man who had eaten more pie, more consecutive
pie, than any other man alive--still alive.

"Well, Joe," we said, getting out our notebooks and pencils, "what
about this pie?"

Mr. Brown laughed, with that pleasant, easy laugh of his, which
makes one feel entirely reassured.

"I rather supposed you boys were going to talk about the pie," he
said.

"Well," we admitted, "all the world is talking about it, Joe.
Coming right on top of the news that a man has played golf
continually for twenty-four hours and that a woman in Indiana
shucked peas for three days, and that the huckleberry record has
been broken, that a man in Medicine Hat, Alberta, stood on one leg
for seven hours, and that the champion fat boy of Iowa passed four
hundred pounds last week, this pie stuff of yours seems to be going
over pretty big."

"Yes," said Mr. Brown, quietly, "there are big things being done
to-day certainly, and I'm glad to be in it.  And yet I don't feel
as if I had done anything so very much after all."

"Oh, come, Joe," we expostulated, "in New York they are saying that
your pie act is about the biggest endurance stunt of the month.  It
puts you, or it ought to, right in the first rank of the big men
to-day."

"Well," said the champion modestly, "I'm afraid I can't take too
much credit for it.  I just did my best, that was all.  I wasn't
going to let it beat me, and so I just put into it every ounce of
pep, or pepsin, that I had."

"What first turned you to eating pie, Joe?" asked one of the boys.

"It's hard to say," he answered.  "I think I just took to it
naturally.  Even as a little fellow, before I understood anything
about it, I was fond of pie and liked to see how much I could eat."

"How did it feel when you ate the first slice in the championship?"
asked one of the boys.

"No," broke in another, "tell us about your training, Joe--how did
you go at that?"  "No," said a third, "tell us what was the most
trying moment of the whole contest."

The great man laughed.  "I'm afraid you boys are asking a whole lot
of questions altogether," he said.  "But the main facts are simple
enough, and, as I see it, nothing so very much to boast about.

"As for the championship contest," he continued, and a look of
quiet earnestness came over his face as he spoke, "I can only say,
boys, that I'm glad it's over.  It was a strain, a great strain.
I'll never forget how I felt as we passed the twentieth slice and
then the thirtieth and then the fortieth.  I said to myself,
'Surely this can't last; there must come a time when it just can't
go on.'  Something seemed to make me understand that.

"I'd run into a burst of speed from the twentieth up to the
thirtieth, with a stroke of two bites to the second, but I saw I
couldn't hold the pace; I slowed it down to four bites in five
seconds and just hung on to that, till I heard the big shout that
told me I had won.  After that, I guess I pretty well keeled over.
I was all in."

"Were you laid out for long?" some one asked.

"No, just for two or three minutes.  Then I went home, had a bath
and a rub-down, and got something to eat, and then I felt dandy."

"Is it true you're to go over to the other side, Joe?" asked one of
the boys.

"I don't quite know.  My manager wants me to go over to England and
eat pie there.  There are some first-class men in England, so they
tell me, that one would be proud to eat against."

"What about France, Joe?"

"Yes, France, too.  The French have got some good men and some fine
men.  And their technique is better than ours.  They're quicker.
They've done more so far in jaw movement than we have.  If I eat a
Frenchman, my only advantage, if I have any at all, will be in
endurance."

"Aren't the pie-eating rules in France different, Joe?" asked one
of us.

"They were," said the champion.  "The French used to allow
drinking--up to six gallons--during the contest.  As you know, we
don't.  But now that we have got the International Pie-Eating
Association, we expect to have a set of rules the same for
everybody."

"Where will you train if you go?" the champion was next asked.

"Most likely," he said, "I'll train at the lunch counters in New
York and some of the big cities.  But the station restaurants are
good too; and I may tackle the cafeterias in some of the big
hotels.  Anywhere, in short, where I can get speed and atmosphere."

"When do you leave for the other side?" we asked.

"Oh, I can't get away just yet.  I have to get my films ready for
the moving picture people.  I'm eating for them four or five hours
a day now, and we're trying out the high-speed pictures."

"What about lectures?"

"Yes, I believe I'm going to give a tour starting next month and
going right to the Coast, lecturing on 'Eating in Relation to
Food.'"

"Doing anything for the schools, Joe?" some one questioned.

"Yes, I think I'm going to give a talk in a lot of the public
schools."

"What about?"

"It will be on 'Food in Relation to Eating,' so you see I can't get
away to Europe for a while yet."

We sat thus for over half an hour chatting with this latest and in
some ways most interesting of the world's new champions.  It seemed
wonderful in talking with him to think of the improved attitude of
the human race.  The old-fashioned interest in wars, battles,
economics, and industry is now obviously passing away.  It is being
replaced by the more human, more vital interests of eating pie,
standing on one leg, and shucking huckleberries.

Looking thus at Mr. Joe Brown, we felt ourselves in the presence of
a typical man of the new age.

Presently, however, the champion seemed to show signs of a slight
weariness.

"Boys," he said," I guess you'll have to excuse me.  I'm beginning
to feel kind of hungry.  I think I'll go inside and get something
to eat."

"What do you generally take as your ordinary diet, Joe?" we asked.

"Pie," he answered.




The Perfect Gift


A LITTLE STUDY IN THE ART OF TASTEFUL GIVING


It so happened that a little while ago I was placed under a very
considerable obligation to my friend and neighbor MacPherson, and I
determined to make him a suitable gift as a small return for his
kindness.  As it was near Xmas, the idea of a Xmas present seemed
both obvious and appropriate.

Now I am one of those who believe that the selection of a gift is
not a matter to be lightly undertaken.  The mere expenditure of
money is of itself nothing; among people who are fairly well-to-do,
it is even less.  What is needed in a gift is some peculiar
appropriateness of time and circumstance, some aptness in the
present that shows to the recipient that the donor has not only
spent his money, but has also devoted his best thought to the
affair in hand.  This lends a peculiar kindliness to the deed.

It was while I was busied with reflections of this sort that I
realized that I had left the Xmas season go by.  I determined to
give MacPherson his present at New Year's.

Meantime, it was a source of gratification to me to observe that
the excellent fellow's friendliness was in no way altered by the
fact that I had given him nothing at Xmas.  His greeting, whenever
we met upon the street, was as hearty and as unconstrained as ever.
It was a further source of gratification to me to reflect that his
New Year's pleasure would be heightened by the receipt of the well-
selected gift that I determined to bestow upon him on that date.

I have always had a peculiar feeling towards the advent of a New
Year.  It seems to me to be a time peculiarly suited to the renewal
of old friendships, the confirmation of existing affections, and
the strengthening of unbroken ties.

A present at the New Year carries for me this meaning; and it
becomes doubly appropriate when accompanied by some well-selected
message, some few but eloquent words that convey to the recipient
even more than does the gift itself the sentiments of the donor.
Such a message, neatly written upon a suitable card or framed
perhaps into a neat turn of verse, is something long to be
remembered when the gift itself is laid aside.

It was while I was thinking of this message that New Year's Day
went past.

The chagrin with which I presently realized this fact soon passed
away.  After all, there is something slightly banal or ordinary in
making gifts at a season of the year when all the world is doing
so.  For at such a time benevolence becomes a trade and charity
itself a tax.  I, therefore, decided to defer my gift till the
middle of January.  This slight lapse of time beyond the so-called
holiday season would give, it seemed to me, an added touch of good
taste.

This decision, of course, now gave me plenty of time to look about
me, to consider more carefully MacPherson's tastes and to suit my
gift to his peculiar predilections.  The excellent fellow meanwhile
continued on a footing of undisturbed friendliness that made it a
source of constant satisfaction to me to reflect on the future
gratification that I proposed to confer on him.

But at this point certain unforeseen difficulties arose in the
selection of my present.  I had practically decided upon a gold
watch, the inside of which should contain a brief inscription,
either in English or Latin, or perhaps Gaelic, as appropriate to
MacPherson's nationality.  Indeed, I had virtually decided on
Gaelic as having perhaps a richer flavor, an undertone of something
not found in the Latin tongue.  Such Gaelic phrases as "Hoot, man"
or "Come Awa' Wie Ye" or "Just a Wee Doch-an-Dorris" have a special
appeal of their own.

My intentions in this direction were frustrated.  It so happened
that in a company where we were both present MacPherson drew forth
a gold watch from his pocket for our inspection.  "I don't know,"
he said, "whether I have showed any of you the watch given to me on
New Year's as the outgoing President of the Caledonian Curling
Club."  "What is the inscription on the back?" asked one of the
company.  "It is Gaelic," said MacPherson, "and it reads:  'Hoot,
man, come awa' wi' ye, and hae a wee doch-an-dorris.'"

I had the same ill-luck, also, with my selection of a fishing-rod,
an admirable thing in split bamboo, such as might appeal to the
heart of an angler.  I had practically bought it and the shopman
was about to wrap it up when I was compelled, by a casual remark on
his part, to reconsider my purchase.  "It is a beautiful rod," he
said; "we just sent a mate to it, almost identical, up to the St.
Moritz Country Club.  They are giving it as a presentation to Mr.
MacPherson, their secretary."

It is quite obvious that a present cannot, among people of taste,
be allowed to duplicate something also given.  I found it necessary
therefore to pause and to make inquiries as best I might in regard
to MacPherson's belongings.  I found him so singularly well
equipped that it was difficult to find any article with which he
was not already supplied.

It was while I was making these investigations that the middle of
January went by.

This, however, proved to be a very fortunate thing.  For I
discovered that my friend's birthday was to come on the twenty-
eighth of February.  This would not only afford me a singularly
happy occasion for the presentation I wished to make, but would
allow me also six weeks of undisturbed reflection.

During this period, however, a further difficulty opened in front
of me.  I had not up to this point considered what a singularly
difficult problem is presented to the donor of a present in the
matter of the price that is to be expended on his gift to the
recipient.  To expend too lavish a sum smacks of vulgarity and
display; too small a price betrays the parsimonious thought.  I
therefore considered it wise to decide beforehand exactly what
price would best suit the requirements of perfect taste.  My gift
could then be adapted to that.

The result of very serious calculation led me therefore to believe
that the sum of thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents would coincide
to a nicety with the dictates both of generosity and of restraint.
I decided on that.  But to my chagrin I found that apparently no
object presented itself for my selection that corresponded to that
amount.  The price of $37.50 was exactly the cost of an electric
train, but neither that nor a wicker perambulator (also $37.50)
seemed appropriate.

So serious was this new dilemma that MacPherson's birthday came and
went while I was struggling with it.  The good fellow even invited
me on that occasion to a champagne supper at his house, still
innocently unaware of how narrowly he had escaped my benefaction.

Meantime, I am waiting for Easter, a season of the year when the
bestowal of a gift is accompanied by a feeling of peculiar
reverence and piety.  My present intention is to give MacPherson a
present at Easter.  And perhaps I will; on the other hand, perhaps
not.  I have become so accustomed to being in a state of pleasant
expectation over MacPherson's present that I hate to terminate the
sensation.

And after all, I am not really so very much concerned about it.
MacPherson is only one of a long list of people to whom during the
past thirty or forty years I have been intending to give
appropriate presents.  If these lines should meet the eye, or the
eyes, of any of them, will they kindly take the will for the deed?

Or, better still, will they please go down to the fifteen-cent
store and pick out anything that they like and charge it to me?




Scenery and Signboards


A VISION OF TRAVEL FROM NEW YORK TO WASHINGTON


Passing through the tunnels and leaving behind us the surging
metropolis of New York, we find ourselves traversing the flat,
marshy land of Eastern New Jersey, where ONE HUNDRED ROOMS EACH WITH
A BATH can be had from $1.50 up.  The scenery is not without its
charm, the sunken valley of the Hackensack and the Passaic, the
waving rushes and meandering streams, suggest to the poetic mind,
WHY NOT TRY GRIP-TIGHT GARTERS?

The ground rises, a varied growth of elm and oak replaces the
lowland flats, and we find ourselves in the rich farm land of New
Jersey filled with FLUID BEEF, which acts directly on the liver.
Here HUMPO may be had for breakfast, and mixed with a little
VITAMINGO will probably prolong our life for twenty years.

Nor need we do anything further than--seated just where we are in
our luxurious club-car--merely remember the name HUMPO, which in
any case comes on every packet and without which the packet is not
genuine.  Indeed, a simple way is to ask the porter to be good
enough to remember HUMPO.

But stop--in our absorption in the view of HUMPO, we have lost an
opportunity to BUILD OUR OWN HOME by merely paying a hundred dollars
down.

                              *****

We are passing now through historic country.  We do not need our
guide-book to tell us that it is through this beautiful farm
district of New Jersey that Washington advanced, slowly driving the
English before him.  He made his way between a big CONDENSED MILK
board and a UNIQUE RADIO SET FOR 238 DOLLARS.  He picked his steps
with evident caution, avoiding COATS AND PANTS FOR MEN OF ALL SIZES,
for his trained strategic eye detected an opening between CHOW CHOW
PICKLES and MALTED EXTRACT OF CODFISH.

This gap had apparently been overlooked by General Howe, and
Washington threw himself into it; a notice on a large board,
erected evidently by some historical society, shows that he
probably enabled himself to do this by taking exercises on the
floor of his bedroom for not more than ten minutes every morning
with the new MUSSELBILD APPARATUS, which would have been sent to
Washington by mail on receipt of a money-order or which he could
have obtained from his local dealer.

The interesting fact in this connection is that the British General
Howe, had he known it, could also have secured a MUSSELBILD from
HIS local dealer, as they are handled in ALL parts of the country.
Had Howe done this and had they both used the SLIDE-EASY SUSPENDERS
that are on each side of the line of the American advance, the
struggle of the Revolution might have moved up and down without the
slightest friction and with no sense of fatigue.

But look, our train is moving into Trenton, one of the most
historic spots in America, where we realize with a thrill by
looking out the window that if we need a slight tonic we can secure
it from any local dealer for nineteen cents.  Our swiftly moving
train is now rushing along the shores of the Delaware, and we can
see the very spot where Washington and his men crossed in the rude
December of 1777; we can shrewdly guess from the notices that have
been reared to mark the spot that they used NON-SKID CHAINS, which
prevented them from skidding or slipping, and that they had at
least an opportunity to reserve rooms with or without baths on the
American plan.

We realize as our train rushes forward that we are approaching
Philadelphia; rooms with baths, breakfast foods, pills, and non-
skid garters multiply on every hand.  If we decide to buy a
COMPLETE NOBBY SUIT, with an extra pair of pants, we are going to
have an opportunity to get it.  Or should we need, in order to view
the historic spots of interest connected with America's first
capital, a SIT-SOFT COLLAR, there are men here, local dealers, who
will be glad to sell it to us.

                              *****

We have rushed past the city of the great Franklin (inventor, no
doubt, of the Franklin shoe, the Franklin underwear, and the
Franklin adjustable monkey-wrench for stout women), and are now
speeding through the open country again.  Here for a short time the
scenery becomes somewhat monotonous: there is nothing on either
hand but deep green woods, open meadows filled with hay (of what
brand and whether good for breakfast we are not informed), and the
rolling hills and shaded valleys of the Appalachian slope.

Now and then in the distance we catch a glimpse of the sea--
unadvertised, it appears, and put to no use whatever.  We cross on
an endless bridge the broad flood of the Susquehanna, an unused
river, so far as we can judge, lying in the gloomy sunshine with no
touch of color more brilliant than the mere blue of the sky or the
poor green of the woods.

                              *****

The scene improves as we go forward.  The notices of the boards are
at a little distance now and we cannot read the words, but the
pictures still appear.  We are passing through a country of bulls.
This is, this must be--Washington!  With our faces eagerly set to
the window, we draw near to the National Capital; the speed of the
train somewhat confuses and blurs our vision and mixes the imagery
of the scenery together.

But we infer even from our hurried view of the outskirts of the
capital that if any bull wants silk hosiery that neither rips nor
tears, he is exactly in the right place for it; and that Washington
is exactly in the center of the yeast district, the canned soup
area, that all the great modern medical inventions such as HUMPO,
JUMPO, and ANTIWHEEZE are sold there, and that we can get all the
soap we want;--in short, look about us--here are Rooms with Beds at
$1.50!  Meals � la carte, Suspenders, Garters, Ice Cream in the
Block, Radios, Gramophones, Elixers of Life, Funeral Directors Open
All Night, Real Estate, Bungalows, Breakfast Foods--

In truth--this is America indeed.




The Life of John Mutation Smith


HOW A TYPICAL CITIZEN OF TO-DAY MOVES THROUGH HIS EXISTENCE


John Mutation Smith was one of the Smiths of Mutation,
Massachusetts.  His family had come over there about three hundred
years ago from England.  His grandfather had married Abigail Price,
of Price's Corners; and so had his great-grandfather; in fact most
of the Mutation Smiths had been marrying Abigail Prices for three
hundred years.

All of which is immaterial to the present discussion, and is only
mentioned by accident.  The real point is that John Mutation Smith
himself differs from those who preceded him, like any other typical
citizen of our own time, and this is the account in brief of his
life.

John Smith was born in Boston and in Philadelphia.  He was never
quite certain on the point, because he was born at about the time
when his father and his second wife (he was her first husband; she
had as yet never married when she married him) moved from an
apartment in Boston to the same apartment in Philadelphia.  Young
Smith's memories often clung fondly to this house where he was
born--or rather, would have done so except that they had torn it
down a little later to put up a garage.

But at any rate Smith's parents didn't remain long in this dear old
home.  They lived for a while in Binghamton, N.Y., and in Oneonta,
N.Y., and in Akron, O.  Smith often used to look back with longing
as he grew older to the dear old homestead in Oneonta where six
months of recollections twined themselves around his heart.

The little playmates of those days endeared themselves to him
forever--except for the fact that he ceased to remember which were
in Oneonta and which in Binghamton and which in Akron.  And he
forgot their names.  Also their faces.  But their memory he never
lost.  As a matter of fact, he met one of them years after selling
real estate out in Fargo, North Dakota--at least, it MUST have been
one of his childhood's playmates because the man in question had
lived in Oneonta (either Oneonta or Onondaga) at the very time when
Mutation Smith was either in Oneonta or Akron.  Things like that
forge a link between grown men not easily broken,--except that
Smith never saw this man again, because he was on his way to
Vancouver, B.C.

Smith always remembered the little red school house where he first
went to school, though he could never be certain where it was.  He
recalled too how the patriotic little fellows used to hoist the
flag in front of the school on the great days of the year.  Only he
was never quite sure what flag it was, because for a while his
father had worked up in Orangeville (Province of Quebec or
Manitoba), and it may have been there.  They used to have patriotic
speeches and patriotic readings (directed either for or against the
United States, Smith never could remember which) on Washington's
birthday or Queen Victoria's.

As a matter of fact, it seems that Mutation Smith's father took out
papers when he got his job in Canada that made him British, but
when he lost his job he took back his papers and got new old ones
again; and then it looked as if he would get a job in Mexico, and
he took out Mexican ones.  So young Smith grew up patriotic, if
nothing else.  He always said that he was all for his country.
Just let him take one look at his papers, he said, to see which it
was and he was all for it.

So much was he inclined that way at college and at his lodge
meetings, later on, he used to be able to recite "Scots, wha hae
wi' Wallace bled!" with tears in his eyes; and also "The Watch on
the Rhine," and "Gunga Din," and "Rise, Japan!" and "Lie Down,
China"--all, I say, with tears in his eyes.

But I am anticipating.  Smith's father's work in Canada and in
Mexico enabled him to get an American education.  He went to
Cornell University, which became for him for the rest of his life
"his dear old Alma Mater."  He felt, as most of the Cornell men
feel, that his college days there marked an epoch in his life.  He
seemed, as it were, to go in a boy, and to come out a man.  And yet
he was not there very long; ten days in fact.  There was something
wrong with his credit in certain subjects that was not sufficient
and the Dean had to remove him.  But when they put him out he was a
man.  The college had done that to him, whether it liked it or not.

Smith always looked back fondly to dear old Cornell.  He used to
say that there was something in its wonderful situation,
overlooking the waters of the Potomac, that appealed to every fiber
in him.

After Cornell, Smith was at the University of Chicago for a term.
This, too, he said, made another man of him.  After that, he was
for two terms at the University of Virginia, a place whose
influence and whose beautiful natural site and buildings, laid out,
as Smith himself loved to recall, by Stonewall Jefferson himself,
made him for the rest of his life a different man; in other words,
he came out different from what he would have been if he had stayed
the same as he would have been if he had not got different.

Smith's credit in various subjects being insufficient at Virginia,
as they had been at Cornell and Chicago, the Dean removed him.
This led to his brief stay at Dartmouth, without which--so at least
he himself thought--his development would not have been what it
was.

Smith went from Dartmouth to the Massachusetts Tech at Boston, as
he wanted to get a glimpse of practical mechanical science.  He got
it and moved to Johns Hopkins to get an inkling of the latest work
in astrophysics.  He got it and left in two weeks, taking it with
him.

Mutation Smith thus became a typical college man of to-day.  All
through his maturer life, he used to love to talk, often through
tears, of his Alma Maters--or rather of his Almas Mater, which is
the proper plural.  He said a college man should stick up for his
Alma Maters, and whenever there was any call for funds for
endowment or re-endowment of any of his colleges, Smith often
subscribed as much as five dollars at a time.

Meantime Mutation Smith, now mature, rendered a different man five
times from what he had been, passed from college into life itself.
And now for the first time women came into his life.  That is to
say, up to now women had never come into it.  They had merely moved
through it like fish through the meshes of a net.  Now they came
and stayed.

Smith's experience with them was very different from the life story
of his forbears in Massachusetts in this respect.  Take the typical
case of his grandfather, John Mayflower Smith.  He never "met"
Abigail Price, who became his wife, because he didn't need to
"meet" her.  When he was seven years old, he gave Abigail an
oyster-shell.  After that he made no sign for four years: but
Abigail kept the shell.

When he was eleven years old, he gave her a "conversation lozenge,"
which had a motto written on it in red poison--"If you love me as I
love you, no knife can cut our love in two."  Abigail kept the
lozenge all her life.  When John Smith was eighteen, he went with
Abigail to a "tea social," in the school-house--and took her home
all alone in broad daylight, the whole four hundred yards to her
house.  After that, of course, he had to marry her.

They were engaged for two years, during which time Smith went to
see Abigail every Sunday from 2 P.M. to 4 P.M., spending most of
his time standing with her father looking at the pig-pen.  They
were both twenty when they were married.  They had eight children,
four boys called John and four girls called Abigail.

John was a good husband to Abigail.  He took her once to the Falls
and once to Boston.  And one day, when she was crying over
something, they say he walked right across the room and kissed her.
After he died, Abigail never married, but spent the rest of her
life talking about him.

But of course none of this kind of thing would apply to John
Mutation Smith, the one under discussion.  He belonged not to that
age, but to this.  I have said that women never came into John
Mutation Smith's life until after his college days, never in any
serious way.  There was, of course, a certain element in his life,
as in that of the young men of to-day, that suggested the
possibility of love.  There was, for example, little Janey Doodoo,
whom he knew in his first year at college.

He used to take little Janey out in his Ford, and kiss her--a few
dozen times at a time--and squeeze her up to about a pressure of
eight pounds to the square inch.  And Janey would wind herself
around him and stroke his hair back and push his ears up and turn
his collar crooked.  But it was just a boy and girl affair.  At
least, that was all it seemed, to look at it--just a boy and a
girl.

Then there were Nettie Nitty and Nina Nohow and Posie Possum--all
girls at college.  John took them out sometimes for the afternoon,
sometimes for the evening--sometimes, even to the town soda-
fountain.  Smith used to love to look back later on to this first
dawning awakening of affection with the first six girls that he
ever loved.  There is nothing so beautiful in life as love's young
dream, and when it comes six abreast, it is overwhelming.

Still, after all, it amounted to but little.  It cost next to
nothing, involved no legal consequences, no action in the courts,
no mental collapse, and no question of the penitentiary--in short,
it was not love.

Reality only came to John Smith in this respect after he left
college and went out into the world.  It was here, right out in the
world, that he married Abigail Price.  It was the first time either
of the young people had ever been married.  They lived in a tiny
apartment and sang and laughed and were happy all day long, for the
whole ten days of their marriage.

They might have stayed married ever so long, only John's boss--he
had gone into the flour and feed business--wanted him to move to
Ypsilanti, Michigan, and Abigail didn't like the name.

So they parted, still friends, while there was yet time.  John
Smith used to look back to those bright earlier days of the first
marriage he ever made with a sigh of regret.  Certain things, he
used to say, seem only to come once in life; and a first marriage
is one of them.

In Ypsilanti, John married Mrs. Thompson--Bessie Thompson.  That
was, as nearly as he could remember, her name; but it may have been
Jessie.  The marriage turned out to be an error, a fatal error, one
of those life errors that we make in love.  Within a month each
realized that he, or she, didn't love her, or him.  John found
himself staring at the blank wall--it seems the only thing to do in
that case--and realizing that his life was wrecked.

Mrs. Thompson stared at the other wall.

They parted.  And for a long, long time, nearly a year, John Smith
remained unmarried.  His heart, he said, was numb.  He drove out a
little in a buggy with one of the local girls.  But his heart was
numb all the time they were out.

John's business in the flour and feed failed.  So he moved away and
opened a drug store in Montpelier, Vermont, and then closed the
drug store and went into the wholesale and retail cigar business in
Topeka, Kansas.  And after that he was for a while up in Canada in
real estate in Saskatoon, and after that he went into the school
book business on Commission in Bangor, Maine, with a side line of
patent ginger ale bottle tops.

John always said that he felt the full charm of business life--the
joy that so many have felt in founding a business and seeing it
grow and expand for perhaps three or four months, before it
collapses.

During all these years of his business life, Mutation Smith was
married--in fact, several times.  But there were no children.  The
rules of the apartments where they lived never permitted it--except
in Saskatoon, but then there were no apartments in Saskatoon.

In the end, John began to grow old.  He would sit for hours in the
chimney corner, or rather in the gas grate, musing on his past
life, thinking of all his birthplaces, and all his playmates, and
of each of his first loves, and of the dear old town, each of the
dear old towns, where the old crowd, all the old crowds, could be
pictured waiting to welcome him--if he could only sort them out in
his mind.

And thinking thus, I imagine that John Mutation Smith, child and
citizen of our time, often grew thoroughly sick of the time in
which he lived.

Meantime in the merely worldly sense Smith had accumulated a very
fair competence.  He had done well out of his failures at Ypsilanti
and two or three other places, he had had a disastrous fire in
Topeka on which he had cleaned up a good deal, and he had incurred
a total bankruptcy in Saskatoon that had put him on his feet.

But his heart was sad.  He often asked himself what his life had
amounted to anyway, and it didn't add up to much.

And now I hear, quite recently--or perhaps I have imagined--a
strange thing about John Mutation Smith, namely, that he is about
to make a new move in life.

It seems that he met again the other day Abigail Price--the same
one of long ago.  And Abigail, like all the Abigails, has waited
and has never married again.

And they are going to be remarried and are going to go back and
settle again in Mutation, Massachusetts, where nothing ever
changes.  They have bought a frame house with walnut trees in front
of it.  They are old people now, of course, nearly thirty-six both
of them, but it's a large house, such a large house, and there are
no rules against children within fifty miles.  So perhaps you can't
tell.




Inference as an Art


HOW EVEN AN AMATEUR MAY FORGE A CHAIN OF LOGIC


I suppose that there is nothing so fascinating to the human
intellect as the following out of a close chain of reasoning--the
kind of thing that is called in the detective stories "an
inexorable concatenation of logic."  Perhaps it is the detective
story that has made this kind of thing so fashionable in our
generation.

Personally I must say that I like now and then to try my hand at
such an exercise, and to see what conclusions I can draw in regard
to the casual people whom I meet or see--a stranger observed on a
train or a random passenger on a street-car.  No doubt I am not
alone in this.  I imagine that the attempt to unravel the mystery
of our fellow-men in this fashion is a favorite pastime with many
of us.

I lay no claim to any particular skill in observation or reasoning
power.  But I may at least say that interest and industry have
brought to me what might seem a rather surprising measure of
success; so much so that at times I find myself "arguing out" the
person whom I see with results that presently justify each separate
stage of my reasoning.

                              *****

I had, no later than last week, a curious illustration of this.  It
happened that I was on a train, in a chair-car, going north from my
own city for a vacation in the woods.  At such-and-such a station--
the name is of no consequence; if necessary, though, I could
furnish it upon request--there entered into the train a party of
five persons.  I set myself to observe them quietly from behind my
newspaper.

It was at once evident that they all knew one another.  The fact
that they got on the train together, that they were all talking
together, and that one, the senior of the party, held the tickets
for all, justified this first step of reasoning.

Of the party themselves the oldest was a man of about thirty-five
to forty years, the next a lady perhaps a little younger, then a
girl in her teens, and finally two little boys dressed almost
alike.  Here then was a second problem--what was the connection or
relationship between them?  I set myself to thinking it out.  Under
what circumstances does a man carry with him two little boys in
similar suits?  Why should a woman say to a man, "Have you got the
children's hold-all?"  Hold-what?  And why were they holding it?

The explanation came upon me, as such things often do, with a
sudden flash.  The five persons were a family!  The man was the
father, the lady was his wife, and the two little boys, identical
in dress, strongly alike in features, were brothers!!

Another conclusion followed almost immediately.  They were starting
on a summer vacation--the man, for instance, was carrying what I
recognized to be a fishing-rod, the girl in her teens had under her
arm a tennis racket in a case, and the porter had carried in for
them a long leather bag with wooden sticks protruding over the top,
which a little close reasoning showed to be golf clubs!

This neat piece of deduction carried with it quite naturally a
further conclusion.  This was to the effect that their vacation was
to be spent on or near (or under) the water.  The two little boys
each had with him a toy yacht.  These, I argued, would only float
on water, and hence in the mountains or on a farm would be of no
purpose.  In addition to this, each child had on its head a sailor
hat with the legend H.M.S. Resolute.  If not water, the boys would
hardly have been named after a ship.

The reader might ask at this point, how can I speak with such
confidence of child, of children, of a girl in her teens?  How
could I know that they were children?  I answer very simply that I
could not and did not KNOW it.  I argued it only as a fair
inference from their appearance.

On the basis thus laid down, I was able next to name to myself the
exact destination of my unknown acquaintances.  At the end of the
line is a well-known summer resort, situated beside a lake.  The
train was to go to this point as its terminus and it was to stop
nowhere else in between.  Therefore the passengers were going to
this station.  This was but logic.

I now set myself to see what further information I could piece
together in regard to the personality, etc., of the group under
observation.  Here I must admit that my conclusions were halting
and more slowly formed.  Yet bit by bit I made progress.  I
observed that the lady presently took out a newspaper, and holding
it right side up, remained for some time with her eyes fixed upon
it.  I inferred from this that she could read and write.

Meantime a similar observation of her husband convinced me that he
was a lawyer.  He sat for some time reading, or at least observing,
a volume which bore the title "Law Reports," from his pocket there
protruded a newspaper or journal with the heading in capitals
"CANADA LEGAL TIMES," and he carried with him a bag of the kind
commonly known as a brief-case.  The inference was that he was
either a lawyer or a liar.

So far, then, my conclusions were that the party consisted of a
well-to-do lawyer and his wife (well-to-do because they rode on the
train instead of walking) going on, or proceeding on, a vacation
to, or in, the water.

The next step was to try to work out their names.  This I admit is
a far more difficult process.  Whether a name can actually be
transferred from mind to mind by intense concentration of thought
is an open question.  Perhaps it can and perhaps it can't.  At any
rate, in this case I failed entirely, in spite of sitting with my
mind intensely concentrated (till aroused by the conductor).

But where internal reasoning fails, observation may succeed.  And
so it proved.  By keeping my ears open, instead of my mind, I was
soon able to educe that the man's name was Henry.  I argued this
from the fact that his wife said, "When are we supposed to get in,
Henry?" and a little later, "You sent a telegram, didn't you,
Henry?"

The man's answer, "Yes," could be construed as an admission that
his name was Henry.

The wife's name, I divined, or at least diagnosed, to be either
Bessie or Mum.  The man addressed her as Bessie, the children Mum.
Later on it occurred to me that the word Mum was a short, or
abbreviated, form of Mother.  Very shortly afterwards, also, I was
able to reason that the man's name was Henry Williams.  Stamped in
black letters on the end of one of his valises was the legend H.
Williams.  Could anything be more convincing?

                              *****

Indeed, just as I concluded this chain of reasoning, I realized
that I knew them. . . .  In fact, the man came across the car and
sat down beside me.

"How are you?" he said.  "Off on a vacation to the lake, I suppose?
I'm just taking Bessie and the kids up there for a fortnight."

Then I realized that of course he was Henry Williams.  I've known
him and Bessie Williams for about sixteen years.  In fact, I think
that one of the little boys, I forgot which, is my godson.

                              *****

The trouble is that I am often so tied up in these chains of logic
that I get tangled.




Our Get-Together Movement


THE WAY WE HAVE ORGANIZED TO "GET TOGETHER" IN OUR TOWN


I want to tell about the Get-Together Movement we've been carrying
on in our town, because I think it will be a help to people to get
together in other towns.

The way it began was this.  For some time past some of us had been
feeling that we didn't get together enough.  Whether it was from
lack of opportunity or from lack of initiative, I don't know.  But
the fact was that we weren't getting together.  So some of us began
to think of how we could manage to get together better.

So the idea came up that a good way to start a movement in that
direction would be to hold a lunch as a start.  We thought if we
could get together at a lunch it might serve as a beginning.  So we
began with a lunch.

Or rather, I should say that before we had the lunch a few of us
got together at breakfast to work up the lunch.  I don't know whose
idea it first was, but at any rate a little group of us went and
had breakfast at one of the hotels.  We just had a plain breakfast--
just cereals and grapefruit and eggs and bacon and a choice of
steak--in fact, just the things they either had on the bill of fare
or could get on half an hour's notice.  It was quite informal.  We
put one of ourselves in the chair, as president, and had no
speeches or anything of the sort except that the president said a
few words, mainly about getting together and one or two about how
the other men just added a word or two about how we hadn't been
getting together in the past and hoping that in the future things
would be different and we would get together.

It was felt at the same time that the purpose of the club should be
service, and it was decided that a good form of service would be to
eat lunch.

So the lunch came off soon after and was an unqualified success in
every way.  The president explained the aim of the organization,
and a simple outline of a constitution was drawn up.  For the use
of others I append here the two or three principal clauses:

Aim of the organization--To get together.

Means to be taken to accomplish it--By coming together.

Purpose of the organization--Service.

Means of effecting it--By cultivating in the members a sense of
service.

Politics of the organization--None.

Religion of the members--None.

Ideas represented--None.

Education and other tests for membership--None.

Fees, outside of food--Nothing.

The constitution was voted with a great deal of enthusiasm.  When
the lunch broke up, it was felt that a real start had been made.

Well, having the lunch encouraged us to go right on, and so the
next thing we had was a dinner.  There was a feeling that you can
get men together at a dinner where they sit together in a way in
which you can't unless you do.

Of course, it took a good deal of work to get the dinner, a lot of
spade work and team work.  It's always that way.  But at last we
got over a hundred pledged to eat dinner and ventured to pull it
off.

It certainly was a big success.  It was quite informal.  We just
held it in one of the big hotels, taking the ordinary table d'h�te
dinner that the hotel served that night and letting the members
just come in and sit down and start eating when they liked and get
up and leave just when they wanted to.

There were no speeches--just the president and one or two gave ten
minutes' talk on service and community feeling.  The president said
that the way to get these was by getting together: he said that we
had already done a lot just by sheer ground work and he wanted us
all to hang right on and stick to it and see it through.

Well, since then we've been keeping the lunches and dinners going
pretty regularly.  And as a result we feel that we are beginning to
know one another.  I sat next to a man the other night whom I don't
suppose I would have ever got to know if I hadn't sat next to him.
We both remarked upon it.  In fact, I don't think there's any
better way to get next to a man than by sitting next to him when
he's eating.  You get a community feeling out of it.  This man--I
forget his name--said so too.

But we've cut out the local speakers.  Somehow our members don't
care to listen to one another.  They all seem to feel that you get
more community feeling, a far better sense of genuine fellowship,
from an outsider.  So we take our speakers now from a good way off.

And we've certainly had some wonderful talks.  One of the first--I
think the man was a professor--was a great talk; it was on "How to
Be 100 Per Cent Yourself"; and there was another on "How to Get 100
Per Cent Outside Yourself"; and others on "How to Think 100 Per
Cent" and on "How to Be 100 Per Cent Awake."

There's no doubt the organization has done a whole lot towards
bringing us all together.  When the members meet on the street,
they always say, "Good morning!" or "How are you?" or something of
that sort, or even stop for a second and say, "Well, how's it
going?" or "How's the boy?"

In fact, you can generally tell the members of our organization on
the street just by the look on their faces.  I heard a man say the
other day that he'd know them a mile off.

So what we feel is that there must be men of the same stamp as
ourselves in other towns.  We ought to know them and they ought to
know us.  Let's start something to get together.




SHORT CIRCUITS IN THE OPEN AIR




A Lesson on the Links


THE APPLICATION OF MATHEMATICS TO GOLF


It is only quite recently that I have taken up golf.  In fact, I
have only played for three or four years, and seldom more than ten
games in a week or at most four in a day.  I have only had a proper
golf vest for two years: I only bought a "spoon" this year and I am
not going to get Scotch socks till next year.

In short, I am still a beginner.  I have once, it is true, had the
distinction of "making a hole in one," in other words of hitting
the ball into the pot, or can, or receptacle, in one shot.  That is
to say, after I had hit, a ball was found in the can and my ball
was not found.  It is what we call circumstantial evidence--the
same thing that people are hanged for.

Under such circumstances I should have little to teach to anybody
about golf.  But it has occurred to me that from a certain angle my
opinions may be of value.  I at least bring to bear on the game all
the resources of a trained mind and all the equipment of a complete
education.

In particular I may be able to help the ordinary golfer--or
"goofer"--others prefer "gopher"--by showing him something of the
application of mathematics to golf.

Many a player is perhaps needlessly discouraged by not being able
to calculate properly the chances and probabilities of progress in
the game.  Take, for example, the simple problem of "going round in
bogey."  The ordinary average player such as I am now becoming--
something between a beginner and an expert--necessarily wonders to
himself "Shall I ever be able to go around in bogey; will the time
ever come when I shall make not one hole in bogey, but all the
holes?"

To this, according to my calculations, the answer is overwhelmingly
"yes."  The thing is a mere matter of time and patience.

Let me explain for the few people who never play golf (such as
night watchmen, night clerks in hotels, night operators,
astronomers and negroes), that "bogey" is an imaginary player who
does each hole at golf in the fewest strokes that a first-class
player with ordinary luck ought to need for that hole.

Now an ordinary player finds it quite usual to do one hole out of
the nine "in bogey,"--as we golfers, or rather, "us goofers," call
it,--but he wonders whether it will ever be his fate to do all the
nine holes of the course in bogey.  To which we answer again with
absolute assurance, he will.

The thing is a simple instance of what is called the mathematical
theory of probability.  If a player usually and generally makes one
hole in bogey, or comes close to it, his chance of making any one
particular hole in bogey is one in nine.  Let us say, for easier
calculation, that it is one in ten.  When he makes it, his chance
of doing the same with the next hole is also one in ten; therefore,
taken from the start his chance of making the two holes
successively in bogey is one-tenth of a tenth chance.  In other
words it is one in a hundred.

The reader sees already how encouraging the calculation is.  Here
is at last something definite about his progress.  Let us carry it
further.  His chance of making three holes in bogey one after the
other will be one in a thousand, his chance of four one in ten
thousand and his chance of making the whole round in bogey will be
exactly one in 1,000,000,000,--that is one in a billion games.

In other words, all he has to do is to keep right on.  But for how
long? he asks.  How long will it take, playing the ordinary number
of games in a month, to play a billion?  Will it take several
years?  Yes, it will.

An ordinary player plays about 100 games in a year, and will
therefore play a billion games in exactly 10,000,000 years.  That
gives us precisely the time it will need for persons like the
reader and myself to go round in bogey.

Even this calculation needs a little revision.  We have to allow
for the fact that in 10,000,000 years the shrinking of the earth's
crust, the diminishing heat of the sun and the general slackening
down of the whole solar system, together with the passing of
eclipses, comets and showers of meteors, may put us off our game.

In fact, I doubt if we shall ever get around in bogey.

                              *****

Let us try something else.  Here is a very interesting calculation
in regard to "allowing for the wind."

I have noticed that a great many golf players of my own particular
class are always preoccupied with the question of "allowing for the
wind."  My friend, Amphibius Jones, for example, just before
driving always murmurs something, as if in prayer, about "allowing
for the wind."  After driving he says with a sigh, "I didn't allow
for the wind."  In fact, all through my class there is a general
feeling that our game is practically ruined by the wind.  We ought
really to play in the middle of the desert of Sahara where there
isn't any.

It occurred to me that it might be interesting to reduce to a
formula the effect exercised by the resistance of the wind on a
moving golf ball.  For example, in our game of last Wednesday,
Jones in his drive struck the ball with what he assures me was his
full force, hitting in with absolute accuracy, as he himself
admits, fair in the center, and he himself feeling, on his own
assertion, absolutely fit, his eye being (a very necessary thing
with Jones), absolutely "in," and he also having on his proper
sweater--a further necessary condition of first-class play.  Under
all the favorable circumstances the ball only advanced fifty yards!
It was evident at once that it was a simple matter of the wind: the
wind, which was of that treacherous character which blows over the
links unnoticed, had impinged full upon the ball, pressed it
backward and forced it to the earth.

Here then is a neat subject of calculation.  Granted that Jones,--
as measured on a hitting machine the week the circus was here,--can
hit two tons and that this whole force was pressed against a golf
ball only one inch and a quarter in diameter.  What happens?  My
reader will remember that the superficial area of such a golf ball
is 3.1415 times 5/4 square inches multiplied by 4, or, more simply,
4PR2.  And all of this driven forward with the power of 4,000
pounds to the inch!

In short, taking Jones's statement at their face value the ball
would have traveled, had it not been for the wind, no less than 6
1/2 miles.

I give the next calculation of even more acute current interest.
It is in regard to "moving the head."  How often is an admirable
stroke at golf spoiled by moving the head!  I have seen members of
our golf club sit silent and glum all evening, murmuring from time
to time, "I moved my head."  When Jones and I play together I often
hit the ball sideways into the vegetable garden from which no ball
returns (they have one of these on every links; it is a Scottish
invention).  And whenever I do so Jones always says, "You moved
your head."  In return when HE drives his ball away up into air and
down again ten yards in front of him, I always retaliate by saying,
"You moved your head, old man."

In short, if absolute immobility of the head could be achieved the
major problem of golf would be solved.

Let us put the theory mathematically.  The head, poised on the
neck, has a circumferential sweep or orbit of about two inches, not
counting the rolling of the eyes.  The circumferential sweep of a
golf ball is based on a radius of 250 yards, or a circumference of
about 1,600 yards, which is very nearly equal to a mile.  Inside
this circumference is an area of 27,878,400 square feet, the whole
of which is controlled by a tiny movement of the human neck.  In
other words, if a player were to wiggle his neck even 1/190 of an
inch the amount of ground on which the ball might falsely alight
would be half a million square feet.  If at the same time he
multiplies the effect by rolling his eyes, the ball might alight
anywhere.

I feel certain that after reading this any sensible player will
keep his head still.

A further calculation remains,--and one perhaps of even greater
practical interest than the ones above.

Everybody who plays golf is well aware that on some days he plays
better than on others.  Question--how often does a man really play
his game?

I take the case of Amphibius Jones.  There are certain days, when
he is, as he admits himself, "put off his game" by not having on
his proper golf vest.  On other days the light puts him off his
game; at other times the dark; so, too, the heat; or again the
cold.  He is often put off his game because he has been up too late
the night before; or similarly because he has been to bed too early
the night before; the barking of a dog always puts him off his
game; so do children; or adults, or women.  Bad news disturbs his
game; so does good; so also does the absence of news.

All of this may be expressed mathematically by a very simple
application of the theory of permutations and probability; let us
say that there are altogether fifty forms of disturbance any one of
which puts Jones off his game.  Each one of these disturbances
happens, say, once in ten days.  What chance is there that a day
will come when NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM OCCURS?  The formula is a
little complicated but mathematicians will recognize the answer at
once as x/1 + x^2/1 . . . x^n/1.  In fact, that is exactly how often
Jones plays at his best; x/1 + x^2/1 . . . x^n/1 worked out in time
and reckoning four games to the week and allowing for leap years
and solar eclipses, it comes to about once in 2,930,000 years.

And from watching Jones play I think that this is about right.




The Family at Football


SHOWING HOW THE GREAT COLLEGE CHAMPIONSHIP GAME OF THE SEASON WAS
VARIOUSLY REPORTED


THE OFFICIAL REPORT

(More or less like this)


Williamson got the ball and opened up with a low kick down field
against the wind.  Smith punted.  Jones fumbled.  Brown fell down.
Robertson got up.  Peterson tackled low.  Johnson kicked high.
Thompson touched down.  Jackson converted.  Quarter time.  Jones
kicked.  Diplock ran four yards.  Brown was put off.  Thompson came
on. . . .  Yards. . . .  More yards . . . half time . . . quarter
kick . . . punt . . . yards . . . points . . . game.


AS SEEN FROM THE STADIUM BENCHES, ROW 4, BY MISS FLOSSIE
FITZCLIPPET BROWN, AND REPORTED TO HER GIRL FRIEND IN CONVERSATION.


Certainly it was a wonderful game.  I had on my wine-colored dress
and the hat to match, and it was cold enough so that you could wear
fur around your neck.  That's one of the great things about
football games, you can wear fur.  That's why they play so late in
the season, at least so some of the boys said.  Most of the girls
had on cloth coats, so of course you don't see as much color as at
a ball game in the summer.  But the two teams wore bright-colored
sweaters.

One side--I think it was our side--had bright blue, and the other
side were in dark red.  But they are not a bit careful of their
suits when they play and some of them got into a frightful mess
from falling down by accident on the ground.  But when they get too
dirty the umpire turns them out of the game and takes on a man with
a new sweater.  The boys explained it all to me.

But I really know a lot about the game because my brother Ted plays
on the team.  They give another touch of color by having some of
the boys stand along the edge of the ground with bright bathrobes
on.  The umpires have on white sweaters and there are people called
referees and they wear long white coats to give a touch of light.

The game was terribly exciting.  The side that I think was our side
were all kicking the ball one way and the other side the other way.
Jack was sitting on one side of me and Bruce on the other and they
explained everything so clearly--all about the yards and the
different points--that I could understand practically all of it
very soon after it had happened.  Sometimes, of course, only the
referee understands and the scoring has to be done on a special
board at the end of the field so as to add it up.  But I could tell
which was our side all the time even when they changed courts after
each rubber.

I saw ever so many people that we knew there because where we were
in the grandstand, by standing up and looking round you could see
practically everybody.  I thought a great many of the hats
perfectly sweet.  They seem to be wearing softer colors this
autumn.  I saw one hat of Valencia blue felt that was just a dream.

Papa and Uncle Peter were there, but I don't think they saw us.
They seemed to be looking at the game all the time.

It got tremendously exciting toward the end.  Both sides were
exactly even with the same number of sets and the boys explained to
me that it was just a question now which side could knock down the
referee and sit on him.  No doubt it sounds brutal, but really when
you are there you get so excited that you forget.  Again and again
as he slipped in and out putting the ball into position, they
nearly got him, but each time he slipped out.

Just at the end it got so exciting--I don't know what it was--
something to do with yards, that I stood right up on the seat.  So
did a lot of the girls.  Jack and Bruce had to hold me by the
ankles or I might have fallen.

And in the end, I think that the side that I think was our side won
the whole game!  Wasn't that splendid?

Oh, football is just delicious.


AS REPORTED BY MR. EDWARD CHUNK BROWN, SENIOR, FATHER OF MISS
FLOSSIE FITZCLIPPET BROWN, OVER THE COFFEE AND CIGARS AT HIS DINNER
TABLE THAT EVENING.


You didn't see the big game to-day?  You certainly missed it.  My
boy Ted was playing in it.  You ought to have been there.  Ted was
playing in the forward line, and I must say Ted put up a great
game.  I tell you, this college football is about as fine and manly
a sport as you can get.

Look at Ted.  Why, Ted was just a little shrimp till I got him
started into football at the prep (I was always keen on the game.
My brother and I both played on the college team in 1895, though
Peter wasn't what you'd call really first class).  Well, look at
Ted now.  Why, he's heavier than I was myself.

Yes, sir, that was a great game today.  At one time they broke
right through the center and they'd have got clear away with it but
for a tackle that my boy Ted made--one of the best tackles I ever
saw, at least in the game today.  Of course, they do less running
than we did, but Ted got in one pretty good run today.  Ted's quick
on his feet, and what's more, Ted can use his head.  Now there was
one time to-day when Ted--Ted--Ted--Ted--Ted.


AS REPORTED BY MISS MARY DEEPHEART BROWN, ELDER SISTER OF MISS
FLOSSIE FITZCLIPPET BROWN AND DAUGHTER OF EDWARD CHUNK BROWN,
SENIOR, IN A CONFIDENTIAL LETTER TO ONE OF HER SIX ONLY FRIENDS.


I must tell you all about the perfectly wonderful football game
last Saturday.  I hadn't seen Ernest for three days and I was
afraid that something had happened or that I had said something,
because once before Ernest said that something I said had made him
feel just terrible for days and days till he knew that I hadn't
said what I said.

And then I got a note from Ernest to ask me if he might take me to
the game, and so I knew it was all right.  Papa said, at first,
that he would come with us, but I was so afraid that it might mean
a chill, that I got Flossie to get Mother to get Ted to get Uncle
Peter to take him.

Anyway, it meant that I went with Ernest by ourselves and there was
no one else there, and we had awfully good seats, right up at the
back in a corner.  There was a post partly in front of us, but it
didn't prevent us from seeing anything.

All through the first half of the game--football games are divided
into three or four halves of about five minutes each--Ernest kept
looking into my face in the strangest way.  I felt that he had
something that he wanted to say, and I looked back at him to try to
read in his face what it was, but of course Ernest has the kind of
face that is hard to read even when you look right into it.

Once Ernest seemed to be just going to say something, but at that
very minute, there was a lot of shouting and yelling, something
must have happened, I think, to do with the football.  But
presently, in the second half when the game was less exciting,
because I think that both sides were exactly even or something, and
the time nearly all gone, Ernest quite all of a sudden, put out his
hand and took mine and said that there was nobody in the world who
meant to him what I did and that ever since he had known me he
cared for nothing except me, and that the law office are now giving
him over four hundred dollars a month and that if I wouldn't marry
him he would give up the law altogether and take the first boat to
Costa Rica.

And I said I didn't know what father would say and Ernest said he
didn't care a damn what father would say (Ernest is so manly in the
way he talks) and he offered to break my father's neck for me if I
liked.  So I said that I hadn't ever meant to get married but to be
some sort of sister, but that if he liked, I would get married this
time for his sake.  And just then one of the caretakers came to
tell us that the game was over and the people had gone and they
wanted to sweep up the seats.  So we went home together.

I think football is a perfectly wonderful game.


AS REPORTED BY PETER HASBIN BROWN, BROTHER OF EDWARD, SENIOR, AND
UNCLE OF FLOSSIE, MARY AND TED.


Yes, I saw the game to-day.  Pretty rotten.  Ed's boy Ted was
playing, and so I went with Ed and his little boy, Billie, to see
the game.  I hadn't seen a game since 1900, but of course Ed and I
both played on the college team, though Ed was no good.  As I see
it, they've pretty well spoiled the old game.  There doesn't seem
to be a rule that they haven't changed.  Why, nowadays you can
hardly understand it.  In my time, of course, the game was far more
exciting.

Well, for one thing, the fellows could kick further, and the men
were heavier and could shove harder and run faster.  Now the whole
game seems just dead.  My nephew, Ted, has the makings of a good
player in him; he plays something of the kind of game I did.  I've
told him a lot of things.  But you take all these rules about
yards, and downs and offside play, it's all changed; a man can't
understand them.  I sat next to my little nephew Billie--he's Ed's
son, he's eight--and I said, "Can you understand it, Billie?" and
he said, "Not quite, Uncle Peter."

There you are, he couldn't understand it, and I said, "It was a
darned sight better game thirty years ago, Billie," and he said,
"Was it, Uncle Peter?"  He's a bright kid.

But the way they have the game now, there is no interest in it.
There was a whole lot of shouting and yelling, but no enthusiasm.
A lot of them were waving their hats and hooting till they were
hoarse, but there was no enthusiasm.  When I used to play and some
one would shout from the touch line (we used to stand right around
the game then), "Go it, Pete!" well, that was enthusiasm.  You
don't get that now.  Oh, no, the game is gone to hell.


AS REPORTED BY BILLIE COMINGUP BROWN, AGED 8, YOUNGER SON OF EDWARD
BROWN, SENIOR.


Gee!  It was wonderful!  Gee!


BY MRS. UPTOWN BROWN--OTHERWISE "MOTHER"--PARENT OF FLOSSIE, MARY,
TED, AND BILLIE, AND WIFE OF EDWARD CHUNK BROWN, SENIOR.


No, please don't go yet.  We've plenty of time for another rubber.
They're all at the football game.  My little boy Ted is playing,
and my two little girls are there, too.  Now, do stay!  And won't
you have another whiskey and soda?




Life in the Open


REFLECTIONS VOUCHSAFED TO ME BY MY HOSTESS IN THE WILDERNESS


"Yes, we come up every Fall," she said.  "We're both so
passionately fond of the open air.  Ransome, will you close that
window.  There's a draft."

"Yes, ma'am," said the butler.

"And we love to do everything for ourselves.  Ransome, will you
please pass me that ash-tray from across the table?"

"Yes, ma'am," said the butler.

"And we live here quite without form or ceremony--that's what
makes it so nice, it's all so simple.  Gwendoline, you may put on
the finger-bowls, and tell William to serve the coffee in the
cardroom. . . ."

So I knew then that I was getting an opportunity to observe at
first hand the life in the open, the simple life, right in the
wilderness, of which my richer friends have so often spoken to me.

                              *****

"We like, you know, the roughness of it," my hostess went on after
we were seated over our coffee--"the journey up and everything.  Of
course, it's not quite so rough to come up now as it used to be,
now that they have built the new motor highway.  This time we were
able to bring up both the town cars, and before that it was always
a question just what we could bring up.

"I DO think the big closed cars are so much nicer when one is
roughing it--Gwendoline, will you pass the cigarettes, please?--
they keep the air out so much better, and our new one, perhaps you
noticed it, is the kind in which you can draw the curtains and
arrange it something like a drawing-room on a train.  We are able
to come up at night in it.  I always think it much nicer--don't
you?--to come up through the mountains at night.  One sleeps better
than in the day."

                              *****

There was a little pause, during which two noiseless maids removed
the coffee cups and a noiseless man in a semi-feudal dress brought
in picture-book logs for a fire six feet wide.

                              *****

"Of course, it is not all so easy," continued my hostess.  "The
food up here is always such a question.  Of course, we can always
get meat from the village--there is quite a village now, you know,
though when my husband first came up twenty years ago there was
nothing--and we can get milk and eggs and vegetables from the
farmers, and, of course, the men bring in fish all the time, and
our gardener manages now to raise a good deal of fruit under glass,
but beyond that it is very difficult to get anything.

"Only yesterday, for example, the housekeeper came to tell me that
we had not enough broilers for lunch; somebody had made a silly
mistake and we were one short.  We had to send Alfred (he drives
fastest) back to the city with the big car to get one.  Even then,
lunch was half an hour late.  Things like that happen all the time.
One has to learn to be philosophical.

"But surely it is worth it--isn't it?--for the pleasure of being up
here in the wilderness, so far away from everything and everybody.
I sometimes feel up here as if one were cut off from the whole
world--William, will you turn on the radio?"

"Yes, ma'am," said the footman.

"I think it's the municipal elections and, of course, my husband is
tremendously interested.  His company has been trying to get better
city government for so long; they need pure government because of
their franchises, and it has been costing them a tremendous lot of
money to get it.  What do you say, William, not working?  Then will
you please ask Jones to tell the electricians to look at it?"

                              *****

My hostess smoked her cigarette in silence for a minute or two,
while her attentive eye followed the maids as they moved about the
room, picking up coffee cups and ash-trays and bringing cigarettes.
"Gwendoline," she said, "I think you had better tell James to give
us more furnace heat and see that there are fires in the upper
bedrooms to-night.  It's turning a little chilly."

"I always like," she continued, turning to me again, "to see to
everything myself.  It takes trouble, but it's the only way.  But,
I beg your pardon, you were asking me something.  Fishing!  Oh,
yes, there is the most glorious fishing up here.  I must tell
Gwendoline to tell Mrs. Edwards to see that they give you fish at
breakfast.  It's just an ideal fishing country, my husband says.
We send William out every morning, and sometimes William and
Ransome both.  Often, so my husband tells me, when the weather is
really clear he has William up and out by four o'clock--my husband
is so fond of early rising, though he can't get up now himself the
way he used to--but he always likes to get William and Ransome out
early.

"They bring back the most beautiful fish.  Trout?  Yes, I think so.
I don't precisely know because, of course, I never go myself, but I
think trout and sea-bass and finnan haddie--they keep us
beautifully supplied.  Was that finnan haddie that you caught this
morning, William?"

"Dor�, ma'am."

"Oh, yes, it's the same thing, isn't it?"

"Yes, ma'am, just the same."

"Thank you, William, you can take the glasses; we're done with
them.  You see, William knows all about fish, as he comes from
Newfoundland, do you not, William?"

"No, ma'am, Saskatchewan."

"Some place of the sort, so I thought."

                              *****

"What do you say--our amusements here?  Oh, we simply don't have
any.  We have always both felt that up here in this beautiful air
(that French window at the end of the room needs closing, Ransome)
it is amusement enough just to be alive.  So we have never bothered
to think about amusements.  Of course, my husband had the billiard-
room built because that is really his one pastime, and this card-
room because it is mine, and we put in the tennis courts, though it
was hard to do, so as to have them for the children.  But that is
all.  We have the golf links, of course--perhaps you noticed them
as you came up.

"It was really quite a triumph for my husband making the course
here.  He did every bit of it himself.  At one time he had nearly
two hundred Italians working.  My husband, as you know, is terribly
energetic; I often call him a dynamo.  The summer when he was
building the golf course he never seemed to stop; always sitting
with his cigar in his mouth first under a tree on one side, looking
at his Italians, and then on the other side--in fact, he was always
SOMEWHERE.  I used to wonder how he could keep it up.

                              *****

"But I am sorry," concluded my hostess, "I am afraid it is time I
was ordering you all off to bed.  We keep such early hours here
that we go to bed at midnight.

"But perhaps you'd rather stay up a little and play billiards or
cards, and there are always one or two of the servants up--at any
rate till about three, and then, I think, my husband is sending
William fishing.  Good night."




Save Me from My Friends




I

FROM MY FRIEND THE DEADBEAT


He has about him such a simple and appealing way, so friendly and
so flattering and so humble.  And each time I KNOW that it is
another ten dollars that he wants, just that, only that--not my
affection nor my converse--just ten dollars.  Yet he gets it--each
time for the last time--he gets it.

                              *****

Sometimes he meets me in the street, always on a fine day, a fine
warm day with a touch of the springtime, or the summertime, or the
soft touch of autumn or the sunny exhilaration of winter in the
air.  He would never stop me in the rain, or the sleet.  He comes,
by instinct, with the sunshine.  And his manner, so cheery--the
spring tulips are not in it with him.

"And how," he asks, "is your little boy?"

I swallow the bait at once.  "Fine," I answer, "he was not so well
last week, but since Tuesday he's in great shape."

"That's good, that's good," says my deadbeat friend, literally
beaming with pleasure.

It seems impossible to doubt his affectionate concern.

"By the way," he continues, as if in a mere train of thought
incidental to his pleasure over my little boy's health, "I'm glad I
ran into you this morning.  It just happens that to-day I'm rather
squeezed--in fact, I'm in a corner--"

I recognize the situation at once.  I realize that my friend's
troubles always take the form of an angular imprisonment.  That
corner--you'd think that he would learn to keep out in the open!
But no, apparently he gets squeezed, shoved, pushed--all those
things happen to him--and as a result of the squeezing and shoving
and pushing he gets into a corner.

Picture then the situation?  Here's a man in a corner, a man with
an affectionate regard for my little son, and ten dollars will take
him out of that corner.  Refuse him?  Quite impossible.

And after all perhaps it's worth it.  If all my friends would greet
me with the same winning friendliness and the same solicitude, I
think I'd gladly invest ten dollars in each of them.

                              *****

Unfortunately, however, being pushed into a corner is not the worst
thing that happens to my friend.  Sometimes apparently the ground
opens under him and he falls into a hole.  "Old man," he pleads,
"I'm in a hole--till Tuesday."  I note that there is always a
termination of his sufferings in sight.  By some incurable
optimism, he really thinks so.

However deep the hole--and at times it is described, so to speak,
as a hell of a hole--he will be out of it by Tuesday.  And better
than that, by next month at the latest, any next month, he expects
to "see daylight."  This expectation, I know, he has cherished for
years.  Just what the daylight is, what form it takes, I don't
know.  But my friend confidently expects to see it.

A man, then, who is sunk in a deep hole, but who expects daylight
next Tuesday--certainly that's worth ten dollars.

                              *****

Sometimes I meet him with other people.  And if I do I know that he
is some one's guest.  If he is in a club, some one has brought him
there.  If he is at the theater, some one has paid for his seat.
If he is at a concert, some one has given him a ticket.

And wherever he is, whatever he regards, always the same
enthusiastic appreciation.  Not for him to criticize!  Not for him
to find the company dull, or the music poor, or the play inferior.
Everything is first rate always; for he is being treated, being
paid for, and has lost the right to be disagreeable.

                              *****

I have often wondered how it must feel to be such a man.
Staggering along in life, in holes and pitfalls, beaming on surly
acquaintances, cherishing the make-believe illusion of a friendship
that he sold for twenty dollars long ago; homeless himself--for he
lives nowhere--yet entering with admiring words the homes of
others.  "This is a charming room!" he says.  Any room is charming
to him, where there is a free seat, and the chance of lingering to
a meal.  How does it feel, I wonder, to be him?

                              *****

But notice the queer thing about it.  Never mind his motives, or
WHY he does it, but just take the fact.  How amiable he is!  What
an uncomplaining companion!  What a fund of appreciation of our
lightest jests, what a wealth of sympathy--in words, at any rate--
with our most superficial sorrow.

Judge him just as an appearance, and what a man!  What a heart!

                              *****

Thinking thus of my friend, the deadbeat, I sometimes apply the
same reasoning to the rest of us.  How agreeable we are when we are
forced to be.  You, my dear reader, in the presence of your
employer, how bright you are, how good-tempered.  When you wish to
tell something, or to get something, how easy and accommodating you
are, how free from irritation.  In other words, each of us, when we
want something, instinctively takes on a pleasant bearing.  And
perhaps if we keep it up it sinks into our character and what was
make-believe becomes reality.

                              *****

So let it be, or rather so let it might have been, with my poor
friend, the deadbeat.

Might have been, I say, for just of late, just within the last
couple of months, a great change has come over him.

It appears that two months ago he saw daylight--actually saw it.
What caused it I don't know, but the first shape it took was a suit
of new raiment, a stylish coat, a cane with a gold head, a hat in
the latest fashion; and on this followed a suite of rooms in a
first-class hotel, and membership, revived I know not how, in one
of the most exclusive clubs.

What the source of this restored fortune may be I do not know, but
of the existence of the change there seems no doubt.

Nor is the change limited to these externals only.  It goes deeper
than that.  When I talk with my friend on the street now--which is
rare, for he no longer lingers in the sunshine--he does not ask
after my little boy.  He has no time.  He is too busy telling me of
the house that he is building in the most secluded of the suburbs;
he is too much occupied with explaining how rotten was the play he
saw (from a box for which he paid) last night; how inferior the
music and how poor the food at this or that reception.

And of my lost ten dollars, and my twenty, and the two fifteens and
the big hole that cost me fifty--not a word.  He has no thought of
repayment.  It has all passed from his mind.  And after all, why
should he repay?  I realize that the repayment lay in his humble
manner, in his gentle flattering interest, and in the pathos of his
make-believe solicitude.

I must wait till perhaps he will have burned up his new daylight.
And meantime I must keep a ten-dollar bill warm in my pocket for
him.


II

FROM MY FRIEND THE REPORTER


He came up to me on the platform just after I had finished giving
my address, his notebook open in his hand.

"Would you mind," he said, "just telling me the main points of your
speech?  I didn't get to hear it."

"You weren't at the lecture?"

"No," he answered, pausing to sharpen his pencil, "I was at the
hockey game."

"Reporting it?"

"No, I don't report that sort of thing.  I only do the lectures and
the highbrow stuff.  Say, it was a great game.  What did you say
the lecture was about?"

"It was called 'The Triumphal Progress of Science.'"

"On science, eh?" he said, writing rapidly as he spoke.

"Yes," I answered, "on science."

He paused.

"How do you spell 'triumphal,'" he asked; "is it a PH or an F?"

I told him.

"And now," he went on, "what was the principal idea, just the main
thing, don't you know, of your address?"

"I was speaking," I said, "of our advanced knowledge of radiating
emanations and the light it throws on the theory of atomic
structure."

"Wait a minute," he said, "till I get that.  Is it r-a-d-i-a-t-i-n-g?
. . . the light it throws, eh? . . . good. . . .  I guess I got
that."

He prepared to shut his little book.

"Have you ever been here before?"

"No," I said, "it's my first time."

"Are you staying in the new hotel?"

"Yes."

"How do you like it?"

"It's very comfortable," I said.

He reopened his book and scribbled fast.

"Did you see the big new abattoir they are putting in?"

"No," I said, "I didn't hear of it."

"It's the third biggest north of Philadelphia.  What do you think
of it?"

"I didn't see it," I said.

He wrote a little and then paused.

"What do you think," he asked, "of this big mix-up in the city
council?"

"I didn't hear of it," I said.

"Do you think that the aldermen are crooked?"

"I don't know anything about these aldermen," I said.

"No," he answered, "perhaps not, but wouldn't you think it likely
that they'd be crooked?"

"They often are crooked enough," I admitted, "in fact, very often a
pack of bums."

"Eh, what's that, a pack of bums?  That's good, that's great"--he
was all enthusiasm now--"that's the kind of stuff, you know, that
our paper likes to get.  You see, so often you go and take a
lecture and there's nothing said at all--nothing like that, don't
you see?  And there's no way to make anything out of it. . . .  But
with this I can feature it up fine.  'A pack of bums!'  Good.  Do
you suppose they took a pretty big graft out of building the
abattoir?"

"I'm afraid," I said, "that I don't know anything about it."

"But say," he pleaded, "you'd think it likely that they did?"

"No, no," I repeated, "I don't know anything about it."

"All right," he said reluctantly, "I guess I'll have to leave that
out.  Well, much obliged.  I hope you come again.  Good night."

And the next morning as I was borne away from that city in the
train I read his report in the paper, headed up with appropriate
capitals and subheadings:


THINKS ALDERMEN PACK OF BUMS

Distinguished Lecturer Talks on Christian Science

"The distinguished visitor," so ran his report, "gave an
interesting talk on Christian Science in the auditorium of the
Y.M.C.A. before a capacity audience.  He said that we were living
in an age of radio and that in his opinion the aldermen of the city
were a pack of bums.  The lecturer discussed very fully the
structure of anatomy which he said had emanated out of radio.  He
expressed his desire to hazard no opinion about the question of
graft in regard to the new abattoir which he considers the finest
that he has seen at any of his lectures.  The address, which was
freely punctuated with applause, was followed with keen attention,
and the wish was freely expressed at the close that the lecturer
might give it in other cities."

                              *****

There!  That's the way he does it, as all of us who deal with him
are only too well aware.

And am I resentful?  I should say not.  Didn't he say that there
was a "capacity audience" when really there were only sixty-eight
people; didn't he "punctuate the lecture with applause," and
"animate it with keen attention"? . . .  What more can a lecturer
want?  And as to the aldermen and the graft and the heading up,
that's our fault, not his.  We want that sort of thing in our
morning paper, and he gives it to us.

And with it, as his own share, a broad and kindly human
indifference that never means to offend.

Let him trudge off into the night with his little book and pencil
and his uncomplaining industry and take my blessing with him.


III

FROM MY FRIEND WITH A SPEECH TO MAKE


"They've invited me to attend this darned banquet next month," said
Robinson.  "They want me to propose the toast to Our Country.  I
suppose it's easy enough, eh?"

He spoke with an affectation of indifference, but I knew what he
was feeling underneath.

"I suppose," he went on, "all I have to do is to get up and jolly
them along for fifteen minutes, eh?"

"That's all," I answered, "just jolly them along."

                              *****

I met him again a week later.

"They've got me down for this banquet on the 12th," he said.  "They
want me to propose Our Country."

"Do they?" I said.

"Yes, and I was thinking that perhaps a good idea might be to say
something about the history of the country, don't you think?"

So then I knew that Robinson had got to the stage of looking up the
encyclopedia.

"A good idea," I answered.

"I thought," he continued, "that I'd trace it down from early times
and show the way it has come on.  How do you think that would go?"

"I think," I said, "that that would go as far as you like."

                              *****

"Don't you think," asked Robinson, a few days later, "that it might
be a good idea to work in Christopher Columbus--something about
Columbus having been the first to dine on this continent, something
about his dining � la carte, or � la chart--you see, 'carte' and
'chart'--if I can just work it in.  Don't you think?"

"I think," I told him, "that if you can only work it in, it will
make a tremendous hit."

That afternoon I saw him in the Public Library taking out the Life
of Christopher Columbus.

                              *****

I happened to meet Robinson a few days later out in the country on
a Sunday walk.

"They've got me down to speak at this big dinner on the 12th," he
said.

"Oh, yes."

"I don't suppose there's any difficulty about doing a thing of that
sort, is there?"

"None whatever," I answered.

From the look on his face, I could realize the stage of anxiety he
had reached.

"I didn't know," I said, "that you were in the habit of walking out
here?"

"I don't," he answered, "not usually.  But I thought with this
speech to make next Tuesday week, I'd take long walks so as to be
able to think over a few ideas.  Don't you think that's a good
plan?"

"Oh, yes," I said, "fine!  How far do you walk each time?"

"Oh, about ten or twelve miles."

"Yes," I said, "that ought to do it."

I watched him disappear a little later along the side of a meadow,
seeing neither the dandelions nor the daisies, but with his mind
riveted on Christopher Columbus, and murmuring in his fancy, "Mr.
Chairman and ladies and gentlemen--"

Such shipwreck does the prospect of a "Pleasant Evening" make of
the human mind.

                              *****

"I was thinking," he said on the following Saturday, "that a fellow
might get off something about the future of the country, eh?"

"An excellent idea!" I assured him.

                              *****

"You weren't at church," I said to Robinson, "on Sunday--"

"No," he answered, "I have been working on this damn speech for
this damn banquet; I've got to follow right after the damn
toastmaster.  Gad!  I've got to think up some damn thing or other
to say between now and Tuesday."

                              *****

On Monday, Robinson was not at his office.  I understood that he
was working at his speech.  I saw the banquet announced in the
newspapers that day and noticed that there were to be fifteen
speakers.

                              *****

On Thursday morning I called up Robinson on the 'phone.  "No," he
said, "I'm not coming downtown.  They got me stung to speak at this
cursed banquet to-night on Our Country.  Gad, I don't know what to
say.  I've had no time to study it up."

"Too bad," I said.

"Yes, and what I think I'll do is, I'll write the blasted thing
out.  It's more certain that way, isn't it?"

"Dead certain."

                              *****

That evening I called Robinson up again about seven-thirty to wish
him success.

His voice sounded muffled.

"I'm not going," he said, "I've caught a sort of a nasty chill.  I
think it's perhaps a touch of bronchitis (here he coughed), or else
it's just a touch of lumbago or sciatica; in fact, I'm in pretty
poor shape.  I guess I'd better not go out to-night.  My wife says
I'd be crazy to go."

"What about your speech?"

"I sent it over," he answered, "Billy Jones is going to read it to
the boys."

                              *****

Next day I naturally supposed that the episode of Robinson and his
speech was all over.

It soon appeared that it was only beginning.

"Great heavens," he said to me when we met that morning, "did you
see the morning paper?"

"The Chinese massacres?" I asked.

"No, my speech, and Good Gad--Billy Jones!  The paper hardly put in
any of it, anyhow, and left out all the best parts, and what they
did put in Billy Jones got all bashed up."

"Bashed up?"

"Yes, look at this, where I said, 'This country has a great destiny
in front of it,' Billy Jones put it, 'This country has a great
destitution in front of it.'  How the--could he have--"

I didn't stop to hear any more.

                              *****

Robinson is still talking, even after the lapse of months, of what
he WOULD have said if he had been able to go, of other ideas that
came to him later, of jokes that he thought would have gone down
well, of gags that he would have had half a mind to put in.

And he really thinks--or tries to--that his wife wouldn't let him
go to the banquet.


IV

FROM MY FRIEND THE GUIDE


Now that I am safely returned from my annual fishing and hunting
trip into the northern woods, I wish to set down the truth about my
friend "Ed" the guide.

I do not care to do this in the heart of the woods, nor on the edge
of a waterfall, nor on the waters of a lonely lake.  It might have
hurt his feelings.

I class Ed as my friend because I call him "Ed": if this doesn't
constitute friendship, what will?  In other things we are not so
much connected: in point of race Ed is half English, half French-
Canadian, half Algonquin, and partly from the United States.  I
have heard him say, too, that his mother came from Germany.  In
fact, Ed is a melting pot.

The first thing I object to in Ed as a guide is that he never
seemed to know his way.  A guide ought to know that much anyway.
"I'm not just sure," he used to say, "which way we go here, but I
guess this is the track.  You just carry the canoe up this here
hill and I'll walk ahead and take a look."  Most of the time when
we were on the march I carried the canoe and Ed "took a look" in
various directions, strolling gently among the pine trees.

"You just start a fire," he would say, "while I look and see if
this is the lake where we fish after supper."

I spent most of my time in carrying the canoe, lighting fires, and
washing dishes.  Ed mostly smoked and told stories of other men he
had taken out.

"I took a gentleman out here last fall," he said, "a mighty nice
man of the name of Richardson, or Richards; you'd likely know him
for he came from either New York or Cleveland.  We caught a beauty
right here above this fall, just as good as the big one you got
just now.  Well, sir, this Mr. Richardson he was so pleased when he
seen that fish that he gave me a fishing rod.  We was standing
right here, with this Mr. Richardson right on that rock where you
are, and I was here inside him like, and he got this big trout, all
of three pounds, just like that big one you got."

"Did he land it?" I asked, speaking through the noise of the water.

"I done it for him," answered Ed, "just the way I landed yours.
Well, sir, as I say, when Mr. Richardson seen that fish landed, he
said, 'Ed,' says he, 'that's the biggest fish I ever caught or seen
caught.  I'm so pleased,' he says, 'I'm going to give you a rod.'"

Ed paused and shook off the bite of a fish that had bothered him.
He could NOT-CATCH fish better than any one I ever saw.

"He had in his hand," continued Ed, "one of them rods made of split
wood, like the one you're fishing with.  'Here, Ed,' he says, when
he come off the rock, 'take this here rod.'  I've got it still back
home."

After this, of course, there was nothing to do except give Ed my
rod.  I had to live up to the standard of Mr. Richardson.

                              *****

I lost my best knife very shortly afterwards in the same way.

"That's a dandy knife you've got there," said Ed, "you can't get
them there up here.  This Mr. Richardson I was talking about at the
fall had a knife just the mate to that.  We was sitting here one
evening and he was peeling potatoes with this knife just the way
you are.  We'd had a dandy catch at the fall, just like what we got
to-day, only to-day they run a little bigger, and Mr. Richardson
was feeling pretty good after it.  'Here, Ed,' he says, says he,
'take this knife for a reminder.'  I took it and kept it and I had
it till I lost it just as we were starting on this trip.  Yes, sir,
he says, 'Ed,' says he, 'take this knife.'"

                              *****

It appeared that Mr. Richardson also got rid of his landing net on
the trip.  "Take it, Ed,"--these were the words he is reported to
have used, "I shan't be wanting it back in the city.  You keep it."

So my landing net followed Mr. Richardson's.

                              *****

As we moved towards home, I realized that bit by bit Richardson had
parted with his equipment.  "Take it, Ed," were the words he
generally used.  Could I say less?  My best rod, my net, two reels,
my book of flies, were all gone when we were still a hundred miles
from home on our way back.  I estimated that at this point the year
before Richardson had had no fishing tackle left.  Then I realized
with concern that from this point on Richardson had begun to lose
his clothes.

"This Mr. Richardson," said Ed, "had one of them fishing coats same
as yours.  They're certainly a mighty handy coat.  And on the way
out of the woods--in fact, it was somewhere here--we'd been having
mighty good sport, nearly as good as the sport you and I have had,
and Mr. Richardson give me his coat.  It seems he never wore it in
the city.  'Take it, Ed,' says he, 'I won't be wearing it.'"

                              *****

Next day, at a waterfall a few miles lower down, Ed indicated for
me the very spot where Richardson had parted with his fishing cap.

                              *****

Twenty miles below that is the spot, which I will show to any one
for ten dollars a day, where Richardson gave away all his socks,
his two red handkerchiefs, and his three extra shirts.

                              *****

The crisis came that evening.  As we sat by the fire Ed promised to
show me next morning the very spot where Richardson gave him his
boots.  It seems that the exact spot can be located to a nicety.  I
lay awake thinking that night with the moonlight falling through
the pine trees and the river singing in the silence, thinking of
Richardson's boots.

Dimly I began to remember that I had heard something about a man
from my own town whose name actually was Richards, or Richardson,
or something like it, and who died of pneumonia just on his return
from a fishing trip.

                              *****

That night I took action.  In the silence of midnight, I rose from
my gray blanket and stole off among the pine trees.  I took nothing
in the way of fishing equipment, BUT I HAD MY BOOTS ON.  I followed
the down way course of the river and two hours after daylight I
struck a railway track and a train that took me home.  I HAVE MY
BOOTS STILL.

But I often think of poor Richardson when the time came when he saw
Ed looking at his fishing pants as he sharpened up a two-edged
hunting knife