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Title:      Short Circuits (1938)
Author:     Stephen Leacock
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Language:   English
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Date first posted:          October 2003
Date most recently updated: October 2003

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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.

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?

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 plenipotentiaries, 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.

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 palæontology, 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.

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.

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?

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 à 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.

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.

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.

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'hôte 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.

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 + x²/1 . . . xⁿ/1. In fact, that is exactly how often Jones plays at his best; x/1 + x²/1 . . . xⁿ/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 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?

"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?"

"Doré, 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."

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.

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.

"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 à la carte, or à 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.