The Project Gutenberg EBook of Frenzied Fiction, by Stephen Leacock
#10 in our series by Stephen Leacock

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****


Title: Frenzied Fiction

Author: Stephen Leacock

Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8457]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on July 13, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRENZIED FICTION ***




This etext was produced by Gardner Buchanan.





Frenzied Fiction
by Stephen Leacock




CONTENTS

I.     My Revelations as a Spy
II.    Father Knickerbocker: A Fantasy
III.   The Prophet in Our Midst
IV.    Personal Adventures in the Spirit World
V.     The Sorrows of a Summer Guest
VI.    To Nature and Back Again
VII.   The Cave-Man as He Is
VIII.  Ideal Interviews--
   I.    With a European Prince
   II.   With Our Greatest Actor
   III.  With Our Greatest Scientist
   IV.   With Our Typical Novelists
IX.    The New Education
X.     The Errors of Santa Claus
XI.    Lost in New York
XII.   This Strenuous Age
XIII.  The Old, Old Story of How Five Men Went Fishing
XIV.   Back from the Land
XV.    The Perplexity Column as Done by the Jaded Journalist
XVI.   Simple Stories of Success, or How to Succeed in Life
XVII.  In Dry Toronto
XVIII. Merry Christmas




I. My Revelations as a Spy

In many people the very name "Spy" excites a shudder of
apprehension; we Spies, in fact, get quite used to being
shuddered at. None of us Spies mind it at all. Whenever
I enter a hotel and register myself as a Spy I am quite
accustomed to see a thrill of fear run round the clerks,
or clerk, behind the desk.

Us Spies or We Spies--for we call ourselves both--are
thus a race apart. None know us. All fear us. Where do
we live? Nowhere. Where are we? Everywhere. Frequently
we don't know ourselves where we are. The secret orders
that we receive come from so high up that it is often
forbidden to us even to ask where we are. A friend of
mine, or at least a Fellow Spy--us Spies have no friends
--one of the most brilliant men in the Hungarian Secret
Service, once spent a month in New York under the impression
that he was in Winnipeg. If this happened to the most
brilliant, think of the others.

All, I say, fear us. Because they know and have reason
to know our power. Hence, in spite of the prejudice
against us, we are able to move everywhere, to lodge in
the best hotels, and enter any society that we wish to
penetrate.

Let me relate an incident to illustrate this: a month
ago I entered one of the largest of the New York hotels
which I will merely call the B. hotel without naming it:
to do so might blast it. We Spies, in fact, never _name_
a hotel. At the most we indicate it by a number known
only to ourselves, such as 1, 2, or 3.

On my presenting myself at the desk the clerk informed
me that he had no room vacant. I knew this of course to
be a mere subterfuge; whether or not he suspected that
I was a Spy I cannot say. I was muffled up, to avoid
recognition, in a long overcoat with the collar turned
up and reaching well above my ears, while the black beard
and the moustache, that I had slipped on in entering the
hotel, concealed my face. "Let me speak a moment to the
manager," I said. When he came I beckoned him aside and
taking his ear in my hand I breathed two words into it.
"Good heavens!" he gasped, while his face turned as pale
as ashes. "Is it enough?" I asked. "Can I have a room,
or must I breathe again?" "No, no," said the manager,
still trembling. Then, turning to the clerk: "Give this
gentleman a room," he said, "and give him a bath."

What these two words are that will get a room in New York
at once I must not divulge. Even now, when the veil of
secrecy is being lifted, the international interests
involved are too complicated to permit it. Suffice it to
say that if these two had failed I know a couple of others
still better.

I narrate this incident, otherwise trivial, as indicating
the astounding ramifications and the ubiquity of the
international spy system. A similar illustration occurs
to me as I write. I was walking the other day with another
man, on upper B. way between the T. Building and the W.
Garden.

"Do you see that man over there?" I said, pointing from
the side of the street on which we were walking on the
sidewalk to the other side opposite to the side that we
were on.

"The man with the straw hat?" he asked. "Yes, what of
him?"

"Oh, nothing," I answered, "except that he's a Spy!"

"Great heavens!" exclaimed my acquaintance, leaning up
against a lamp-post for support. "A Spy! How do you know
that? What does it mean?"

I gave a quiet laugh--we Spies learn to laugh very quietly.

"Ha!" I said, "that is my secret, my friend. _Verbum
sapientius! Che sara sara! Yodel doodle doo!_"

My acquaintance fell in a dead faint upon the street. I
watched them take him away in an ambulance. Will the
reader be surprised to learn that among the white-coated
attendants who removed him I recognized no less a person
than the famous Russian Spy, Poulispantzoff. What he was
doing there I could not tell. No doubt his orders came
from so high up that he himself did not know. I had seen
him only twice before--once when we were both disguised
as Zulus at Buluwayo, and once in the interior of China,
at the time when Poulispantzoff made his secret entry
into Thibet concealed in a tea-case. He was inside the
tea-case when I saw him; so at least I was informed by
the coolies who carried it. Yet I recognized him instantly.
Neither he nor I, however, gave any sign of recognition
other than an imperceptible movement of the outer eyelid.
(We Spies learn to move the outer lid of the eye so
imperceptibly that it cannot be seen.) Yet after meeting
Poulispantzoff in this way I was not surprised to read
in the evening papers a few hours afterward that the uncle
of the young King of Siam had been assassinated. The
connection between these two events I am unfortunately
not at liberty to explain; the consequences to the Vatican
would be too serious. I doubt if it could remain top-side up.

These, however, are but passing incidents in a life filled
with danger and excitement. They would have remained
unrecorded and unrevealed, like the rest of my revelations,
were it not that certain recent events have to some extent
removed the seal of secrecy from my lips. The death of
a certain royal sovereign makes it possible for me to
divulge things hitherto undivulgeable. Even now I can
only tell a part, a small part, of the terrific things
that I know. When more sovereigns die I can divulge more.
I hope to keep on divulging at intervals for years. But
I am compelled to be cautious. My relations with the
Wilhelmstrasse, with Downing Street and the Quai d'Orsay,
are so intimate, and my footing with the Yildiz Kiosk
and the Waldorf-Astoria and Childs' Restaurants are so
delicate, that a single _faux pas_ might prove to be a
false step.

It is now seventeen years since I entered the Secret
Service of the G. empire. During this time my activities
have taken me into every quarter of the globe, at times
even into every eighth or sixteenth of it.

It was I who first brought back word to the Imperial
Chancellor of the existence of an Entente between England
and France. "Is there an Entente?" he asked me, trembling
with excitement, on my arrival at the Wilhelmstrasse.
"Your Excellency," I said, "there is." He groaned. "Can
you stop it?" he asked. "Don't ask me," I said sadly.
"Where must we strike?" demanded the Chancellor. "Fetch
me a map," I said. They did so. I placed my finger on
the map. "Quick, quick," said the Chancellor, "look where
his finger is." They lifted it up. "Morocco!" they cried.
I had meant it for Abyssinia but it was too late to
change. That night the warship Panther sailed under sealed
orders. The rest is history, or at least history and
geography.

In the same way it was I who brought word to the
Wilhelmstrasse of the _rapprochement_ between England
and Russia in Persia. "What did you find?" asked the
Chancellor as I laid aside the Russian disguise in which
I had travelled. "A _Rapprochement!_" I said. He groaned.
"They seem to get all the best words," he said.

I shall always feel, to my regret; that I am personally
responsible for the outbreak of the present war. It may
have had ulterior causes. But there is no doubt that it
was precipitated by the fact that, for the first time in
seventeen years, I took a six weeks' vacation in June
and July of 1914. The consequences of this careless step
I ought to have foreseen. Yet I took such precautions as
I could. "Do you think," I asked, "that you can preserve
the _status quo_ for six weeks, merely six weeks, if I
stop spying and take a rest?" "We'll try," they answered.
"Remember," I said, as I packed my things, "keep the
Dardanelles closed; have the Sandjak of Novi Bazaar
properly patrolled, and let the Dobrudja remain under a
_modus vivendi_ till I come back."

Two months later, while sitting sipping my coffee at a
Kurhof in the Schwarzwald, I read in the newspapers that
a German army had invaded France and was fighting the
French, and that the English expeditionary force had
crossed the Channel. "This," I said to myself, "means
war." As usual, I was right.

It is needless for me to recount here the life of busy
activity that falls to a Spy in wartime. It was necessary
for me to be here, there and everywhere, visiting all
the best hotels, watering-places, summer resorts, theatres,
and places of amusement. It was necessary, moreover, to
act with the utmost caution and to assume an air of
careless indolence in order to lull suspicion asleep.
With this end in view I made a practice of never rising
till ten in the morning. I breakfasted with great leisure,
and contented myself with passing the morning in a quiet
stroll, taking care, however, to keep my ears open. After
lunch I generally feigned a light sleep, keeping my ears
shut. A _table d'hote_ dinner, followed by a visit to
the theatre, brought the strenuous day to a close. Few
Spies, I venture to say, worked harder than I did.

It was during the third year of the war that I received
a peremptory summons from the head of the Imperial Secret
Service at Berlin, Baron Fisch von Gestern. "I want to
see you," it read. Nothing more. In the life of a Spy
one learns to think quickly, and to think is to act. I
gathered as soon as I received the despatch that for some
reason or other Fisch von Gestern was anxious to see me,
having, as I instantly inferred, something to say to me.
This conjecture proved correct.

The Baron rose at my entrance with military correctness
and shook hands.

"Are you willing," he inquired, "to undertake a mission
to America?"

"I am," I answered.

"Very good. How soon can you start?"

"As soon as I have paid the few bills that I owe in
Berlin," I replied.

"We can hardly wait for that," said my chief, "and in
case it might excite comment. You must start to-night!"

"Very good," I said.

"Such," said the Baron, "are the Kaiser's orders. Here
is an American passport and a photograph that will answer
the purpose. The likeness is not great, but it is
sufficient."

"But," I objected, abashed for a moment, "this photograph
is of a man with whiskers and I am, unfortunately,
clean-shaven."

"The orders are imperative," said Gestern, with official
hauteur. "You must start to-night. You can grow whiskers
this afternoon."

"Very good," I replied.

"And now to the business of your mission," continued the
Baron. "The United States, as you have perhaps heard, is
making war against Germany."

"I have heard so," I replied.

"Yes," continued Gestern. "The fact has leaked out--how,
we do not know--and is being widely reported. His Imperial
Majesty has decided to stop the war with the United
States."

I bowed.

"He intends to send over a secret treaty of the same
nature as the one recently made with his recent Highness
the recent Czar of Russia. Under this treaty Germany
proposes to give to the United States the whole of
equatorial Africa and in return the United States is to
give to Germany the whole of China. There are other
provisions, but I need not trouble you with them. Your
mission relates, not to the actual treaty, but to the
preparation of the ground."

I bowed again.

"You are aware, I presume," continued the Baron, "that
in all high international dealings, at least in Europe,
the ground has to be prepared. A hundred threads must be
unravelled. This the Imperial Government itself cannot
stoop to do. The work must be done by agents like yourself.
You understand all this already, no doubt?"

I indicated my assent.

"These, then, are your instructions," said the Baron,
speaking slowly and distinctly, as if to impress his
words upon my memory. "On your arrival in the United
States you will follow the accredited methods that are
known to be used by all the best Spies of the highest
diplomacy. You have no doubt read some of the books,
almost manuals of instruction, that they have written?"

"I have read many of them," I said.

"Very well. You will enter, that is to say, enter and
move everywhere in the best society. Mark specially,
please, that you must not only _enter_ it but you must
_move_. You must, if I may put it so, get a move on."

I bowed.

"You must mix freely with the members of the Cabinet.
You must dine with them. This is a most necessary matter
and one to be kept well in mind. Dine with them often in
such a way as to make yourself familiar to them. Will
you do this?"

"I will," I said.

"Very good. Remember also that in order to mask your
purpose you must constantly be seen with the most
fashionable and most beautiful women of the American
capital. Can you do this?"

"Can I?" I said.

"You must if need be"--and the Baron gave a most significant
look which was not lost upon me--"carry on an intrigue
with one or, better, with several of them. Are you ready
for it?"

"More than ready," I said.

"Very good. But this is only a part. You are expected
also to familiarize yourself with the leaders of the
great financial interests. You are to put yourself on
such a footing with them as to borrow large sums of money
from them. Do you object to this?"

"No," I said frankly, "I do not."

"Good! You will also mingle freely in Ambassadorial and
foreign circles. It would be well for you to dine, at
least once a week, with the British Ambassador. And now
one final word"--here Gestern spoke with singular
impressiveness--"as to the President of the United States."

"Yes," I said.

"You must mix with him on a footing of the most open-handed
friendliness. Be at the White House continually. Make
yourself in the fullest sense of the words the friend
and adviser of the President. All this I think is clear.
In fact, it is only what is done, as you know, by all
the masters of international diplomacy."

"Precisely," I said.

"Very good. And then," continued the Baron, "as soon as
you find yourself sufficiently _en rapport_ with everybody,
or I should say," he added in correction, for the Baron
shares fully in the present German horror of imported
French words, "when you find yourself sufficiently in
enggeknupfterverwandtschaft with everybody, you may then
proceed to advance your peace terms. And now, my dear
fellow," said the Baron, with a touch of genuine cordiality,
"one word more. Are you in need of money?"

"Yes," I said.

"I thought so. But you will find that you need it less
and less as you go on. Meantime, good-bye, and best wishes
for your mission."

Such was, such is, in fact, the mission with which I am
accredited. I regard it as by far the most important
mission with which I have been accredited by the
Wilhelmstrasse. Yet I am compelled to admit that up to
the present it has proved unsuccessful. My attempts to
carry it out have been baffled. There is something perhaps
in the atmosphere of this republic which obstructs the
working of high diplomacy. For over five months now I
have been waiting and willing to dine with the American
Cabinet. They have not invited me. For four weeks I sat
each night waiting in the J. hotel in Washington with my
suit on ready to be asked. They did not come near me.

Nor have I yet received an invitation from the British
Embassy inviting me to an informal lunch or to midnight
supper with the Ambassador. Everybody who knows anything
of the inside working of the international spy system
will realize that without these invitations one can do
nothing. Nor has the President of the United States given
any sign. I have sent ward to him, in cipher, that I am
ready to dine with him on any day that may be convenient
to both of us. He has made no move in the matter.

Under these circumstances an intrigue with any of the
leaders of fashionable society has proved impossible. My
attempts to approach them have been misunderstood--in
fact, have led to my being invited to leave the J. hotel.
The fact that I was compelled to leave it, owing to
reasons that I cannot reveal, without paying my account,
has occasioned unnecessary and dangerous comment. I
connect it, in fact, with the singular attitude adopted
by the B. hotel on my arrival in New York, to which I
have already referred.

I have therefore been compelled to fall back on revelations
and disclosures. Here again I find the American atmosphere
singularly uncongenial. I have offered to reveal to the
Secretary of State the entire family history of Ferdinand
of Bulgaria for fifty dollars. He says it is not worth
it. I have offered to the British Embassy the inside
story of the Abdication of Constantine for five dollars.
They say they know it, and knew it before it happened.
I have offered, for little more than a nominal sum, to
blacken the character of every reigning family in Germany.
I am told that it is not necessary.

Meantime, as it is impossible to return to Central Europe,
I expect to open either a fruit store or a peanut stand
very shortly in this great metropolis. I imagine that
many of my former colleagues will soon be doing the same!




II. Father Knickerbocker: A Fantasy

It happened quite recently--I think it must have been on
April the second of 1917--that I was making the long
pilgrimage on a day-train from the remote place where I
dwell to the city of New York. And as we drew near the
city, and day darkened into night, I had fallen to reading
from a quaint old copy of Washington Irving's immortal
sketches of Father Knickerbocker and of the little town
where once he dwelt.

I had picked up the book I know not where. Very old it
apparently was and made in England. For there was pasted
across the fly-leaf of it an extract from some ancient
magazine or journal of a century ago, giving what was
evidently a description of the New York of that day.

From reading the book I turned--my head still filled with
the vision of Father Knickerbocker and Sleepy Hollow and
Tarrytown--to examine the extract. I read it in a sort
of half-doze, for the dark had fallen outside, and the
drowsy throbbing of the running train attuned one's mind
to dreaming of the past.

"The town of New York"--so ran the extract pasted in the
little book--"is pleasantly situated at the lower extremity
of the Island of Manhattan. Its recent progress has been
so amazing that it is now reputed, on good authority, to
harbour at least twenty thousand souls. Viewed from the
sea, it presents, even at the distance of half a mile,
a striking appearance owing to the number and beauty of
its church spires, which rise high above the roofs and
foliage and give to the place its characteristically
religious aspect. The extreme end of the island is heavily
fortified with cannon, commanding a range of a quarter
of a mile, and forbidding all access to the harbour.
Behind this Battery a neat greensward affords a pleasant
promenade, where the citizens are accustomed to walk with
their wives every morning after church."

"How I should like to have seen it!" I murmured to myself
as I laid the book aside for a moment. "The Battery, the
harbour and the citizens walking with their wives, their
own wives, on the greensward."

Then I read on:

"From the town itself a wide thoroughfare, the Albany
Post Road, runs meandering northward through the fields.
It is known for some distance under the name of the Broad
Way, and is so wide that four moving vehicles are said
to be able to pass abreast. The Broad Way, especially in
the springtime when it is redolent with the scent of
clover and apple-blossoms, is a favourite evening promenade
for the citizens--with their wives--after church. Here
they may be seen any evening strolling toward the high
ground overlooking the Hudson, their wives on one arm,
a spyglass under the other, in order to view what they
can see. Down the Broad Way may be seen moving also droves
of young lambs with their shepherds, proceeding to the
market, while here and there a goat stands quietly munching
beside the road and gazing at the passers-by."

"It seems," I muttered to myself as I read, "in some ways
but little changed after all."

"The town"--so the extract continued--"is not without
its amusements. A commodious theatre presents with great
success every Saturday night the plays of Shakespeare
alternating with sacred concerts; the New Yorker, indeed,
is celebrated throughout the provinces for his love of
amusement and late hours. The theatres do not come out
until long after nine o'clock, while for the gayer habitues
two excellent restaurants serve fish, macaroni, prunes
and other delicacies till long past ten at night. The
dress of the New Yorker is correspondingly gay. In the
other provinces the men wear nothing but plain suits of
a rusty black, whereas in New York there are frequently
seen suits of brown, snuff-colour and even of
pepper-and-salt. The costumes of the New York women are
equally daring, and differ notably from the quiet dress
of New England.

"In fine, it is commonly said in the provinces that a
New Yorker can be recognized anywhere, with his wife, by
their modish costumes, their easy manners and their
willingness to spend money--two, three and even five
cents being paid for the smallest service."

"Dear me," I thought, as I paused a moment in my reading,
"so they had begun it even then."

"The whole spirit of the place"--the account continued--"has
recently been admirably embodied in literary form by an
American writer, Mr. Washington Irving (not to be confounded
with George Washington). His creation of Father Knickerbocker
is so lifelike that it may be said to embody the very
spirit of New York. The accompanying woodcut--which was
drawn on wood especially for this periodical--recalls at
once the delightful figure of Father Knickerbocker. The
New Yorkers of to-day are accustomed, indeed, to laugh
at Mr. Irving's fancy and to say that Knickerbocker
belongs to a day long since past. Yet those who know tell
us that the image of the amiable old gentleman, kindly
but irascible, generous and yet frugal, loving his town
and seeing little beyond it, may be held once and for
all to typify the spirit of the place, without reference
to any particular time or generation."

"Father Knickerbocker!" I murmured, as I felt myself
dozing off to sleep, rocked by the motion of the car.
"Father Knickerbocker, how strange if he could be here
again and see the great city as we know it now! How
different from his day! How I should love to go round
New York and show it to him as it is."

So I mused and dozed till the very rumble of the wheels
seemed to piece together in little snatches. "Father
Knickerbocker--Father Knickerbocker--the Battery--the
Battery--citizens walking with their wives, with their
wives--their own wives"--until presently, I imagine, I
must have fallen asleep altogether and knew no more till
my journey was over and I found myself among the roar
and bustle of the concourse of the Grand Central.

And there, lo and behold, waiting to meet me, was Father
Knickerbocker himself! I know not how it happened, by
what queer freak of hallucination or by what actual
miracle--let those explain it who deal in such things
--but there he stood before me, with an outstretched hand
and a smile of greeting, Father Knickerbocker himself,
the Embodied Spirit of New York.

"How strange," I said. "I was just reading about you in
a book on the train and imagining how much I should like
actually to meet you and to show you round New York."

The old man laughed in a jaunty way.

"Show _me_ round?" he said. "Why, my dear boy, _I live
here_."

"I know you did long ago," I said.

"I do still," said Father Knickerbocker. "I've never left
the place. I'll show _you_ around. But wait a bit--don't
carry that handbag. I'll get a boy to call a porter to
fetch a man to take it."

"Oh, I can carry it," I said. "It's a mere nothing."

"My dear fellow," said Father Knickerbocker, a little
testily I thought, "I'm as democratic and as plain and
simple as any man in this city. But when it comes to
carrying a handbag in full sight of all this crowd, why,
as I said to Peter Stuyvesant about--about"--here a misty
look seemed to come over the old gentleman's face--"about
two hundred years ago, I'll be hanged if I will. It can't
be done. It's not up to date."

While he was saying this, Father Knickerbocker had beckoned
to a group of porters.

"Take this gentleman's handbag," he said, "and you carry
his newspapers, and you take his umbrella. Here's a
quarter for you and a quarter for you and a quarter for
you. One of you go in front and lead the way to a taxi."

"Don't you know the way yourself?" I asked in a
half-whisper.

"Of course I do, but I generally like to walk with a boy
in front of me. We all do. Only the cheap people nowadays
find their own way."

Father Knickerbocker had taken my arm and was walking
along in a queer, excited fashion, senile and yet with
a sort of forced youthfulness in his gait and manner.

"Now then," he said, "get into this taxi."

"Can't we _walk_?" I asked.

"Impossible," said the old gentleman. "It's five blocks
to where we are going."

As we took our seats I looked again at my companion; this
time more closely. Father Knickerbocker he certainly was,
yet somehow strangely transformed from my pictured fancy
of the Sleepy Hollow days. His antique coat with its wide
skirt had, it seemed, assumed a modish cut as if in
imitation of the bell-shaped spring overcoat of the young
man about town. His three-cornered hat was set at a rakish
angle till it looked almost like an up-to-date fedora.
The great stick that he used to carry had somehow changed
itself into the curved walking-stick of a Broadway lounger.
The solid old shoes with their wide buckles were gone.
In their place he wore narrow slippers of patent leather
of which he seemed inordinately proud, for he had stuck
his feet up ostentatiously on the seat opposite. His eyes
followed my glance toward his shoes.

"For the fox-trot," he said. "The old ones were no good.
Have a cigarette? These are Armenian, or would you prefer
a Honolulan or a Nigerian? Now," he resumed, when we had
lighted our cigarettes, "what would you like to do first?
Dance the tango? Hear some Hawaiian music, drink cocktails,
or what?"

"Why, what I should like most of all, Father
Knickerbocker--"

But he interrupted me.

"There's a devilish fine woman! Look, the tall blonde
one! Give me blondes every time!" Here he smacked his
lips. "By gad, sir, the women in this town seem to get
finer every century. What were you saying?"

"Why, Father Knickerbocker," I began, but he interrupted
me again.

"My dear fellow," he said. "May I ask you not to call me
_Father_ Knickerbocker?"

"But I thought you were so old," I said humbly.

"Old! Me _old_! Oh, I don't know. Why, dash it, there
are plenty of men as old as I am dancing the tango here
every night. Pray call me, if you don't mind, just
Knickerbocker, or simply Knicky--most of the other boys
call me Knicky. Now what's it to be?"

"Most of all," I said, "I should like to go to some quiet
place and have a talk about the old days."

"Right," he said. "We're going to just the place now--nice
quiet dinner, a good quiet orchestra, Hawaiian, but quiet,
and lots of women." Here he smacked his lips again, and
nudged me with his elbow. "Lots of women, bunches of
them. Do you like women?"

"Why, Mr. Knickerbocker," I said hesitatingly, "I
suppose--I--"

The old man sniggered as he poked me again in the ribs.

"You bet you do, you dog!" he chuckled. "We _all_ do.
For me, I confess it, sir, I can't sit down to dinner
without plenty of women, stacks of them, all round me."

Meantime the taxi had stopped. I was about to open the
door and get out.

"Wait, wait," said Father Knickerbocker, his hand upon
my arm, as he looked out of the window. "I'll see somebody
in a minute who'll let us out for fifty cents. None of
us here ever gets in or out of anything by ourselves.
It's bad form. Ah, here he is!"

A moment later we had passed through the portals of a
great restaurant, and found ourselves surrounded with
all the colour and tumult of a New York dinner _a la
mode_. A burst of wild music, pounded and thrummed out
on ukuleles by a group of yellow men in Hawaiian costume,
filled the room, helping to drown or perhaps only serving
to accentuate the babel of talk and the clatter of dishes
that arose on every side. Men in evening dress and women
in all the colours of the rainbow, _decollete_ to a
degree, were seated at little tables, blowing blue smoke
into the air, and drinking green and yellow drinks from
glasses with thin stems. A troupe of _cabaret_ performers
shouted and leaped on a little stage at the side of the
room, unheeded by the crowd.

"Ha ha!" said Knickerbocker, as we drew in our chairs to
a table. "Some place, eh? There's a peach! Look at her!
Or do you like better that lazy-looking brunette next to
her?"

Mr. Knickerbocker was staring about the room, gazing at
the women with open effrontery, and a senile leer upon
his face. I felt ashamed of him. Yet, oddly enough, no
one about us seemed in the least disturbed.

"Now, what cocktail will you have?" said my companion.
"There's a new one this week, the Fantan, fifty cents
each, will you have that? Right? Two Fantans. Now to
eat--what would you like?"

"May I have a slice of cold beef and a pint of ale?"

"Beef!" said Knickerbocker contemptuously. "My dear
fellow, you can't have that. Beef is only fifty cents.
Do take something reasonable. Try Lobster Newburg, or
no, here's a more expensive thing--Filet Bourbon a la
something. I don't know what it is, but by gad, sir, it's
three dollars a portion anyway."

"All right," I said. "You order the dinner."

Mr. Knickerbocker proceeded to do so, the head-waiter
obsequiously at his side, and his long finger indicating
on the menu everything that seemed most expensive and
that carried the most incomprehensible name. When he had
finished he turned to me again.

"Now," he said, "let's talk."

"Tell me," I said, "about the old days and the old times
on Broadway."

"Ah, yes," he answered, "the old days--you mean ten years
ago before the Winter Garden was opened. We've been going
ahead, sir, going ahead. Why, ten years ago there was
practically nothing, sir, above Times Square, and look
at it now."

I began to realize that Father Knickerbocker, old as he
was, had forgotten all the earlier times with which I
associated his memory. There was nothing left but the
_cabarets_, and the Gardens, the Palm Rooms, and the
ukuleles of to-day. Behind that his mind refused to
travel.

"Don't you remember," I asked, "the apple orchards and
the quiet groves of trees that used to line Broadway long
ago?"

"Groves!" he said. "I'll show you a grove, a coconut
grove"--here he winked over his wineglass in a senile
fashion--"that has apple-trees beaten from here to
Honolulu." Thus he babbled on.

All through our meal his talk continued: of _cabarets_
and dances, or fox-trots and midnight suppers, of blondes
and brunettes, "peaches" and "dreams," and all the while
his eye roved incessantly among the tables, resting on
the women with a bold stare. At times he would indicate
and point out for me some of what he called the
"representative people" present.

"Notice that man at the second table," he would whisper
across to me. "He's worth all the way to ten millions:
made it in Government contracts; they tried to send him
to the penitentiary last fall but they can't get him--he's
too smart for them! I'll introduce you to him presently.
See the man with him? That's his lawyer, biggest crook
in America, they say; we'll meet him after dinner." Then
he would suddenly break off and exclaim: "Egad, sir,
there's a fine bunch of them," as another bevy of girls
came trooping out upon the stage.

"I wonder," I murmured, "if there is nothing left of him
but this? Has all the fine old spirit gone? Is it all
drowned out in wine and suffocated in the foul atmosphere
of luxury?"

Then suddenly I looked up at my companion, and I saw to
my surprise that his whole face and manner had altered.
His hand was clenched tight on the edge of the table.
His eyes looked before him--through and beyond the riotous
crowd all about him--into vacancy, into the far past,
back into memories that I thought forgotten. His face
had altered. The senile, leering look was gone, and in
its place the firm-set face of the Knickerbocker of a
century ago.

He was speaking in a strange voice, deep and strong.

"Listen," he said, "listen. Do you hear it--there--far
out at sea--ships' guns--listen--they're calling for
help--ships' guns--far out at sea!" He had clasped me by
the arm. "Quick, to the Battery, they'll need every man
to-night, they'll--"

Then he sank back into his chair. His look changed again.
The vision died out of his eyes.

"What was I saying?" he asked. "Ah, yes, this old brandy,
a very special brand. They keep it for me here, a dollar
a glass. They know me here," he added in his fatuous way.
"All the waiters know me. The headwaiter always knows me
the minute I come into the room--keeps a chair for me.
Now try this brandy and then presently we'll move on and
see what's doing at some of the shows."

But somehow, in spite of himself, my companion seemed to
be unable to bring himself fully back into the consciousness
of the scene before him. The far-away look still lingered
in his eyes.

Presently he turned and spoke to me in a low, confidential
tone.

"Was I talking to myself a moment ago?" he asked. "Yes?
Ah, I feared I was. Do you know--I don't mind telling it
to you--lately I've had a strange, queer feeling that
comes over me at times, as if _something were happening_
--something, I don't know what. I suppose," he continued,
with a false attempt at resuming his fatuous manner, "I'm
going the pace a little too hard, eh! Makes one fanciful.
But the fact is, at times"--he spoke gravely again--"I
feel as if there were something happening, something
coming."

"Knickerbocker," I said earnestly, "Father Knickerbocker,
don't you know that something _is_ happening, that this
very evening as we are sitting here in all this riot,
the President of the United States is to come before
Congress on the most solemn mission that ever--"

But my speech fell unheeded. Knickerbocker had picked up
his glass again and was leering over it at a bevy of
girls dancing upon the stage.

"Look at that girl," he interrupted quickly, "the one
dancing at the end. What do you think of her, eh? Some
peach!"

Knickerbocker broke off suddenly. For at this moment our
ears caught the sound of a noise, a distant tumult, as
it were, far down the street and growing nearer. The old
man had drawn himself erect in his seat, his hand to his
ear, listening as he caught the sound.

"Out on the Broad Way," he said, instinctively calling
it by its ancient name as if a flood of memories were
upon him. "Do you hear it? Listen--listen--what is it?
I've heard that sound before--I've heard every sound on
the Broad Way these two centuries back--what is it? I
seem to know it!"

The sound and tumult as of running feet and of many voices
crying came louder from the street. The people at the
tables had turned in their seats to listen. The music of
the orchestra had stopped. The waiters had thrown back
the heavy curtains from the windows and the people were
crowding to them to look out into the street. Knickerbocker
had risen in his place, his eyes looked toward the windows,
but his gaze was fixed on vacancy as with one who sees
a vision passing.

"I know the sound," he cried. "I see it all again. Look,
can't you see them? It's Massachusetts soldiers marching
South to the war--can't you hear the beating of the drums
and the shrill calling of the fife--the regiments from
the North, the first to come. I saw them pass, here where
we are sitting, sixty years ago--"

Knickerbocker paused a moment, his hand still extended
in the air, and then with a great light upon his face he
cried:

"I know it now! I know what it meant, the feeling that
has haunted me--the sounds I kept hearing--the guns of
the ships at sea and the voices calling in distress! I
know now. It means, sir, it means--"

But as he spoke a great cry came up from the street and
burst in at the doors and windows, echoing in a single
word:

WAR! WAR! The message of the President is for WAR!

"War!" cried Father Knickerbocker, rising to his full
height, stern and majestic and shouting in a stentorian
tone that echoed through the great room. "War! War! To
your places, every one of you! Be done with your idle
luxury! Out with the glare of your lights! Begone you
painted women and worthless men! To your places every
man of you! To the Battery! Man the guns! Stand to it,
every one of you for the defence of America--for our
New York, New York--"

Then, with the sound "New York, New York" still echoing
in my ears I woke up. The vision of my dream was gone.
I was still on the seat of the car where I had dozed
asleep, the book upon my knee. The train had arrived at
the depot and the porters were calling into the doorway
of the car: "New York! New York!"

All about me was the stir and hubbub of the great depot.
But loud over all it was heard the call of the newsboys
crying "WAR! WAR! The President's message is for WAR!
Late extra! WAR! WAR!"

And I knew that a great nation had cast aside the bonds
of sloth and luxury, and was girding itself to join in
the fight for the free democracy of all mankind.




III. The Prophet in Our Midst

The Eminent Authority looked around at the little group
of us seated about him at the club. He was telling us,
or beginning to tell us, about the outcome of the war.
It was a thing we wanted to know. We were listening
attentively. We felt that we were "getting something."

"I doubt very much," he said, "whether Downing Street
realizes the enormous power which the Quai d'Orsay has
over the Yildiz Kiosk."

"So do I," I said, "what is it?"

But he hardly noticed the interruption.

"You've got to remember," he went on, "that, from the
point of view of the Yildiz, the Wilhelmstrasse is just
a thing of yesterday."

"Quite so," I said.

"Of course," he added, "the Ballplatz is quite different."

"Altogether different," I admitted.

"And mind you," he said, "the Ballplatz itself can be
largely moved from the Quirinal through the Vatican."

"Why of course it can," I agreed, with as much relief in
my tone as I could put into it. After all, what simpler
way of moving the Ballplatz than that?

The Eminent Authority took another sip at his tea, and
looked round at us through his spectacles.

It was I who was taking on myself to do most of the
answering, because it was I who had brought him there
and invited the other men to meet him. "He's coming round
at five," I had said, "do come and have a cup of tea and
meet him. He knows more about the European situation and
the probable solution than any other man living." Naturally
they came gladly. They wanted to know--as everybody wants
to know--how the war will end. They were just ordinary
plain men like myself.

I could see that they were a little mystified, perhaps
disappointed. They would have liked, just as I would, to
ask a few plain questions, such as, can the Italians
knock the stuff out of the Austrians? Are the Rumanians
getting licked or not? How many submarines has Germany
got, anyway? Such questions, in fact, as we are accustomed
to put up to one another every day at lunch and to answer
out of the morning paper. As it was, we didn't seem to
be getting anywhere.

No one spoke. The silence began to be even a little
uncomfortable. It was broken by my friend Rapley, who is
in wholesale hardware and who has all the intellectual
bravery that goes with it. He asked the Authority straight
out the question that we all wanted to put.

"Just what do you mean by the Ballplatz? What is the
Ballplatz?"

The Authority smiled an engaging smile.

"Precisely," he said, "I see your drift exactly. You say
what _is_ the Ballplatz? I reply quite frankly that it
is almost impossible to answer. Probably one could best
define it as the driving power behind the Ausgleich."

"I see," said Rapley.

"Though the plain fact is that ever since the Herzegovinian
embroglio the Ballplatz is little more than a counterpoise
to the Wilhelmstrasse."

"Ah!" said Rapley.

"Indeed, as everybody knows, the whole relationship of
the Ballplatz with the Nevski Prospekt has emanated from
the Wilhelmstrasse."

This was a thing which personally I had _not_ known. But
I said nothing. Neither did the other men. They continued
smoking, looking as innocent as they could.

"Don't misunderstand me," said the Authority, "when I
speak of the Nevski Prospekt. I am not referring in any
way to the Tsarskoe Selo."

"No, no," we all agreed.

"No doubt there were, as we see it plainly now, under
currents in all directions from the Tsarskoe Selo."

We all seemed to suggest by our attitude that these
undercurrents were sucking at our very feet.

"But the Tsarskoe Selo," said the Authority, "is now
definitely eliminated."

We were glad of that; we shifted our feet back into
attitudes of ease.

I felt that it was time to ask a leading question.

"Do you think," I said, "that Germany will be broken up
by the war?"

"You mean Germany in what sense? Are you thinking of
Preuszenthum? Are yon referring to Junkerismus?"

"No," I said, quite truthfully, "neither of them."

"Ah," said the Authority, "I see; you mean Germany as a
Souverantat embodied in a Reichsland."

"That's it," I said.

"Then it's rather hard," said the Eminent Authority, "to
answer your question in plain terms. But I'll try. One
thing, of course, is _absolutely_ certain, Mittel-Europa
goes overboard."

"It does, eh?"

"Oh, yes, absolutely. This is the end of Mittel-Europa.
I mean to say--here we've had Mittel-Europa, that is,
the Mittel-Europa _idea_, as a sort of fantasmus in front
of Teutonism ever since Koniggratz."

The Authority looked all round us in that searching way
he had. We all tried to look like men seeing a fantasmus
and disgusted at it.

"So you see," he went on, "Mittel-Europa is done with."

"I suppose it is," I said. I didn't know just whether to
speak with regret or not. I heard Rapley murmur, "I guess
so."

"And there is not a doubt," continued the Authority, "that
when Mittel-Europa goes, Grossdeutschthum goes with it."

"Oh, sure to," we all murmured.

"Well, then, there you are--what is the result for Germany
--why the thing's as plain as a pikestaff--in fact you're
driven to it by the sheer logic of the situation--there
is only _one_ outcome--"

The Authority was speaking very deliberately. He even
paused at this point and lighted a cigarette, while we
all listened breathlessly. We felt that we had got the
thing to a focus at last.

"Only one outcome--a Staatenbund."

"Great heavens," I said, "not a Staatenbund!"

"Undoubtedly," said the Authority, puffing quietly at
his cigarette, as if personally he wouldn't lift a finger
to stop the Staatenbund if he could, "that's the end of
it, a Staatenbund. In other words, we are back where we
were before the Vienna Congress!"

At this he chuckled heartily to himself: so the rest of
us laughed too: the thing was _too_ absurd. But the
Authority, who was a man of nice distinctions and genuinely
anxious to instruct us, was evidently afraid that he had
overstated things a little.

"Mind you," he said, "there'll be _something_
left--certainly the Zollverein and either the Ausgleich
or something very like it."

All of the men gave a sort of sigh of relief. It was
certainly something to have at least a sort of resemblance
or appearance of the Ausgleich among us. We felt that we
were getting on. One could see that a number of the men
were on the brink of asking questions.

"What about Rumania," asked Nelles--he is a banker and
interested in government bonds--"is this the end of it?"

"No," said the Authority, "it's not the end of Rumania,
but it _is_ the end of Rumanian Irridentismus."

That settled Nelles.

"What about the Turks?" asked Rapley.

"The Turks, or rather, I suppose it would be more proper
to say, the Osmanli, as that is no doubt what you mean?"
Rapley nodded. "Well, speaking personally, I should say
that there's no difficulty in a permanent settlement in
that quarter. If I were drawing up the terms of a treaty
of peace meant to be really lasting I should lay down
three absolute bases; the rest needn't matter"--the
Authority paused a moment and then proceeded to count
off the three conditions of peace on his fingers--"These
would be, first, the evacuation of the Sandjak; second,
an international guarantee for the Capitulations; and
third, for internal matters, an arrangement along the
lines of the original firman of Midhat Pasha."

A murmur of complete satisfaction went round the group.

"I don't say," continued the Eminent Authority, "that
there wouldn't be other minor matters to adjust; but they
would be a mere detail. You ask me, for instance, for a
_milice_, or at least a gendarmerie, in the Albanian
hinterland; very good, I grant it you at once. You retain,
if you like, you abolish the Cypriotic suzerainty of the
Porte--all right. These are matters of indifference."

We all assumed a look of utter indifference.

"But what about the Dardanelles? Would you have them
fixed so that ships could go through, or not?" asked
Rapley.

He is a plain man, not easily put down and liking a plain
answer. He got it.

"The Dardanelles," said the Authority, "could easily be
denationalized under a quadrilateral guarantee to be made
a pars materia of the pactum foederis."

"That ought to hold them," I murmured.

The Authority felt now that he had pretty well settled
the map of Europe. He rose and shook hands with us all
around very cordially. We did not try to detain him. We
felt that time like his was too valuable to be wasted on
things like us.

"Well, I tell you," said Rapley, as we settled back into
our chairs when the Great Authority had gone, "my own
opinion, boys, is that the United States and England can
trim Germany and Austria any day in the week and twice
on Sunday."

After which somebody else said:

"I wonder how many of these submarines Germany has,
anyway?"

And then we drifted back into the humbler kind of war
talk that we have been carrying on for three years.

But later, as we walked home together, Rapley said to me:

"That fellow threw a lot of light on things in Europe,
didn't he?"

And I answered:

"Yes."

What liars we all are!




IV. Personal Adventures in the Spirit World

I do not write what follows with the expectation of
convincing or converting anybody. We Spiritualists, or
Spiritists--we call ourselves both, or either--never ask
anybody to believe us. If they do, well and good. If not,
all right. Our attitude simply is that facts are facts.
There they are; believe them or not as you like. As I
said the other night, in conversation with Aristotle and
John Bunyan and George Washington and a few others, why
should anybody believe us? Aristotle, I recollect, said
that all that he wished was that everybody should know
how happy he was; and Washington said that for his part,
if people only knew how bright and beautiful it all was
where he was, they would willingly, indeed gladly, pay
the mere dollar--itself only a nominal fee--that it cost
to talk to him. Bunyan, I remember, added that he himself
was quite happy.

But, as I say, I never ask anybody to believe me; the
more so as I was once an absolute sceptic myself. As I
see it now, I was prejudiced. The mere fact that spiritual
seances and the services of a medium involved the payment
of money condemned the whole thing in my eyes. I did not
realize, as I do now, that these _medii_, like anybody
else, have got to live; otherwise they would die and
become spirits.

Nor would I now place these disclosures before the public
eyes were if not that I think that in the present crisis
they will prove of value to the Allied cause.

But let me begin at the beginning. My own conversion to
spiritualism came about, like that of so many others,
through the more or less casual remark of a Friend.

Noticing me one day gloomy and depressed, this Friend
remarked to me:

"Have you any belief in Spiritualism?"

Had it come from anyone else, I should have turned the
question aside with a sneer. But it so happens that I
owe a great deal of gratitude to this particular Friend.
It was he who, at a time when I was so afflicted with
rheumatism that I could scarcely leap five feet into the
air without pain, said to me one day quite casually:
"Have you ever tried pyro for your rheumatism?" One month
later I could leap ten feet in the air--had I been able
to--without the slightest malaise. The same man, I may
add, hearing me one day exclaiming to myself: "Oh, if
there were anything that would remove the stains from my
clothes!" said to me very simply and quietly: "Have you
ever washed them in luxo?" It was he, too, who, noticing
a haggard look on my face after breakfast one morning,
inquired immediately what I had been eating for breakfast;
after which, with a simplicity and directness which I
shall never forget, he said: "Why not eat humpo?"

Nor can I ever forget my feeling on another occasion
when, hearing me exclaim aloud: "Oh, if there were only
something invented for removing the proteins and amygdaloids
from a carbonized diet and leaving only the pure nitrogenous
life-giving elements!" seized my hand in his, and said
in a voice thrilled with emotion: "There is! It has!"

The reader will understand, therefore, that a question,
or query, from such a Friend was not to be put lightly
aside. When he asked if I believed in Spiritualism I
answered with perfect courtesy:

"To be quite frank, I do not."

There was silence between us for a time, and then my
Friend said:

"Have you ever given it a trial?"

I paused a moment, as the idea was a novel one.

"No," I answered, "to be quite candid, I have not."

Neither of us spoke for perhaps twenty minutes after
this, when my Friend said:

"Have you anything against it?"

I thought awhile and then I said:

"Yes, I have."

My Friend remained silent for perhaps half an hour. Then
he asked:

"What?"

I meditated for some time. Then I said:

"This--it seems to me that the whole thing is done for
money. How utterly unnatural it is to call up the
dead--one's great-grandfather, let us say--and pay money
for talking to him."

"Precisely," said my Friend without a moment's pause. "I
thought so. Now suppose I could bring you into contact
with the spirit world through a medium, or through
different _medii_, without there being any question of
money, other than a merely nominal fee, the money being,
as it were, left out of count, and regarded as only, so
to speak, nominal, something given merely _pro forma_
and _ad interim_. Under these circumstances, will you
try the experiment?"

I rose and took my Friend's hand."

"My dear fellow," I said, "I not only will, but I shall."

From this conversation dated my connection with
Spiritualism, which has since opened for me a new world.

It would be out of place for me to indicate the particular
address or the particular methods employed by the agency
to which my Friend introduced me. I am anxious to avoid
anything approaching a commercial tinge in what I write.
Moreover, their advertisement can be seen along with many
others--all, I am sure, just as honourable and just as
trustworthy--in the columns of any daily newspaper. As
everybody knows, many methods are employed. The tapping
of a table, the movement of a ouija board, or the voice
of a trance medium, are only a few among the many devices
by which the spirits now enter into communication with
us. But in my own case the method used was not only
simplicity itself, but was so framed as to carry with it
the proof of its own genuineness. One had merely to speak
into the receiver of a telephone, and the voice of the
spirit was heard through the transmitter as in an ordinary
telephone conversation.

It was only natural, after the scoffing remark that I
had made, that I should begin with my great-grandfather.
Nor can I ever forget the peculiar thrill that went
through me when I was informed by the head of the agency
that a tracer was being sent out for Great-grandfather
to call him to the phone.

Great-grandfather--let me do him this justice--was prompt.
He was there in three minutes. Whatever his line of
business was in the spirit world--and I was never able
to learn it--he must have left it immediately and hurried
to the telephone. Whatever later dissatisfaction I may
have had with Great-grandfather, let me state it fairly
and honestly, he is at least a punctual man. Every time
I called he came right away without delay. Let those who
are inclined to cavil at the methods of the Spiritualists
reflect how impossible it would be to secure such
punctuality on anything but a basis of absolute honesty.

In my first conversation with Great-grandfather, I found
myself so absurdly nervous at the thought of the vast
gulf of space and time across which we were speaking that
I perhaps framed my questions somewhat too crudely.

"How are you, great-grandfather?" I asked.

His voice came back to me as distinctly as if he were in
the next room:

"I am happy, very happy. Please tell everybody that I am
_happy_."

"Great-grandfather," I said. "I will. I'll see that
everybody knows it. Where are you, great-grandfather?"

"Here," he answered, "beyond."

"Beyond what?"

"Here on the other side."

"Side of which?" I asked.

"Of the great vastness," he answered. "The other end of
the Illimitable."

"Oh, I see," I said, "that's where you are."

We were silent for some time. It is amazing how difficult
it is to find things to talk about with one's
great-grandfather. For the life of me I could think of
nothing better than:

"What sort of weather have you been having?"

"There is no weather here," said Great-grandfather. "It's
all bright and beautiful all the time."

"You mean bright sunshine?" I said.

"There is no sun here," said Great-grandfather.

"Then how do you mean--" I began.

But at this moment the head of the agency tapped me on
the shoulder to remind me that the two minutes' conversation
for which I had deposited, as a nominal fee, five dollars,
had expired. The agency was courteous enough to inform
me that for five dollars more Great-grandfather would
talk another two minutes.

But I thought it preferable to stop for the moment.

Now I do not wish to say a word against my own
great-grandfather. Yet in the conversations which followed
on successive days I found him--how shall I put it?
--unsatisfactory. He had been, when on this side--to use
the term we Spiritualists prefer--a singularly able man,
an English judge; so at least I have always been given
to understand. But somehow Great-grandfather's brain, on
the other side, seemed to have got badly damaged. My
own theory is that, living always in the bright sunshine,
he had got sunstroke. But I may wrong him. Perhaps it
was locomotor ataxy that he had. That he was very, very
happy where he was is beyond all doubt. He said so at
every conversation. But I have noticed that feeble-minded
people are often happy. He said, too, that he was glad
to be where he was; and on the whole I felt glad that he
was too. Once or twice I thought that possibly
Great-grandfather felt so happy because he had been
drinking: his voice, even across the great gulf, seemed
somehow to suggest it. But on being questioned he told
me that where he was there was no drink and no thirst,
because it was all so bright and beautiful. I asked him
if he meant that it was "bone-dry" like Kansas, or whether
the rich could still get it? But he didn't answer.

Our intercourse ended in a quarrel. No doubt it was my
fault. But it _did_ seem to me that Great-grandfather,
who had been one of the greatest English lawyers of his
day, might have handed out an opinion.

The matter came up thus: I had had an argument--it was
in the middle of last winter--with some men at my club
about the legal interpretation of the Adamson Law. The
dispute grew bitter.

"I'm right," I said, "and I'll prove it if you give me
time to consult the authorities."

"Consult your great-grandfather!" sneered one of the men.

"All right," I said, "I will."

I walked straight across the room to the telephone and
called up the agency.

"Give me my great-grandfather," I said. "I want him right
away."

He was there. Good, punctual old soul, I'll say that for
him. He was there.

"Great-grandfather," I said, "I'm in a discussion here
about the constitutionality of the Adamson Law, involving
the power of Congress under the Constitution. Now, you
remember the Constitution when they made it. Is the law
all right?"

There was silence.

"How does it stand, great-grandfather?" I said. "Will it
hold water?"

Then he spoke.

"Over here," he said, "there are no laws, no members of
Congress and no Adamsons; it's all bright and beautiful
and--"

"Great-grandfather," I said, as I hung up the receiver
in disgust, "you are a Mutt!"

I never spoke to him again. Yet I feel sorry for him,
feeble old soul, flitting about in the Illimitable, and
always so punctual to hurry to the telephone, so happy,
so feeble-witted and courteous; a better man, perhaps,
take it all in all, than he was in life; lonely, too, it
may be, out there in the Vastness. Yet I never called
him up again. He is happy. Let him stay.

Indeed, my acquaintance with the spirit world might have
ended at that point but for the good offices, once more,
of my Friend.

"You find your great-grandfather a little slow, a little
dull?" he said. "Well, then, if you want brains, power,
energy, why not call up some of the spirits of the great
men, some of the leading men, for instance, of your
great-grandfather's time?"

"You've said it!" I exclaimed. "I'll call up Napoleon
Bonaparte."

I hurried to the agency.

"Is it possible," I asked, "for me to call up the Emperor
Napoleon and talk to him?"

Possible? Certainly. It appeared that nothing was easier.
In the case of Napoleon Bonaparte the nominal fee had to
be ten dollars in place of five; but it seemed to me
that, if Great-grandfather cost five, Napoleon Bonaparte
at ten was cheapness itself.

"Will it take long to get him?" I asked anxiously.

"We'll send out a tracer for him right away," they said.

Like Great-grandfather, Napoleon was punctual. That I
will say for him. If in any way I think less of Napoleon
Bonaparte now than I did, let me at least admit that a
more punctual, obliging, willing man I never talked with.

He came in two minutes.

"He's on the line now," they said.

I took up the receiver, trembling.

"Hello!" I called. "Est-ce que c'est l'Empereur Napoleon
a qui j'ai l'honneur de parler?"

"How's that?" said Napoleon.

"Je demande si je suis en communication avec l'Empereur
Napoleon--"

"Oh," said Napoleon, "that's all right; speak English."

"What!" I said in surprise. "You know English? I always
thought you couldn't speak a word of it."

He was silent for a minute. Then he said:

"I picked it up over here. It's all right. Go right ahead."

"Well," I continued, "I've always admired you so much,
your wonderful brain and genius, that I felt I wanted to
speak to you and ask you how you are."

"Happy," said Napoleon, "very happy."

"That's good," I said. "That's fine! And how is it out
there? All bright and beautiful, eh?"

"Very beautiful," said the Emperor.

"And just where are you?" I continued. "Somewhere out in
the Unspeakable, I suppose, eh?"

"Yes," he answered, "out here beyond."

"That's good," I said. "Pretty happy, eh?"

"Very happy," said Napoleon. "Tell everybody how happy
I am."

"I know," I answered. "I'll tell them all. But just now
I've a particular thing to ask. We've got a big war on,
pretty well the whole world in it, and I thought perhaps
a few pointers from a man like you--"

But at this point the attendant touched me on the shoulder.
"Your time is up," he said.

I was about to offer to pay at once for two minutes more
when a better idea struck me. Talk with Napoleon? I'd do
better than that. I'd call a whole War Council of great
spirits, lay the war crisis before them and get the
biggest brains that the world ever produced to work on
how to win the war.

Who should I have? Let me see! Napoleon himself, of
course. I'd bring him back. And for the sea business,
the submarine problem, I'd have Nelson. George Washington,
naturally, for the American end; for politics, say, good
old Ben Franklin, the wisest old head that ever walked
on American legs, and witty too; yes, Franklin certainly,
if only for his wit to keep the council from getting
gloomy; Lincoln--honest old Abe--him certainly I must
have. Those and perhaps a few others.

I reckoned that a consultation at ten dollars apiece with
spirits of that class was cheap to the verge of the
ludicrous. Their advice ought to be worth millions--yes,
billions--to the cause.

The agency got them for me without trouble. There is no
doubt they are a punctual crowd, over there beyond in
the Unthinkable.

I gathered them all in and talked to them, all and
severally, the payment, a merely nominal matter, being
made, _pro forma_, in advance.

I have in front of me in my rough notes the result of
their advice. When properly drafted it will be, I feel
sure, one of the most important state documents produced
in the war.

In the personal sense--I have to admit it--I found them
just a trifle disappointing. Franklin, poor fellow, has
apparently lost his wit. The spirit of Lincoln seemed to
me to have none of that homely wisdom that he used to
have. And it appears that we were quite mistaken in
thinking Disraeli a brilliant man; it is clear to me now
that he was dull--just about as dull as Great-grandfather,
I should say. Washington, too, is not at all the kind of
man we thought him.

Still, these are only personal impressions. They detract
nothing from the extraordinary value of the advice given,
which seems to me to settle once and for ever any lingering
doubt about the value of communications with the Other Side.

My draft of their advice runs in part as follows:

The Spirit of Nelson, on being questioned on the submarine
problem, holds that if all the men on the submarines were
where he is everything would be bright and happy. This
seems to me an invaluable hint. There is nothing needed
now except to put them there.

The advice of the Spirit of Napoleon about the campaign
on land seemed to me, if possible, of lower value than
that of Nelson on the campaign at sea. It is hardly
conceivable that Napoleon has forgotten where the Marne
is. But it may have changed since his day. At any rate,
he says that, if ever the Russians cross the Marne, all
is over. Coming from such a master-strategist, this ought
to be attended to.

Franklin, on being asked whether the United States had
done right in going into the war, said "Yes"; asked
whether the country could with honour have stayed out,
he said "No." There is guidance here for thinking men of
all ranks.

Lincoln is very happy where he is. So, too, I was amazed
to find, is Disraeli. In fact, it was most gratifying to
learn that all of the great spirits consulted are very
happy, and want everybody to know how happy they are.
Where they are, I may say, it is all bright and beautiful.

Fear of trespassing on their time prevented me from
questioning each of them up to the full limit of the
period contracted for.

I understand that I have still to my credit at the agency
five minutes' talk with Napoleon, available at any time,
and similarly five minutes each with Franklin and
Washington, to say nothing of ten minutes' unexpired time
with Great-grandfather.

All of these opportunities I am willing to dispose of at
a reduced rate to anyone still sceptical of the reality
of the spirit world.




V. The Sorrows of a Summer Guest

Let me admit, as I start to write, that the whole thing
is my own fault. I should never have come. I knew better.
I have known better for years. I have known that it is
sheer madness to go and pay visits in other people's
houses.

Yet in a moment of insanity I have let myself in for it
and here I am. There is no hope, no outlet now till the
first of September when my visit is to terminate. Either
that or death. I do not greatly care which.

I write this, where no human eye can see me, down by the
pond--they call it the lake--at the foot of Beverly-Jones's
estate. It is six o'clock in the morning. No one is up.
For a brief hour or so there is peace. But presently Miss
Larkspur--the jolly English girl who arrived last week
--will throw open her casement window and call across
the lawn, "Hullo everybody! What a ripping morning!" And
young Poppleson will call back in a Swiss yodel from
somewhere in the shrubbery, and Beverly-Jones will appear
on the piazza with big towels round his neck and shout,
"Who's coming for an early dip?" And so the day's fun
and jollity--heaven help me--will begin again.

Presently they will all come trooping in to breakfast,
in coloured blazers and fancy blouses, laughing and
grabbing at the food with mimic rudeness and bursts of
hilarity. And to think that I might have been breakfasting
at my club with the morning paper propped against the
coffee-pot, in a silent room in the quiet of the city.

I repeat that it is my own fault that I am here.

For many years it had been a principle of my life to
visit nobody. I had long since learned that visiting only
brings misery. If I got a card or telegram that said,
"Won't you run up to the Adirondacks and spend the week-end
with us?" I sent back word: "No, not unless the Adirondacks
can run faster than I can," or words to that effect. If
the owner of a country house wrote to me: "Our man will
meet you with a trap any afternoon that you care to name,"
I answered, in spirit at least: "No, he won't, not unless
he has a bear-trap or one of those traps in which they
catch wild antelope." If any fashionable lady friend
wrote to me in the peculiar jargon that they use: "Can
you give us from July the twelfth at half-after-three
till the fourteenth at four?" I replied: "Madam, take
the whole month, take a year, but leave me in peace."

Such at least was the spirit of my answers to invitations.
In practice I used to find it sufficient to send a telegram
that read: "Crushed with work impossible to get away,"
and then stroll back into the reading-room of the club
and fall asleep again.

But my coming here was my own fault. It resulted from
one of those unhappy moments of expansiveness such as
occur, I imagine, to everybody--moments when one appears
to be something quite different from what one really is,
when one feels oneself a thorough good fellow, sociable,
merry, appreciative, and finds the people around one the
same. Such moods are known to all of us. Some people say
that it is the super-self asserting itself. Others say
it is from drinking. But let it pass. That at any rate
was the kind of mood that I was in when I met Beverly-Jones
and when he asked me here.

It was in the afternoon, at the club. As I recall it, we
were drinking cocktails and I was thinking what a bright,
genial fellow Beverly-Jones was, and how completely I
had mistaken him. For myself--I admit it--I am a brighter,
better man after drinking two cocktails than at any other
time--quicker, kindlier, more genial. And higher, morally.
I had been telling stories in that inimitable way that
one has after two cocktails. In reality, I only know four
stories, and a fifth that I don't quite remember, but in
moments of expansiveness they feel like a fund or flow.

It was under such circumstances that I sat with
Beverly-Jones. And it was in shaking hands at leaving
that he said: "I _do_ wish, old chap, that you could run
up to our summer place and give us the whole of August!"
and I answered, as I shook him warmly by the hand: "My
_dear_ fellow, I'd simply _love_ to!" "By gad, then it's
a go!" he said. "You must come up for August, and wake
us all up!"

Wake them up! Ye gods! Me wake them up!

One hour later I was repenting of my folly, and wishing,
when I thought of the two cocktails, that the prohibition
wave could be hurried up so as to leave us all high and
dry--bone-dry, silent and unsociable.

Then I clung to the hope that Beverly-Jones would forget.
But no. In due time his wife wrote to me. They were
looking forward so much, she said, to my visit; they
felt--she repeated her husband's ominous phrase--that I
should wake them all up!

What sort of alarm-clock did they take me for, anyway!

Ah, well! They know better now. It was only yesterday
afternoon that Beverly-Jones found me standing here in
the gloom of some cedar-trees beside the edge of the pond
and took me back so quietly to the house that I realized
he thought I meant to drown myself. So I did.

I could have stood it better--my coming here, I mean
--if they hadn't come down to the station in a body to
meet me in one of those long vehicles with seats down
the sides: silly-looking men in coloured blazers and
girls with no hats, all making a hullabaloo of welcome.
"We are quite a small party," Mrs. Beverly-Jones had
written. Small! Great heavens, what would they call a
large one? And even those at the station turned out to
be only half of them. There were just as many more all
lined up on the piazza of the house as we drove up, all
waving a fool welcome with tennis rackets and golf clubs.

Small party, indeed! Why, after six days there are still
some of the idiots whose names I haven't got straight!
That fool with the fluffy moustache, which is he? And
that jackass that made the salad at the picnic yesterday,
is he the brother of the woman with the guitar, or who?

But what I mean is, there is something in that sort of
noisy welcome that puts me to the bad at the start. It
always does. A group of strangers all laughing together,
and with a set of catchwords and jokes all their own,
always throws me into a fit of sadness, deeper than words.
I had thought, when Mrs. Beverly-Jones said a _small_
party, she really meant small. I had had a mental picture
of a few sad people, greeting me very quietly and gently,
and of myself, quiet, too, but cheerful--somehow lifting
them up, with no great effort, by my mere presence.

Somehow from the very first I could feel that Beverly-Jones
was disappointed in me. He said nothing. But I knew it.
On that first afternoon, between my arrival and dinner,
he took me about his place, to show it to me. I wish that
at some proper time I had learned just what it is that
you say when a man shows you about his place. I never
knew before how deficient I am in it. I am all right to
be shown an iron-and-steel plant, or a soda-water factory,
or anything really wonderful, but being shown a house
and grounds and trees, things that I have seen all my
life, leaves me absolutely silent.

"These big gates," said Beverly-Jones, "we only put up
this year."

"Oh," I said. That was all. Why shouldn't they put them
up this year? I didn't care if they'd put them up this
year or a thousand years ago.

"We had quite a struggle," he continued, "before we
finally decided on sandstone.

"You did, eh?" I said. There seemed nothing more to say;
I didn't know what sort of struggle he meant, or who
fought who; and personally sandstone or soapstone or any
other stone is all the same to me.

"This lawn," said Beverly-Jones, "we laid down the first
year we were here." I answered nothing. He looked me
right in the face as he said it and I looked straight
back at him, but I saw no reason to challenge his statement.
"The geraniums along the border," he went on, "are rather
an experiment. They're Dutch."

I looked fixedly at the geraniums but never said a word.
They were Dutch; all right, why not? They were an
experiment. Very good; let them be so. I know nothing in
particular to say about a Dutch experiment.

I could feel that Beverly-Jones grew depressed as he
showed me round. I was sorry for him, but unable to help.
I realized that there were certain sections of my education
that had been neglected. How to be shown things and make
appropriate comments seems to be an art in itself. I
don't possess it. It is not likely now, as I look at this
pond, that I ever shall.

Yet how simple a thing it seems when done by others. I
saw the difference at once the very next day, the second
day of my visit, when Beverly-Jones took round young
Poppleton, the man that I mentioned above who will
presently give a Swiss yodel from a clump of laurel bushes
to indicate that the day's fun has begun.

Poppleton I had known before slightly. I used to see him
at the club. In club surroundings he always struck me as
an ineffable young ass, loud and talkative and perpetually
breaking the silence rules. Yet I have to admit that in
his summer flannels and with a straw hat on he can do
things that I can't.

"These big gates," began Beverly-Jones as he showed
Poppleton round the place with me trailing beside them,
"we only put up this year."

Poppleton, who has a summer place of his own, looked at
the gates very critically.

"Now, do you know what _I'd_ have done with those gates,
if they were mine?" he said.

"No," said Beverly-Jones.

"I'd have set them two feet wider apart; they're too
narrow, old chap, too narrow." Poppleton shook his head
sadly at the gates.

"We had quite a struggle," said Beverly-Jones, "before
we finally decided on sandstone."

I realized that he had one and the same line of talk that
he always used. I resented it. No wonder it was easy for
him. "Great mistake," said Poppleton. "Too soft. Look at
this"--here he picked up a big stone and began pounding
at the gate-post--"see how easily it chips! Smashes right
off. Look at that, the whole corner knocks right off,
see!"

Beverly-Jones entered no protest. I began to see that
there is a sort of understanding, a kind of freemasonry,
among men who have summer places. One shows his things;
the other runs them down, and smashes them. This makes
the whole thing easy at once. Beverly-Jones showed his
lawn.

"Your turf is all wrong, old boy," said Poppleton. "Look!
it has no body to it. See, I can kick holes in it with
my heel. Look at that, and that! If I had on stronger
boots I could kick this lawn all to pieces."

"These geraniums along the border," said Beverly-Jones,
"are rather an experiment. They're Dutch."

"But my dear fellow," said Poppleton, "you've got them
set in wrongly. They ought to slope _from_ the sun you
know, never _to_ it. Wait a bit"--here he picked up a
spade that was lying where a gardener had been
working--"I'll throw a few out. Notice how easily they
come up. Ah, that fellow broke! They're apt to. There,
I won't bother to reset them, but tell your man to slope
them over from the sun. That's the idea."

Beverly-Jones showed his new boat-house next and Poppleton
knocked a hole in the side with a hammer to show that
the lumber was too thin.

"If that were _my_ boat-house," he said, "I'd rip the
outside clean off it and use shingle and stucco."

It was, I noticed, Poppleton's plan first to imagine
Beverly-Jones's things his own, and then to smash them,
and then give them back smashed to Beverly-Jones. This
seemed to please them both. Apparently it is a
well-understood method of entertaining a guest and being
entertained. Beverly-Jones and Poppleton, after an hour
or so of it, were delighted with one another.

Yet somehow, when I tried it myself, it failed to work.

"Do you know what I would do with that cedar summer-house
if it was mine?" I asked my host the next day.

"No," he said.

"I'd knock the thing down and burn it," I answered.

But I think I must have said it too fiercely. Beverly-Jones
looked hurt and said nothing.

Not that these people are not doing all they can for me.
I know that. I admit it. If I _should_ meet my end here
and if--to put the thing straight out--_my_ lifeless body
is found floating on the surface of this pond, I should
like there to be documentary evidence of _that_ much.
They are trying their best. "This is Liberty Hall," Mrs.
Beverly-Jones said to me on the first day of my visit.
"We want you to feel that you are to do absolutely as
you like!"

Absolutely as I like! How little they know me. I should
like to have answered: "Madam, I have now reached a time
of life when human society at breakfast is impossible to
me; when any conversation prior to eleven a.m. must be
considered out of the question; when I prefer to eat my
meals in quiet, or with such mild hilarity as can be got
from a comic paper; when I can no longer wear nankeen
pants and a coloured blazer without a sense of personal
indignity; when I can no longer leap and play in the
water like a young fish; when I do not yodel, cannot sing
and, to my regret; dance even worse than I did when young;
and when the mood of mirth and hilarity comes to me only
as a rare visitant--shall we say at a burlesque performance
--and never as a daily part of my existence. Madam, I
am unfit to be a summer guest. If this is Liberty Hall
indeed, let me, oh, let me go!"

Such is the speech that I would make if it were possible.
As it is, I can only rehearse it to myself.

Indeed, the more I analyse it the more impossible it
seems, for a man of my temperament at any rate, to be a
summer guest. These people, and, I imagine, all other
summer people, seem to be trying to live in a perpetual
joke. Everything, all day, has to be taken in a mood of
uproarious fun.

However, I can speak of it all now in quiet retrospect
and without bitterness. It will soon be over now. Indeed,
the reason why I have come down at this early hour to
this quiet water is that things have reached a crisis.
The situation has become extreme and I must end it.

It happened last night. Beverly-Jones took me aside while
the others were dancing the fox-trot to the victrola on
the piazza.

"We're planning to have some rather good fun to-morrow
night," he said, "something that will be a good deal more
in your line than a lot of it, I'm afraid, has been up
here. In fact, my wife says that this will be the very
thing for you."

"Oh," I said.

"We're going to get all the people from the other houses
over and the girls"--this term Beverly-Jones uses to mean
his wife and her friends--"are going to get up a sort of
entertainment with charades and things, all impromptu,
more or less, of course--"

"Oh," I said. I saw already what was coming.

"And they want you to act as a sort of master-of-ceremonies,
to make up the gags and introduce the different stunts
and all that. I was telling the girls about that afternoon
at the club, when you were simply killing us all with
those funny stories of yours, and they're all wild over
it."

"Wild?" I repeated.

"Yes, quite wild over it. They say it will be the hit of
the summer."

Beverly-Jones shook hands with great warmth as we parted
for the night. I knew that he was thinking that my
character was about to be triumphantly vindicated, and
that he was glad for my sake.

Last night I did not sleep. I remained awake all night
thinking of the "entertainment." In my whole life I have
done nothing in public except once when I presented a
walking-stick to the vice-president of our club on the
occasion of his taking a trip to Europe. Even for that
I used to rehearse to myself far into the night sentences
that began: "This walking-stick, gentleman, means far
more than a mere walking-stick."

And now they expect me to come out as a merry
master-of-ceremonies before an assembled crowd of summer
guests.

But never mind. It is nearly over now. I have come down
to this quiet water in the early morning to throw myself
in. They will find me floating here among the lilies.
Some few will understand. I can see it written, as it
will be, in the newspapers.

"What makes the sad fatality doubly poignant is that the
unhappy victim had just entered upon a holiday visit that
was to have been prolonged throughout the whole month.
Needless to say, he was regarded as the life and soul of
the pleasant party of holiday makers that had gathered
at the delightful country home of Mr. and Mrs. Beverly-Jones.
Indeed, on the very day of the tragedy, he was to have
taken a leading part in staging a merry performance of
charades and parlour entertainments--a thing for which
his genial talents and overflowing high spirits rendered
him specially fit."

When they read that, those who know me best will understand
how and why I died. "He had still over three weeks to
stay there," they will say. "He was to act as the stage
manager of charades." They will shake their heads. They
will understand.

But what is this? I raise my eyes from the paper and I
see Beverly-Jones hurriedly approaching from the house.
He is hastily dressed, with flannel trousers and a
dressing-gown. His face looks grave. Something has
happened. Thank God, something has happened. Some accident!
Some tragedy! Something to prevent the charades!

I write these few lines on a fast train that is carrying
me back to New York, a cool, comfortable train, with a
deserted club-car where I can sit in a leather arm-chair,
with my feet up on another, smoking, silent, and at peace.

Villages, farms and summer places are flying by. Let them
fly. I, too, am flying--back to the rest and quiet of
the city.

"Old man," Beverly-Jones said, as he laid his hand on
mine very kindly--he is a decent fellow, after all, is
Jones--"they're calling you by long-distance from New
York."

"What is it?" I asked, or tried to gasp.

"It's bad news, old chap; fire in your office last evening.
I'm afraid a lot of your private papers were burned.
Robinson--that's your senior clerk, isn't it?--seems to
have been on the spot trying to save things. He's badly
singed about the face and hands. I'm afraid you must go
at once."

"Yes, yes," I said, "at once."

"I know. I've told the man to get the trap ready right
away. You've just time to catch the seven-ten. Come along."

"Right," I said. I kept my face as well as I could, trying
to hide my exultation. The office burnt! Fine! Robinson's
singed! Glorious! I hurriedly packed my things and
whispered to Beverly-Jones farewell messages for the
sleeping household. I never felt so jolly and facetious
in my life. I could feel that Beverly-Jones was admiring
the spirit and pluck with which I took my misfortune.
Later on he would tell them all about it.

The trap ready! Hurrah! Good-bye, old man! Hurrah! All
right. I'll telegraph. Right you are, good-bye. Hip, hip,
hurrah! Here we are! Train right on time. Just these two
bags, porter, and there's a dollar for you. What merry,
merry fellows these darky porters are, anyway!

And so here I am in the train, safe bound for home and
the summer quiet of my club.

Well done for Robinson! I was afraid that it had missed
fire, or that my message to him had gone wrong. It was
on the second day of my visit that I sent word to him to
invent an accident--something, anything--to call me back.
I thought the message had failed. I had lost hope. But
it is all right now, though he certainly pitched the note
pretty high.

Of course I can't let the Beverly-Joneses know that it
was a put-up job. I must set fire to the office as soon
as I get back. But it's worth it. And I'll have to singe
Robinson about the face and hands. But it's worth that too!




VI. To Nature and Back Again

It was probably owing to the fact that my place of lodgment
in New York overlooked the waving trees of Central Park
that I was consumed, all the summer through, with a great
longing for the woods. To me, as a lover of Nature, the
waving of a tree conveys thoughts which are never conveyed
to me except by seeing a tree wave.

This longing grew upon me. I became restless with it. In
the daytime I dreamed over my work. At night my sleep
was broken and restless. At times I would even wander
forth, at night into the park, and there, deep in the
night shadow of the trees, imagine myself alone in the
recesses of the dark woods remote from the toil and fret
of our distracted civilization.

This increasing feeling culminated in the resolve which
becomes the subject of this narrative. The thought came
to me suddenly one night. I woke from my sleep with a
plan fully matured in my mind. It was this: I would, for
one month, cast off all the travail and cares of civilized
life and become again the wild man of the woods that Nature
 made me. My plan was to go to the edge of the great
woods, somewhere in New England, divest myself of my
clothes--except only my union suit--crawl into the woods,
stay there a month and then crawl out again. To a trained
woodsman and crawler like myself the thing was simplicity
itself. For food I knew that I could rely on berries,
roots, shoots, mosses, mushrooms, fungi, bungi--in fact
the whole of Nature's ample storehouse; for my drink,
the running brook and the quiet pool; and for my companions
the twittering chipmunk, the chickadee, the chocktaw,
the choo-choo, the chow-chow, and the hundred and one
inhabitants of the forgotten glade and the tangled thicket.

Fortunately for me, my resolve came to me upon the last
day in August. The month of September was my vacation.
My time was my own. I was free to go.

On my rising in the morning my preparations were soon
made; or, rather, there were practically no preparations
to make. I had but to supply myself with a camera, my
one necessity in the woods, and to say good-bye to my
friends. Even this last ordeal I wished to make as brief
as possible. I had no wish to arouse their anxiety over
the dangerous, perhaps foolhardy, project that I had in
mind. I wished, as far as possible, to say good-bye in
such a way as to allay the very natural fears which my
undertaking would excite in the minds of my friends.

From myself, although trained in the craft of the woods,
I could not conceal the danger that I incurred. Yet the
danger was almost forgotten in the extraordinary and
novel interest that attached to the experiment. Would it
prove possible for a man, unaided by our civilized arts
and industries, to maintain himself naked--except for
his union suit--in the heart of the woods? Could he do
it, or could he not? And if he couldn't what then?

But this last thought I put from me. Time alone could
answer the question.

As in duty bound, I went first to the place of business
where I am employed, to shake hands and say good-bye to
my employer.

"I am going," I said, "to spend a month naked alone in
the woods."

He looked up from his desk with genial kindliness.

"That's right," he said, "get a good rest."

"My plan is," I added, "to live on berries and funguses."

"Fine," he answered. "Well, have a good time, old
man--good-bye."

Then I dropped in casually upon one of my friends.

"Well," I said, "I'm off to New England to spend a month
naked."

"Nantucket," he said, "or Newport?"

"No," I answered, speaking as lightly as I could. "I'm
going into the woods and stay there naked for a month."

"Oh, yes," he said. "I see. Well, good-bye, old chap--see
you when you get back."

After that I called upon two or three other men to say
a brief word of farewell. I could not help feeling slightly
nettled, I must confess, at the very casual way in which
they seemed to take my announcement. "Oh, yes," they said,
"naked in the woods, eh? Well, ta-ta till you get back."

Here was a man about to risk his life--for there was no
denying the fact--in a great sociological experiment,
yet they received the announcement with absolute unconcern.
It offered one more assurance, had I needed it, of the
degenerate state of the civilization upon which I was
turning my back.

On my way to the train I happened to run into a newspaper
reporter with whom I have some acquaintance.

"I'm just off," I said, "to New England to spend a month
naked--at least naked all but my union suit--in the woods;
no doubt you'll like a few details about it for your paper."

"Thanks, old man," he said, "we've pretty well given up
running that nature stuff. We couldn't do anything with
it--unless, of course, anything happens to you. Then we'd
be glad to give you some space."

Several of my friends had at least the decency to see me
off on the train. One, and one alone accompanied me on
the long night-ride to New England in order that he might
bring back my clothes, my watch, and other possessions
from the point where I should enter the woods, together
with such few messages of farewell as I might scribble
at the last moment.

It was early morning when we arrived at the wayside
station where we were to alight. From here we walked to
the edge of the woods. Arrived at this point we halted.
I took off my clothes, with the exception of my union
suit. Then, taking a pot of brown stain from my valise,
I proceeded to dye my face and hands and my union suit
itself a deep butternut brown.

"What's that for?" asked my friend.

"For protection," I answered. "Don't you know that all
animals are protected by their peculiar markings that
render them invisible? The caterpillar looks like the
leaf it eats from; the scales of the fish counterfeit
the glistening water of the brook; the bear and the
'possum are coloured like the tree-trunks on which they
climb. There!" I added, as I concluded my task. "I am
now invisible."

"Gee!" said my friend.

I handed him back the valise and the empty paint-pot,
dropped to my hands and knees--my camera slung about my
neck--and proceeded to crawl into the bush. My friend
stood watching me.

"Why don't you stand up and walk?" I heard him call.

I turned half round and growled at him. Then I plunged
deeper into the bush, growling as I went.

After ten minutes' active crawling I found myself in the
heart of the forest. It reached all about me on every
side for hundreds of miles. All around me was the unbroken
stillness of the woods. Not a sound reached my ear save
the twittering of a squirrel, or squirl, in the branches
high above my head or the far-distant call of a loon
hovering over some woodland lake.

I judged that I had reached a spot suitable for my
habitation.

My first care was to make a fire. Difficult though it
might appear to the degenerate dweller of the city to do
this, to the trained woodsman, such as I had now become,
it is nothing. I selected a dry stick, rubbed it vigorously
against my hind leg, and in a few moments it broke into
a generous blaze. Half an hour later I was sitting beside
a glowing fire of twigs discussing with great gusto an
appetizing mess of boiled grass and fungi cooked in a
hollow stone.

I ate my fill, not pausing till I was full, careless, as
the natural man ever is, of the morrow. Then, stretched
out upon the pine-needles at the foot of a great tree,
I lay in drowsy contentment listening to the song of the
birds, the hum of the myriad insects and the strident
note of the squirrel high above me. At times I would give
utterance to the soft answering call, known to every
woodsman, that is part of the freemasonry of animal
speech. As I lay thus, I would not have exchanged places
with the pale dweller in the city for all the wealth in
the world. Here I lay remote from the world, happy, full
of grass, listening to the crooning of the birds.

But the mood of inaction and reflection cannot last, even
with the lover of Nature. It was time to be up and doing.
Much lay before me to be done before the setting of the
sun should bring with it, as I fully expected it would,
darkness. Before night fell I must build a house, make
myself a suit of clothes, lay in a store of nuts, and in
short prepare myself for the oncoming of winter, which,
in the bush, may come on at any time in the summer.

I rose briskly from the ground to my hands and knees and
set myself to the building of my house. The method that
I intended to follow here was merely that which Nature
has long since taught to the beaver and which, moreover,
is known and practised by the gauchos of the pampas, by
the googoos of Rhodesia and by many other tribes. I had
but to select a suitable growth of trees and gnaw them
down with my teeth, taking care so to gnaw them that each
should fall into the place appointed for it in the
building. The sides, once erected in this fashion, another
row of trees, properly situated, is gnawed down to fall
crosswise as the roof.

I set myself briskly to work and in half an hour had
already the satisfaction of seeing my habitation rising
into shape. I was still gnawing with unabated energy when
I was interrupted by a low growling in the underbrush.
With animal caution I shrank behind a tree, growling in
return. I could see something moving in the bushes,
evidently an animal of large size. From its snarl I judged
it to be a bear. I could hear it moving nearer to me. It
was about to attack me. A savage joy thrilled through me
at the thought, while my union suit bristled with rage
from head to foot as I emitted growl after growl of
defiance. I bared my teeth to the gums, snarling, and
lashed my flank with my hind foot. Eagerly I watched for
the onrush of the bear. In savage combat who strikes
first wins. It was my idea, as soon as the bear should
appear, to bite off its front legs one after the other.
This initial advantage once gained, I had no doubt of
ultimate victory.

The brushes parted. I caught a glimpse of a long brown
body and a hairy head. Then the creature reared up,
breasting itself against a log, full in front of me.
Great heavens! It was not a bear at all. It was a man.

He was dressed, as I was, in a union suit, and his face
and hands, like mine, were stained a butternut brown.
His hair was long and matted and two weeks' stubble of
beard was on his face.

For a minute we both glared at one another, still growling.
Then the man rose up to a standing position with a muttered
exclamation of disgust.

"Ah, cut it out," he said. "Let's talk English."

He walked over towards me and sat down upon a log in an
attitude that seemed to convey the same disgust as the
expression of his features. Then he looked round about him.

"What are you doing?" he said.

"Building a house," I answered.

"I know," he said with a nod. "What are you here for?"

"Why," I explained, "my plan is this: I want to see
whether a man can come out here in the woods, naked, with
no aid but that of his own hands and his own ingenuity and--"

"Yes, yes, I know," interrupted the disconsolate man.
"Earn himself a livelihood in the wilderness, live as
the cave-man lived, carefree and far from the curse of
civilization!"

"That's it. That was my idea," I said, my enthusiasm
rekindling as I spoke. "That's what I'm doing; my food
is to be the rude grass and the roots that Nature furnishes
for her children, and for my drink--"

"Yes, yes," he interrupted again with impatience, "for
your drink the running rill, for your bed the sweet couch of
hemlock, and for your canopy the open sky lit with the soft
stars in the deep-purple vault of the dewy night. I know."

"Great heavens, man!" I exclaimed. "That's my idea exactly.
In fact, those are my very phrases. How could you have
guessed it?"

He made a gesture with his hand to indicate weariness
and disillusionment.

"Pshaw!" he said. "I know it because I've been doing it.
I've been here a fortnight now on this open-air,
life-in-the-woods game. Well, I'm sick of it! This last
lets me out."

"What last?" I asked.

"Why, meeting you. Do you realize that you are the
nineteenth man that I've met in the last three days
running about naked in the woods? They're all doing it.
The woods are full of them."

"You don't say so!" I gasped.

"Fact. Wherever you go in the bush you find naked men
all working out this same blasted old experiment. Why,
when you get a little farther in you'll see signs up:
NAKED MEN NOT ALLOWED IN THIS BUSH, and NAKED MEN KEEP
OFF, and GENTLEMEN WHO ARE NAKED WILL KINDLY KEEP TO THE
HIGH ROAD, and a lot of things like that. You must have
come in at a wrong place or you'd have noticed the little
shanties that they have now at the edge of the New England
bush with signs up: UNION SUITS BOUGHT AND SOLD, CAMERAS
FOR SALE OR TO RENT, HIGHEST PRICE FOR CAST-OFF CLOTHING,
and all that sort of thing."

"No," I said. "I saw nothing."

"Well, you look when you go back. As for me, I'm done
with it. The thing's worked out. I'm going back to the
city to see whether I can't, right there in the heart of
the city, earn myself a livelihood with my unaided hands
and brains. That's the real problem; no more bumming on
the animals for me. This bush business is too easy. Well,
good-bye; I'm off."

"But stop a minute," I said. "How is it that, if what
you say is true, I haven't seen or heard anybody in the
bush, and I've been here since the middle of the morning?"

"Nonsense," the man answered. "They were probably all
round you but you didn't recognize them."

"No, no, it's not possible. I lay here dreaming beneath
a tree and there wasn't a sound, except the twittering
of a squirrel and, far away, the cry of a lake-loon,
nothing else."

"Exactly, the twittering of a squirrel! That was some
feller up the tree twittering to beat the band to let on
that he was a squirrel, and no doubt some other feller
calling out like a loon over near the lake. I suppose
you gave them the answering cry?"

"I did," I said. "I gave that low guttural note which--"

"Precisely--which is the universal greeting in the
freemasonry of animal speech. I see you've got it all
down pat. Well, good-bye again. I'm off. Oh, don't bother
to growl, please. I'm sick of that line of stuff."

"Good-bye," I said.

He slid through the bushes and disappeared. I sat where
I was, musing, my work interrupted, a mood of bitter
disillusionment heavy upon me. So I sat, it may have been
for hours.

In the far distance I could hear the faint cry of a
bittern in some lonely marsh.

"Now, who the deuce is making that noise?" I muttered.
"Some silly fool, I suppose, trying to think he's a
waterfowl. Cut it out!"

Long I lay, my dream of the woods shattered, wondering
what to do.

Then suddenly there came to my ear the loud sound of
voices, human voices, strident and eager, with nothing
of the animal growl in them.

"He's in there. I seen him!" I heard some one call.

Rapidly I dived sideways into the underbrush, my animal
instinct strong upon me again, growling as I went.
Instinctively I knew that it was I that they were after.
All the animal joy of being hunted came over me. My union
suit stood up on end with mingled fear and rage.

As fast as I could I retreated into the wood. Yet somehow,
as I moved, the wood, instead of growing denser, seemed
to thin out. I crouched low, still growling and endeavouring
to bury myself in the thicket. I was filled with a wild
sense of exhilaration such as any lover of the wild life
would feel at the knowledge that he is being chased, that
some one is after him, that some one is perhaps just a
few feet behind him, waiting to stick a pitchfork into
him as he runs. There is no ecstasy like this.

Then I realized that my pursuers had closed in on me. I
was surrounded on all sides.

The woods had somehow grown thin. They were like the mere
shrubbery of a park--it might be of Central Park itself.
I could hear among the deeper tones of men the shrill
voices of boys. "There he is," one cried, "going through
them bushes! Look at him humping himself!" "What is it,
what's the sport?" another called. "Some crazy guy loose
in the park in his underclothes and the cops after him."

Then they closed in on me. I recognized the blue suits
of the police force and their short clubs. In a few
minutes I was dragged out of the shrubbery and stood in
the open park in my pyjamas, wide awake, shivering in
the chilly air of early morning.

Fortunately for me, it was decided at the police-court
that sleep-walking is not an offence against the law. I
was dismissed with a caution.

My vacation is still before me, and I still propose to
spend it naked. But I shall do so at Atlantic City.




VII. The Cave-Man as He is

I think it likely that few people besides myself have
ever actually seen and spoken with a "cave-man."

Yet everybody nowadays knows all about the cave-man. The
fifteen-cent magazines and the new fiction have made him
a familiar figure. A few years ago, it is true, nobody
had ever heard of him. But lately, for some reason or
other, there has been a run on the cave-man. No up-to-date
story is complete without one or two references to him.
The hero, when the heroine slights him, is said to "feel
for a moment the wild, primordial desire of the cave-man,
the longing to seize her, to drag her with him, to carry
her away, to make her his." When he takes her in his arms
it is recorded that "all the elemental passion of the
cave-man surges through him." When he fights, on her
behalf against a dray-man or a gun-man or an ice-man or
any other compound that makes up a modern villain, he is
said to "feel all the fierce fighting joy of the cave-man."
If they kick him in the ribs, he likes it. If they beat
him over the head, he never feels it; because he is, for
the moment, a cave-man. And the cave-man is, and is known
to be, quite above sensation.

The heroine, too, shares the same point of view. "Take
me," she murmurs as she falls into the hero's embrace,
"be my cave-man." As she says it there is, so the writer
assures us, something of the fierce light of the cave-woman
in her eyes, the primordial woman to be wooed and won
only by force.

So, like everybody else, I had, till I saw him, a great
idea of the cave-man. I had a clear mental picture of
him--huge, brawny, muscular, a wolfskin thrown about him
and a great war-club in his hand. I knew him as without
fear with nerves untouched by our effete civilization,
fighting, as the beasts fight, to the death, killing
without pity and suffering without a moan.

It was a picture that I could not but admire.

I liked, too--I am free to confess it--his peculiar way
with women. His system was, as I understood it, to take
them by the neck and bring them along with him. That was
his fierce, primordial way of "wooing" them. And they
liked it. So at least we are informed by a thousand
credible authorities. They liked it. And the modern woman,
so we are told, would still like it if only one dared to
try it on. There's the trouble; if one only _dared_!

I see lots of them--I'll be frank about it--that I should
like to grab, to sling over my shoulder and carry away
with me; or, what is the same thing, allowing for modern
conditions, have an express man carry them. I notice them
at Atlantic City, I see them in Fifth Avenue--yes,
everywhere. But would they come? That's the _deuce_ of
it. Would they come right along, like the cave-woman,
merely biting off my ear as they came, or are they
degenerate enough to bring an action against me, indicting
the express company as a party of the second part?

Doubts such as these prevent me from taking active
measures. But they leave me, as they leave many another
man, preoccupied and fascinated with the cave-man.

One may imagine, then, my extraordinary interest in him
when I actually met him in the flesh. Yet the thing came
about quite simply, indeed more by accident than by
design, an adventure open to all.

It so happened that I spent my vacation in Kentucky--the
region, as everybody knows, of the great caves. They
extend--it is a matter of common knowledge--for hundreds
of miles; in some places dark and sunless tunnels, the
black silence broken only by the dripping of the water
from the roof; in other places great vaults like
subterranean temples, with vast stone arches sweeping to
the dome, and with deep, still water of unfathomed depth
as the floor; and here and there again they are lighted
from above through rifts in the surface of the earth,
and are dry and sand strewn--fit for human habitation.

In such caves as these--so has the obstinate legend run
for centuries--there still dwell cave-men, the dwindling
remnant of their race. And here it was that I came across
him.

I had penetrated into the caves far beyond my guides. I
carried a revolver and had with me an electric lantern,
but the increasing sunlight in the cave as I went on had
rendered the latter needless.

There he sat, a huge figure, clad in a great wolfskin.
Besides him lay a great club. Across his knee was a spear
round which he was binding sinews that tightened under
his muscular hand. His head was bent over his task. His
matted hair had fallen over his eyes. He did not see me
till I was close beside him on the sanded floor of the
cave. I gave a slight cough.

"Excuse me!" I said.

The Cave-man gave a startled jump.

"My goodness," he said, "you startled me!"

I could see that he was quite trembling.

"You came along so suddenly," he said, "it gave me the
jumps." Then he muttered, more to himself than to me,
"Too much of this darned cave-water! I must quit drinking it."

I sat down near to the Caveman on a stone, taking care
to place my revolver carefully behind it. I don't mind
admitting that a loaded revolver, especially as I get
older, makes me nervous. I was afraid that he might start
fooling with it. One can't be too careful.

As a way of opening conversation I picked up the Cave-man's
club.

"Say," I said, "that's a great club you have, eh? By gee!
it's heavy!"

"Look out!" said the Cave-man with a certain agitation
in his voice as he reached out and took the club from
me. "Don't fool with that club! It's loaded! You know
you could easily drop the club on your toes, or on mine.
A man can't be too careful with a loaded club."

He rose as he said this and carried the club to the other
side of the cave, where he leant it against the wall.
Now that he stood up and I could examine him he no longer
looked so big. In fact he was not big at all. The effect
of size must have come, I think, from the great wolfskin
that he wore. I have noticed the same thing in Grand
Opera. I noticed, too, for the first time that the cave
we were in seemed fitted up, in a rude sort of way, like
a dwelling-room.

"This is a nice place you've got," I said.

"Dandy, isn't it?" he said, as he cast his eyes around.
"_She_ fixed it up. She's got great taste. See that mud
sideboard? That's the real thing, A-one mud! None of your
cheap rock about that. We fetched that mud for two miles
to make that. And look at that wicker bucket. Isn't it
great? Hardly leaks at all except through the sides, and
perhaps a little through the bottom. _She_ wove that.
She's a humdinger at weaving."

He was moving about as he spoke, showing me all his little
belongings. He reminded me for all the world of a man in
a Harlem flat, showing a visitor how convenient it all
is. Somehow, too, the Cave-man had lost all appearance
of size. He looked, in fact, quite little, and when he
had pushed his long hair back from his forehead he seemed
to wear that same, worried, apologetic look that we all
have. To a higher being, if there is such, our little
faces one and all appear, no doubt, pathetic.

I knew that he must be speaking about his wife.

"Where is she?" I asked.

"My wife?" he said. "Oh, she's gone out somewhere through
the caves with the kid. You didn't meet our kid as you
came along, did you? No? Well, he's the greatest boy you
even saw. He was only two this nineteenth of August. And
you should hear him say 'Pop' and 'Mom' just as if he
was grown up. He is really, I think, about the brightest
boy I've ever known--I mean quite apart from being his
father, and speaking of him as if he were anyone else's
boy. You didn't meet them?"

"No," I said, "I didn't."

"Oh, well," the Cave-man went on, "there are lots of ways
and passages through. I guess they went in another
direction. The wife generally likes to take a stroll
round in the morning and see some of the neighbours. But,
say," he interrupted, "I guess I'm forgetting my manners.
Let me get you a drink of cave-water. Here, take it in
this stone mug! There you are, say when! Where do we get
it? Oh, we find it in parts of the cave where it filters
through the soil above. Alcoholic? Oh, yes, about fifteen
per cent, I think. Some say it soaks all through the soil
of this State. Sit down and be comfortable, and, say if
you hear the woman coming just slip your mug behind that
stone out of sight. Do you mind? Now, try one of these
elm-root cigars. Oh, pick a good one--there are lots
of them!"

We seated ourselves in some comfort on the soft sand,
our backs against the boulders, sipping cave-water and
smoking elm-root cigars. It seemed altogether as if one
were back in civilization, talking to a genial host.

"Yes," said the Cave-man, and he spoke, as it were, in
a large and patronizing way. "I generally let my wife
trot about as she likes in the daytime. She and the other
women nowadays are getting up all these different movements,
and the way I look at it is that if it amuses her to run
around and talk and attend meetings, why let her do it.
Of course," he continued, assuming a look of great
firmness, "if I liked to put my foot down--"

"Exactly, exactly," I said. "It's the same way with us!"

"Is it now!" he questioned with interest. "I had imagined
that it was all different Outside. You're from the Outside,
aren't you? I guessed you must be from the skins you wear."

"Have you never been Outside?" I asked.

"No fear!" said the Cave-man. "Not for mine! Down here
in the caves, clean underground and mostly in the dark,
it's all right. It's nice and safe." He gave a sort of
shudder. "Gee! You fellows out there must have your nerve
to go walking around like that on the outside rim of
everything, where the stars might fall on you or a thousand
things happen to you. But then you Outside Men have got
a natural elemental fearlessness about you that we Cave-men
have lost. I tell you, I was pretty scared when I looked
up and saw you standing there."

"Had you never seen any Outside Men?" I asked.

"Why, yes," he answered, "but never close. The most I've
done is to go out to the edges of the cave sometimes and
look out and see them, Outside Men and Women, in the
distance. But of course, in one way or another, we Cave-men
know all about them. And the thing we envy most in you
Outside Men is the way you treat your women! By gee! You
take no nonsense from them--you fellows are the real
primordial, primitive men. We've lost it somehow."

"Why, my dear fellow--" I began.

But the Cave-man, who had sat suddenly upright, interrupted.

"Quick! quick!" he said. "Hide that infernal mug! She's
coming. Don't you hear!"

As he spoke I caught the sound of a woman's voice somewhere
in the outer passages of the cave.

"Now, Willie," she was saying, speaking evidently to the
Cave-child, "you come right along back with me, and if
I ever catch you getting in such a mess as that again
I'll never take you anywhere, so there!"

Her voice had grown louder. She entered the cave as she
spoke--a big-boned woman in a suit of skins leading by
the hand a pathetic little mite in a rabbit-skin, with
blue eyes and a slobbered face.

But as I was sitting the Cave-woman evidently couldn't
see me; for she turned at once to speak to her husband,
unconscious of my presence.

"Well, of all the idle creatures!" she exclaimed. "Loafing
here in the sand"--she gave a sniff--"and smoking--"

"My dear," began the Cave-man.

"Don't you my-dear me!" she answered. "Look at this place!
Nothing tidied up yet and the day half through! Did you
put the alligator on to boil?"

"I was just going to say--" began the Cave-man.

"_Going_ to say! Yes, I don't doubt you were going to
say. You'd go on saying all day if I'd let you. What I'm
asking you is, is the alligator on to boil for dinner or
is it not--My gracious!" She broke off all of a sudden,
as she caught sight of me. "Why didn't you say there was
company? Land sakes! And you sit there and never say
there was a gentleman here!"

She had hustled across the cave and was busily arranging
her hair with a pool of water as a mirror.

"Gracious!" she said, "I'm a perfect fright! You must
excuse me," she added, looking round toward me, "for
being in this state. I'd just slipped on this old fur
blouse and run around to a neighbour's and I'd no idea
that he was going to bring in company. Just like him!
I'm afraid we've nothing but a plain alligator stew to
offer you, but I'm sure if you'll stay to dinner--"

She was hustling about already, good primitive housewife
that she was, making the stone-plates rattle on the mud
table.

"Why, really--" I began. But I was interrupted by a sudden
exclamation from both the Cave-man and the Cave-woman
together:

"Willie! where's Willie!"

"Gracious!" cried the woman. "He's wandered out alone--oh,
hurry, look for him! Something might get him! He may have
fallen in the water! Oh, hurry!"

They were off in a moment, shouting into the dark passages
of the outer cave: "Willie! Willie!" There was agonized
anxiety in their voices.

And then in a moment, as it seemed, they were back again,
with Willie in their arms, blubbering, his rabbit-skin
all wet.

"Goodness gracious!" said the Cave-woman. "He'd fallen
right in, the poor little man. Hurry, dear, and get
something dry to wrap him in! Goodness, what a fright!
Quick, darling, give me something to rub him with."

Anxiously the Cave-parents moved about beside the child,
all quarrel vanished.

"But surely," I said, as they calmed down a little, "just
there where Willie fell in, beside the passage that I
came through, there is only three inches of water."

"So there is," they said, both together, "but just suppose
it had been three feet!"

Later on, when Willie was restored, they both renewed
their invitation to me to stay to dinner.

"Didn't you say," said the Cave-man, "that you wanted to
make some notes on the difference between Cave-people
and the people of your world of to-day?"

"I thank you," I answered, "I have already all the notes
I want!"




VIII. Ideal Interviews


I. WITH A EUROPEAN PRINCE

With any European Prince, travelling in America

On receiving our card the Prince, to our great surprise
and pleasure, sent down a most cordial message that he
would be delighted to see us at once. This thrilled us.

"Take us," we said to the elevator boy, "to the apartments
of the Prince." We were pleased to see him stagger and
lean against his wheel to get his breath back.

In a few moments we found ourselves crossing the threshold
of the Prince's apartments. The Prince, who is a charming
young man of from twenty-six to twenty-seven, came across
the floor to meet us with an extended hand and a simple
gesture of welcome. We have seldom seen anyone come across
the floor more simply.

The Prince, who is travelling incognito as the Count of
Flim Flam, was wearing, when we saw him, the plain morning
dress of a gentleman of leisure. We learned that a little
earlier he had appeared at breakfast in the costume of
a Unitarian clergyman, under the incognito of the Bishop
of Bongee; while later on he appeared at lunch, as a
delicate compliment to our city, in the costume of a
Columbia professor of Yiddish.

The Prince greeted us with the greatest cordiality, seated
himself, without the slightest affectation, and motioned
to us, with indescribable bonhomie, his permission to
remain standing.

"Well," said the Prince, "what is it?"

We need hardly say that the Prince, who is a consummate
master of ten languages, speaks English quite as fluently
as he does Chinese. Indeed, for a moment, we could scarcely
tell which he was talking.

"What are your impressions of the United States?" we
asked as we took out our notebook.

"I am afraid," answered the Prince, with the delightful
smile which is characteristic of him, and which we noticed
again and again during the interview, "that I must scarcely
tell you that."

We realized immediately that we were in the presence not
only of a soldier but of one of the most consummate
diplomats of the present day.

"May we ask then," we resumed, correcting our obvious
blunder, "what are your impressions, Prince, of the
Atlantic Ocean?"

"Ah," said the Prince, with that peculiar thoughtfulness
which is so noticeable in him and which we observed not
once but several times, "the Atlantic!"

Volumes could not have expressed his thought better.

"Did you," we asked, "see any ice during your passage
across?"

"Ah," said the Prince, "ice! Let me think."

We did so.

"Ice," repeated the Prince thoughtfully.

We realized that we were in the presence not only of a
soldier, a linguist and a diplomat, but of a trained
scientist accustomed to exact research.

"Ice!" repeated the Prince. "Did I see any ice? No."

Nothing could have been more decisive, more final than
the clear, simple brevity of the Prince's "No." He had
seen no ice. He knew he had seen no ice. He said he had
seen no ice. Nothing could have been more straightforward,
more direct. We felt assured from that moment that the
Prince had not seen any ice.

The exquisite good taste with which the Prince had answered
our question served to put us entirely at our ease, and
we presently found ourselves chatting with His Highness
with the greatest freedom and without the slightest _gene_
or _mauvaise honte_, or, in fact, _malvoisie_ of any kind.

We realized, indeed, that we were in the presence not
only of a trained soldier, a linguist and a diplomat,
but also of a conversationalist of the highest order.

His Highness, who has an exquisite sense of humour--indeed,
it broke out again and again during our talk with him
--expressed himself as both amused and perplexed over
our American money.

"It is very difficult," he said, "with us it is so simple;
six and a half groner are equal to one and a third
gross-groner or the quarter part of our Rigsdaler. Here
it is so complicated."

We ventured to show the Prince a fifty-cent piece and to
explain its value by putting two quarters beside it.

"I see," said the Prince, whose mathematical ability is
quite exceptional, "two twenty-five-cent pieces are equal
to one fifty-cent piece. I must try to remember that.
Meantime," he added, with a gesture of royal condescension,
putting the money in his pocket, "I will keep your coins
as instructors"--we murmured our thanks--"and now explain
to me, please, your five-dollar gold piece and your
ten-dollar eagle."

We felt it proper, however, to shift the subject, and
asked the Prince a few questions in regard to his views
on American politics. We soon found that His Highness,
although this is his first visit to this continent, is
a keen student of our institutions and our political
life. Indeed, His Altitude showed by his answers to our
questions that he is as well informed about our politics
as we are ourselves. On being asked what he viewed as
the uppermost tendency in our political life of to-day,
the Prince replied thoughtfully that he didn't know. To
our inquiry as to whether in his opinion democracy was
moving forward or backward, the Prince, after a moment
of reflection, answered that he had no idea. On our asking
which of the generals of our Civil War was regarded in
Europe as the greatest strategist, His Highness answered
without hesitation, "George Washington."

Before closing our interview the Prince, who, like his
illustrious father, is an enthusiastic sportsman, completely
turned the tables on us by inquiring eagerly about the
prospects for large game in America.

We told him something--as much as we could recollect--of
woodchuck hunting in our own section of the country. The
Prince was interested at once. His eye lighted up, and
the peculiar air of fatigue, or languor, which we had
thought to remark on his face during our interview, passed
entirely off his features. He asked us a number of
questions, quickly and without pausing, with the air, in
fact, of a man accustomed to command and not to listen.
How was the woodchuck hunted? From horseback or from an
elephant? Or from an armoured car, or turret? How many
beaters did one use to beat up the woodchuck? What bearers
was it necessary to carry with one? How great a danger
must one face of having one's beaters killed? What
percentage of risk must one be prepared to incur of
accidentally shooting one's own beaters? What did a bearer
cost? and so on.

All these questions we answered as best we could, the
Prince apparently seizing the gist, or essential part of
our answer, before we had said it.

In concluding the discussion we ventured to ask His
Highness for his autograph. The Prince, who has perhaps
a more exquisite sense of humour than any other sovereign
of Europe, declared with a laugh that he had no pen.
Still roaring over this inimitable drollery, we begged
the Prince to honour us by using our own fountain-pen.

"Is there any ink in it?" asked the Prince--which threw
us into a renewed paroxysm of laughter.

The Prince took the pen and very kindly autographed for
us seven photographs of himself. He offered us more, but
we felt that seven was about all we could use. We were
still suffocated with laughter over the Prince's wit;
His Highness was still signing photographs when an equerry
appeared and whispered in the Prince's ear. His Highness,
with the consummate tact to be learned only at a court,
turned quietly without a word and left the room.

We never, in all our experience, remember seeing a
prince--or a mere man for the matter of that--leave a
room with greater suavity, discretion, or aplomb. It was
a revelation of breeding, of race, of long slavery to
caste. And yet, with it all, it seemed to have a touch
of finality about it--a hint that the entire proceeding
was deliberate, planned, not to be altered by circumstance.
He did not come back.

We understand that he appeared later in the morning at
a civic reception in the costume of an Alpine Jaeger,
and attended the matinee in the dress of a lieutenant of
police.

Meantime he has our pen. If he turns up in any costume
that we can spot at sight, we shall ask him for it.




II. WITH OUR GREATEST ACTOR

   That is to say, with Any One of
   our Sixteen Greatest Actors

It was within the privacy of his own library that we
obtained--need we say with infinite difficulty--our
interview with the Great Actor. He was sitting in a deep
arm-chair, so buried in his own thoughts that he was
oblivious of our approach. On his knee before him lay a
cabinet photograph of himself. His eyes seemed to be
peering into it, as if seeking to fathom its unfathomable
mystery. We had time to note that a beautiful carbon
photogravure of himself stood on a table at his elbow,
while a magnificent half-tone pastel of himself was
suspended on a string from the ceiling. It was only when
we had seated ourself in a chair and taken out our notebook
that the Great Actor looked up.

"An interview?" he said, and we noted with pain the
weariness in his tone. "Another interview!"

We bowed.

"Publicity!" he murmured rather to himself than to us.
"Publicity! Why must one always be forced into publicity?"

It was not our intention, we explained apologetically,
to publish or to print a single word--

"Eh, what?" exclaimed the Great Actor. "Not print it?
Not publish it? Then what in--"

Not, we explained, without his consent.

"Ah," he murmured wearily, "my consent. Yes, yes, I must
give it. The world demands it. Print, publish anything
you like. I am indifferent to praise, careless of fame.
Posterity will judge me. But," he added more briskly,
"let me see a proof of it in time to make any changes I
might care to."

We bowed our assent.

"And now," we began, "may we be permitted to ask a few
questions about your art? And first, in which branch of
the drama do you consider that your genius chiefly lies,
in tragedy or in comedy?"

"In both," said the Great Actor.

"You excel then," we continued, "in neither the one nor
the other?"

"Not at all," he answered, "I excel in each of them."

"Excuse us," we said, "we haven't made our meaning quite
clear. What we meant to say is, stated very simply, that
you do not consider yourself better in either of them
than in the other?"

"Not at all," said the Actor, as he put out his arm with
that splendid gesture that we have known and admired for
years, at the same time throwing back his leonine head
so that his leonine hair fell back from his leonine
forehead. "Not at all. I do better in both of them. My
genius demands both tragedy and comedy at the same time."

"Ah," we said, as a light broke in upon us, "then that,
we presume, is the reason why you are about to appear in
Shakespeare?"

The Great Actor frowned.

"I would rather put it," he said, "that Shakespeare is
about to appear in me."

"Of course, of course," we murmured, ashamed of our own
stupidity.

"I appear," went on the Great Actor, "in _Hamlet_. I
expect to present, I may say, an entirely new Hamlet."

"A new Hamlet!" we exclaimed, fascinated. "A new Hamlet!
Is such a thing possible?"

"Entirely," said the Great Actor, throwing his leonine
head forward again. "I have devoted years of study to
the part. The whole conception of the part of Hamlet has
been wrong."

We sat stunned.

"All actors hitherto," continued the Great Actor, "or
rather, I should say, all so-called actors--I mean all
those who tried to act before me--have been entirely
mistaken in their presentation. They have presented Hamlet
as dressed in black velvet."

"Yes, yes," we interjected, "in black velvet, yes!"

"Very good. The thing is absurd," continued the Great Actor,
as he reached down two or three heavy volumes from the
shelf beside him. "Have you ever studied the Elizabethan era?"

"The which?" we asked modestly.

"The Elizabethan era?"

We were silent.

"Or the pre-Shakespearean tragedy?"

We hung our head.

"If you had, you would know that a Hamlet in black velvet
is perfectly ridiculous. In Shakespeare's day--as I could
prove in a moment if you had the intelligence to understand
it--there was no such thing as black velvet. It didn't
exist."

"And how then," we asked, intrigued, puzzled and yet
delighted, "do _you_ present Hamlet?"

"In _brown_ velvet," said the Great Actor.

"Great Heavens," we exclaimed, "this is a revolution."

"It is. But that is only one part of my conception. The
main thing will be my presentation of what I may call
the psychology of Hamlet."

"The psychology!" we said.

"Yes," resumed the Great Actor, "the psychology. To make
Hamlet understood, I want to show him as a man bowed down
by a great burden. He is overwhelmed with Weltschmerz.
He carries in him the whole weight of the Zeitgeist; in
fact, everlasting negation lies on him--"

"You mean," we said, trying to speak as cheerfully as we
could, "that things are a little bit too much for him."

"His will," went on the Great Actor, disregarding our
interruption, "is paralysed. He seeks to move in one
direction and is hurled in another. One moment he sinks
into the abyss. The next, he rises above the clouds. His
feet seek the ground, but find only the air--"

"Wonderful," we said, "but will you not need a good deal
of machinery?"

"Machinery!" exclaimed the Great Actor, with a leonine
laugh. "The machinery of _thought_, the mechanism of
power, of magnetism--"

"Ah," we said, "electricity."

"Not at all," said the Great Actor. "You fail to understand.
It is all done by my rendering. Take, for example, the
famous soliloquy on death. You know it?"

"'To be or not to be,'" we began.

"Stop," said the Great Actor. "Now observe. It is a
soliloquy. Precisely. That is the key to it. It is
something that Hamlet _says to himself_. Not a _word of
it_, in my interpretation, is actually spoken. All is
done in absolute, unbroken silence."

"How on earth," we began, "can you do that?"

"Entirely and solely _with my face_."

Good heavens! Was it possible? We looked again, this time
very closely, at the Great Actor's face. We realized with
a thrill that it might be done.

"I come before the audience _so_," he went on, "and
soliloquize--thus--follow my face, please--"

As the Great Actor spoke, he threw himself into a
characteristic pose with folded arms, while gust after
gust of emotion, of expression, of alternate hope, doubt
and despair, swept--we might say chased themselves across
his features.

"Wonderful!" we gasped.

"Shakespeare's lines," said the Great Actor, as his face
subsided to its habitual calm, "are not necessary; not,
at least, with my acting. The lines, indeed, are mere
stage directions, nothing more. I leave them out. This
happens again and again in the play. Take, for instance,
the familiar scene where Hamlet holds the skull in his
hand: Shakespeare here suggests the words 'Alas, poor
Yorick! I knew him well--'"

"Yes, yes!" we interrupted, in spite of ourself, "'a
fellow of infinite jest--'"

"Your intonation is awful," said the Actor. "But listen.
In my interpretation I use no words at all. I merely
carry the skull quietly in my hand, very slowly, across
the stage. There I lean against a pillar at the side,
with the skull in the palm of my hand, and look at it in
silence."

"Wonderful!" we said.

"I then cross over to the right of the stage, very
impressively, and seat myself on a plain wooden bench,
and remain for some time, looking at the skull."

"Marvellous!"

"I then pass to the back of the stage and lie down on my
stomach, still holding the skull before my eyes. After
holding this posture for some time, I crawl slowly forward,
portraying by the movement of my legs and stomach the
whole sad history of Yorick. Finally I turn my back on
the audience, still holding the skull, and convey through
the spasmodic movements of my back Hamlet's passionate
grief at the loss of his friend."

"Why!" we exclaimed, beside ourself with excitement,
"this is not merely a revolution, it is a revelation."

"Call it both," said the Great Actor.

"The meaning of it is," we went on, "that you practically
don't need Shakespeare at all."

"Exactly, I do not. I could do better without him.
Shakespeare cramps me. What I really mean to convey is
not Shakespeare, but something greater, larger--how shall
I express it--bigger." The Great Actor paused and we
waited, our pencil poised in the air. Then he murmured,
as his eyes lifted in an expression of something like
rapture. "In fact--ME."

He remained thus, motionless, without moving. We slipped
gently to our hands and knees and crawled quietly to the
door, and so down the stairs, our notebook in our teeth.




III WITH OUR GREATEST SCIENTIST

As seen in any of our College Laboratories

It was among the retorts and test-tubes of his physical
laboratory that we were privileged to interview the Great
Scientist. His back was towards us when we entered. With
characteristic modesty he kept it so for some time after
our entry. Even when he turned round and saw us his face
did not react off us as we should have expected.

He seemed to look at us, if such a thing were possible,
without seeing us, or, at least, without wishing to see us.

We handed him our card.

He took it, read it, dropped it in a bowlful of sulphuric
acid and then, with a quiet gesture of satisfaction,
turned again to his work.

We sat for some time behind him. "This, then," we thought
to ourselves (we always think to ourselves when we are
left alone), "is the man, or rather is the back of the
man, who has done more" (here we consulted the notes
given us by our editor), "to revolutionize our conception
of atomic dynamics than the back of any other man."

Presently the Great Scientist turned towards us with a
sigh that seemed to our ears to have a note of weariness
in it. Something, we felt, must be making him tired.

"What can I do for you?" he said.

"Professor," we answered, "we have called upon you in
response to an overwhelming demand on the part of the
public--"

The Great Scientist nodded.

"To learn something of your new researches and discoveries
in" (here we consulted a minute card which we carried in
our pocket) "in radio-active-emanations which are already
becoming" (we consulted our card again) "a household
word--"

The Professor raised his hand as if to check us.

"I would rather say," he murmured, "helio-radio-active--"

"So would we," we admitted, "much rather--"

"After all," said the Great Scientist, "helium shares in
the most intimate degree the properties of radium. So,
too, for the matter of that," he added in afterthought,
"do thorium, and borium!"

"Even borium!" we exclaimed, delighted, and writing
rapidly in our notebook. Already we saw ourselves writing
up as our headline _Borium Shares Properties of Thorium_.

"Just what is it," said the Great Scientist, "that you
want to know?"

"Professor," we answered, "what our journal wants is a
plain and simple explanation, so clear that even our
readers can understand it, of the new scientific discoveries
in radium. We understand that you possess, more than any
other man, the gift of clear and lucid thought--"

The Professor nodded.

"And that you are able to express yourself with greater
simplicity than any two men now lecturing."

The Professor nodded again.

"Now, then," we said, spreading our notes on our knee,
"go at it. Tell us, and, through us, tell a quarter of
a million anxious readers just what all these new
discoveries are about."

"The whole thing," said the Professor, warming up to his
work as he perceived from the motions of our face and
ears our intelligent interest, "is simplicity itself. I
can give it to you in a word--"

"That's it," we said. "Give it to us that way."

"It amounts, if one may boil it down into a phrase--"

"Boil it, boil it," we interrupted.

"Amounts, if one takes the mere gist of it--"

"Take it," we said, "take it."

"Amounts to the resolution of the ultimate atom."

"Ha!" we exclaimed.

"I must ask you first to clear your mind," the Professor
continued, "of all conception of ponderable magnitude."

We nodded. We had already cleared our mind of this.

"In fact," added the Professor, with what we thought a
quiet note of warning in his voice, "I need hardly tell
you that what we are dealing with must be regarded as
altogether ultramicroscopic."

We hastened to assure the Professor that, in accordance
with the high standards of honour represented by our
journal, we should of course regard anything that he
might say as ultramicroscopic and treat it accordingly.

"You say, then," we continued, "that the essence of the
problem is the resolution of the atom. Do you think you
can give us any idea of what the atom is?"

The Professor looked at us searchingly.

We looked back at him, openly and frankly. The moment
was critical for our interview. Could he do it? Were we
the kind of person that he could give it to? Could we
get it if he did?

"I think I can," he said. "Let us begin with the assumption
that the atom is an infinitesimal magnitude. Very good.
Let us grant, then, that though it is imponderable and
indivisible it must have a spacial content? You grant me
this?"

"We do," we said, "we do more than this, we _give_ it
to you."

"Very well. If spacial, it must have dimension: if
dimension--form. Let us assume _ex hypothesi_ the form
to be that of a spheroid and see where it leads us."

The Professor was now intensely interested. He walked to
and fro in his laboratory. His features worked with
excitement. We worked ours, too, as sympathetically as
we could.

"There is no other possible method in inductive science,"
he added, "than to embrace some hypothesis, the most
attractive that one can find, and remain with it--"

We nodded. Even in our own humble life after our day's
work we had found this true.

"Now," said the Professor, planting himself squarely in
front of us, "assuming a spherical form, and a spacial
content, assuming the dynamic forces that are familiar
to us and assuming--the thing is bold, I admit--"

We looked as bold as we could.

"Assuming that the _ions_, or _nuclei_ of the atom--I
know no better word--"

"Neither do we," we said.

"That the nuclei move under the energy of such forces,
what have we got?"

"Ha!" we said.

"What have we got? Why, the simplest matter conceivable.
The forces inside our atom--itself, mind you, the function
of a circle--mark that--"

We did.

"Becomes merely a function of pi!"

The Great Scientist paused with a laugh of triumph.

"A function of pi!" we repeated in delight.

"Precisely. Our conception of ultimate matter is reduced
to that of an oblate spheroid described by the revolution
of an ellipse on its own minor axis!"

"Good heavens!" we said. "Merely that."

"Nothing else. And in that case any further calculation
becomes a mere matter of the extraction of a root."

"How simple," we murmured.

"Is it not," said the Professor. "In fact, I am accustomed,
in talking to my class, to give them a very clear idea,
by simply taking as our root F--F being any finite constant--"

He looked at us sharply. We nodded.

"And raising F to the log of infinity. I find they
apprehend it very readily."

"Do they?" we murmured. Ourselves we felt as if the Log
of Infinity carried us to ground higher than what we
commonly care to tread on.

"Of course," said the Professor, "the Log of Infinity is
an Unknown."

"Of course," we said very gravely. We felt ourselves here
in the presence of something that demanded our reverence.

"But still," continued the Professor almost jauntily, "we
can handle the Unknown just as easily as anything else."

This puzzled us. We kept silent. We thought it wiser to
move on to more general ground. In any case, our notes
were now nearly complete.

"These discoveries, then," we said, "are absolutely
revolutionary."

"They are," said the Professor.

"You have now, as we understand, got the atom--how shall
we put it?--got it where you want it."

"Not exactly," said the Professor with a sad smile.

"What do you mean?" we asked.

"Unfortunately our analysis, perfect though it is, stops
short. We have no synthesis."

The Professor spoke as in deep sorrow.

"No synthesis," we moaned. We felt it was a cruel blow.
But in any case our notes were now elaborate enough. We
felt that our readers could do without a synthesis. We
rose to go.

"Synthetic dynamics," said the Professor, taking us by
the coat, "is only beginning--"

"In that case--" we murmured, disengaging his hand.

"But, wait, wait," he pleaded "wait for another fifty
years--"

"We will," we said very earnestly. "But meantime as our
paper goes to press this afternoon we must go now. In
fifty years we will come back."

"Oh, I see, I see," said the Professor, "you are writing
all this for a newspaper. I see."

"Yes," we said, "we mentioned that at the beginning."

"Ah," said the Professor, "did you? Very possibly. Yes."

"We propose," we said, "to feature the article for next
Saturday."

"Will it be long?" he asked.

"About two columns," we answered.

"And how much," said the Professor in a hesitating way,
"do I have to pay you to put it in?"

"How much which?" we asked.

"How much do I have to pay?"

"Why, Professor--" we began quickly. Then we checked
ourselves. After all was it right to undeceive him, this
quiet, absorbed man of science with his ideals, his atoms
and his emanations. No, a hundred times no. Let him pay
a hundred times.

"It will cost you," we said very firmly, "ten dollars."

The Professor began groping among his apparatus. We knew
that he was looking for his purse.

"We should like also very much," we said, "to insert your
picture along with the article--"

"Would that cost much?" he asked.

"No, that is only five dollars."

The Professor had meantime found his purse.

"Would it be all right," he began, "that is, would you
mind if I pay you the money now? I am apt to forget."

"Quite all right," we answered. We said good-bye very
gently and passed out. We felt somehow as if we had
touched a higher life. "Such," we murmured, as we looked
about the ancient campus, "are the men of science: are
there, perhaps, any others of them round this morning
that we might interview?"




IV. WITH OUR TYPICAL NOVELISTS

Edwin and Ethelinda Afterthought--Husband and Wife--In
their Delightful Home Life.

It was at their beautiful country place on the Woonagansett
that we had the pleasure of interviewing the Afterthoughts.
At their own cordial invitation, we had walked over from
the nearest railway station, a distance of some fourteen
miles. Indeed, as soon as they heard of our intention
they invited us to walk. "We are so sorry not to bring
you in the motor," they wrote, "but the roads are so
frightfully dusty that we might get dust on our chauffeur."
This little touch of thoughtfulness is the keynote of
their character.

The house itself is a delightful old mansion giving on
a wide garden, which gives in turn on a broad terrace
giving on the river.

The Eminent Novelist met us at the gate. We had expected
to find the author of _Angela Rivers_ and _The Garden of
Desire_ a pale aesthetic type (we have a way of expecting
the wrong thing in our interviews). We could not resist
a shock of surprise (indeed we seldom do) at finding him
a burly out-of-door man weighting, as he himself told
us, a hundred stone in his stockinged feet (we think he
said stone).

He shook hands cordially.

"Come and see my pigs," he said.

"We wanted to ask you," we began, as we went down the
walk, "something about your books."

"Let's look at the pigs first," he said. "Are you anything
of a pig man?"

We are always anxious in our interviews to be all things
to all men. But we were compelled to admit that we were
not much of a pig man.

"Ah," said the Great Novelist, "perhaps you are more of
a dog man?"

"Not altogether a dog man," we answered.

"Anything of a bee man?" he asked.

"Something," we said (we were once stung by a bee).

"Ah," he said, "you shall have a go at the beehives,
then, right away?"

We assured him that we were willing to postpone a go at
the beehives till later.

"Come along, then, to the styes," said the Great Novelist,
and he added, "Perhaps you're not much of a breeder."

We blushed. We thought of the five little faces around
the table for which we provide food by writing our
interviews.

"No," we said, "we were not much of a breeder."

"Now then," said the Great Novelist as we reached our
goal, "how do you like this stye?"

"Very much indeed," we said.

"I've put in a new tile draining--my own plan. You notice
how sweet it keeps the stye."

We had not noticed this.

"I am afraid," said the Novelist, "that the pigs are all
asleep inside."

We begged him on no account to waken them. He offered to
open the little door at the side and let us crawl in. We
insisted that we could not think of intruding.

"What we would like," we said, "is to hear something of
your methods of work in novel writing." We said this with
very peculiar conviction. Quite apart from the immediate
purposes of our interview, we have always been most
anxious to know by what process novels are written. If
we could get to know this, we would write one ourselves.

"Come and see my bulls first," said the Novelist. "I've
got a couple of young bulls here in the paddock that will
interest you."

We felt sure that they would.

He led us to a little green fence. Inside it were two
ferocious looking animals, eating grain. They rolled
their eyes upwards at us as they ate.

"How do those strike you?" he asked.

We assured him that they struck us as our beau ideal
of bulls.

"Like to walk in beside them?" said the Novelist, opening
a little gate.

We drew back. Was it fair to disturb these bulls?

The Great Novelist noticed our hesitation.

"Don't be afraid," he said. "They're not likely to harm
you. I send my hired man right in beside them every
morning, without the slightest hesitation."

We looked at the Eminent Novelist with admiration. We
realized that like so many of our writers, actors, and
even our thinkers, of to-day, he was an open-air man in
every sense of the word.

But we shook our heads.

Bulls, we explained, were not a department of research
for which we were equipped. What we wanted, we said, was
to learn something of his methods of work.

"My methods of work?" he answered, as we turned up the
path again. "Well, really, I hardly know that I have any."

"What is your plan or method," we asked, getting out our
notebook and pencil, "of laying the beginning of a new
novel?"

"My usual plan," said the Novelist, "is to come out here
and sit in the stye till I get my characters."

"Does it take long?" we questioned.

"Not very. I generally find that a quiet half-hour spent
among the hogs will give me at least my leading character."

"And what do you do next?"

"Oh, after that I generally light a pipe and go and sit
among the beehives looking for an incident."

"Do you get it?" we asked.

"Invariably. After that I make a few notes, then go off
for a ten mile tramp with my esquimaux dogs, and get back
in time to have a go through the cattle sheds and take
a romp with the young bulls."

We sighed. We couldn't help it. Novel writing seemed
further away than ever.

"Have you also a goat on the premises?" we asked.

"Oh, certainly. A ripping old fellow--come along and
see him."

We shook our heads. No doubt our disappointment showed
in our face. It often does. We felt that it was altogether
right and wholesome that our great novels of to-day should
be written in this fashion with the help of goats, dogs,
hogs and young bulls. But we felt, too, that it was not
for us.

We permitted ourselves one further question.

"At what time," we said, "do you rise in the morning?"

"Oh anywhere between four and five," said the Novelist.

"Ah, and do you generally take a cold dip as soon as you
are up--even in winter?"

"I do."

"You prefer, no doubt," we said, with a dejection that
we could not conceal, "to have water with a good coat of
ice over it?"

"Oh, certainly!"

We said no more. We have long understood the reasons for
our own failure in life, but it was painful to receive
a renewed corroboration of it. This ice question has
stood in our way for forty-seven years.

The Great Novelist seemed to note our dejection.

"Come to the house," he said, "my wife will give you a
cup of tea."

In a few moments we had forgotten all our troubles in
the presence of one of the most charming chatelaines it
has been our lot to meet.

We sat on a low stool immediately beside Ethelinda
Afterthought, who presided in her own gracious fashion
over the tea-urn.

"So you want to know something of my methods of work?"
she said, as she poured hot tea over our leg.

"We do," we answered, taking out our little book and
recovering something of our enthusiasm. We do not mind
hot tea being poured over us if people treat us as a
human being.

"Can you indicate," we continued, "what method you follow
in beginning one of your novels?"

"I always begin," said Ethelinda Afterthought, "with a
study."

"A study?" we queried.

"Yes. I mean a study of actual facts. Take, for example,
my _Leaves from the Life of a Steam Laundrywoman_--more
tea?"

"No, no," we said.

"Well, to make that book I first worked two years in a
laundry."

"Two years!" we exclaimed. "And why?"

"To get the atmosphere."

"The steam?" we questioned.

"Oh, no," said Mrs. Afterthought, "I did that separately.
I took a course in steam at a technical school."

"Is it possible?" we said, our heart beginning to sing
again. "Was all that necessary?"

"I don't see how one could do it otherwise. The story
opens, as no doubt you remember--tea?--in the boiler room
of the laundry."

"Yes," we said, moving our leg--"no, thank you."

"So you see the only possible _point d'appui_ was to
begin with a description of the inside of the boiler."

We nodded.

"A masterly thing," we said.

"My wife," interrupted the Great Novelist, who was sitting
with the head of a huge Danish hound in his lap, sharing
his buttered toast with the dog while he adjusted a set
of trout flies, "is a great worker."

"Do you always work on that method?" we asked.

"Always," she answered. "For _Frederica of the Factory_
I spent six months in a knitting mill. For _Marguerite
of the Mud Flats_ I made special studies for months and
months."

"Of what sort?" we asked.

"In mud. Learning to model it. You see for a story of
that sort the first thing needed is a thorough knowledge
of mud--all kinds of it."

"And what are you doing next?" we inquired.

"My next book," said the Lady Novelist, "is to be a study
--tea?--of the pickle industry--perfectly new ground."

"A fascinating field," we murmured.

"And quite new. Several of our writers have done the
slaughter-house, and in England a good deal has been done
in jam. But so far no one has done pickles. I should
like, if I could," added Ethelinda Afterthought, with
the graceful modesty that is characteristic of her, "to
make it the first of a series of pickle novels, showing,
don't you know, the whole pickle district, and perhaps
following a family of pickle workers for four or five
generations."

"Four or five!" we said enthusiastically. "Make it ten!
And have you any plan for work beyond that?"

"Oh, yes indeed," laughed the Lady Novelist. "I am always
planning ahead. What I want to do after that is a study
of the inside of a penitentiary."

"Of the _inside_?" we said, with a shudder.

"Yes. To do it, of course, I shall go to jail for two or
three years!"

"But how can you get in?" we asked, thrilled at the quiet
determination of the frail woman before us.

"I shall demand it as a right," she answered quietly. "I
shall go to the authorities, at the head of a band of
enthusiastic women, and demand that I shall be sent to
jail. Surely after the work I have done, that much is
coming to me."

"It certainly is," we said warmly.

We rose to go.

Both the novelists shook hands with us with great
cordiality. Mr. Afterthought walked as far as the front
door with us and showed us a short cut past the beehives
that could take us directly through the bull pasture to
the main road.

We walked away in the gathering darkness of evening very
quietly. We made up our mind as we went that novel writing
is not for us. We must reach the penitentiary in some
other way.

But we thought it well to set down our interview as a
guide to others.




IX. The New Education

"So you're going back to college in a fortnight," I said
to the Bright Young Thing on the veranda of the summer
hotel. "Aren't you sorry?"

"In a way I am," she said, "but in another sense I'm glad
to go back. One can't loaf all the time."

She looked up from her rocking-chair over her Red Cross
knitting with great earnestness.

How full of purpose these modern students are, I thought
to myself. In my time we used to go back to college as
to a treadmill.

"I know that," I said, "but what I mean is that college,
after all, is a pretty hard grind. Things like mathematics
and Greek are no joke, are they? In my day, as I remember
it, we used to think spherical trigonometry about the
hardest stuff of the lot."

She looked dubious.

"I didn't _elect_ mathematics," she said.

"Oh," I said, "I see. So you don't have to take it. And
what _have_ you elected?"

"For this coming half semester--that's six weeks, you
know--I've elected Social Endeavour."

"Ah," I said, "that's since my day, what is it?"

"Oh, it's _awfully_ interesting. It's the study of
conditions."

"What kind of conditions?" I asked.

"All conditions. Perhaps I can't explain it properly.
But I have the prospectus of it indoors if you'd like to
see it. We take up Society."

"And what do you do with it?"

"Analyse it," she said.

"But it must mean reading a tremendous lot of books."

"No," she answered. "We don't use books in this course.
It's all Laboratory Work."

"Now I _am_ mystified," I said. "What do you mean by
Laboratory Work?"

"Well," answered the girl student with a thoughtful look
upon her face, "you see, we are supposed to break society
up into its elements."

"In six weeks?"

"Some of the girls do it in six weeks. Some put in a
whole semester and take twelve weeks at it."

"So as to break up pretty thoroughly?" I said.

"Yes," she assented. "But most of the girls think six
weeks is enough."

"That ought to pulverize it pretty completely. But how
do you go at it?"

"Well," the girl said, "it's all done with Laboratory
Work. We take, for instance, department stores. I think
that is the first thing we do, we take up the department
store."

"And what do you do with it?"

"We study it as a Social Germ."

"Ah," I said, "as a Social Germ."

"Yes," said the girl, delighted to see that I was beginning
to understand, "as a Germ. All the work is done in the
concrete. The class goes down with the professor to the
department store itself--"

"And then--"

"Then they walk all through it, observing."

"But have none of them ever been in a departmental store
before?"

"Oh, of course, but, you see, we go as Observers."

"Ah, now, I understand. You mean you don't buy anything
and so you are able to watch everything?"

"No," she said, "it's not that. We do buy things. That's
part of it. Most of the girls like to buy little
knick-knacks, and anyway it gives them a good chance to
do their shopping while they're there. But while they
_are_ there they are observing. Then afterwards they make
charts."

"Charts of what?" I asked.

"Charts of the employes; they're used to show the brain
movement involved."

"Do you find much?"

"Well," she said hesitatingly, "the idea is to reduce
all the employes to a Curve."

"To a Curve?" I exclaimed, "an In or an Out."

"No, no, not exactly that. Didn't you use Curves when
you were at college?"

"Never," I said.

"Oh, well, nowadays nearly everything, you know, is done
into a Curve. We put them on the board."

"And what is this particular Curve of the employe used
for?" I asked.

"Why," said the student, "the idea is that from the Curve
we can get the Norm of the employe."

"Get his Norm?" I asked.

"Yes, get the Norm. That stands for the Root Form of the
employe as a social factor."

"And what can you do with that?"

"Oh, when we have that we can tell what the employe would
do under any and every circumstance. At least that's the
idea--though I'm really only quoting," she added, breaking
off in a diffident way, "from what Miss Thinker, the
professor of Social Endeavour, says. She's really fine.
She's making a general chart of the female employes of
one of the biggest stores to show what percentage in case
of fire would jump out of the window and what percentage
would run to the fire escape."

"It's a wonderful course," I said. "We had nothing like
it when I went to college. And does it only take in
departmental stores?"

"No," said the girl, "the laboratory work includes for
this semester ice-cream parlours as well."

"What do you do with _them_?"

"We take them up as Social Cells, Nuclei, I think the
professor calls them."

"And how do you go at them?" I asked.

"Why, the girls go to them in little laboratory groups
and study them."

"They eat ice-cream in them?"

"They _have to_," she said, "to make it concrete. But
while they are doing it they are considering the ice-cream
parlour merely as a section of social protoplasm."

"Does the professor go?" I asked.

"Oh, yes, she heads each group. Professor Thinker never
spares herself from work."

"Dear me," I said, "you must be kept very busy. And is
Social Endeavour all that you are going to do?"

"No," she answered, "I'm electing a half-course in Nature
Work as well."

"Nature Work? Well! Well! That, I suppose, means cramming
up a lot of biology and zoology, does it not?"

"No," said the girl, "it's not exactly done with books.
I believe it is all done by Field Work."

"Field Work?"

"Yes. Field Work four times a week and an Excursion every
Saturday."

"And what do you do in the Field Work?"

"The girls," she answered, "go out in groups anywhere out
of doors, and make a Nature Study of anything they see."

"How do they do that?" I asked.

"Why, they look at it. Suppose, for example, they come
to a stream or a pond or anything--"

"Yes--"

"Well, they _look_ at it."

"Had they never done that before?" I asked.

"Ah, but they look at it as a Nature Unit. Each girl must
take forty units in the course. I think we only do one
unit each day we go out."

"It must," I said, "be pretty fatiguing work, and what
about the Excursion?"

"That's every Saturday. We go out with Miss Stalk, the
professor of Ambulation."

"And where do you go?"

"Oh, anywhere. One day we go perhaps for a trip on a
steamer and another Saturday somewhere in motors, and so
on."

"Doing what?" I asked.

"Field Work. The aim of the course--I'm afraid I'm quoting
Miss Stalk but I don't mind, she's really fine--is to
break nature into its elements--"

"I see--"

"So as to view it as the external structure of Society
and make deductions from it."

"Have you made any?" I asked.

"Oh, no"--she laughed--"I'm only starting the work this
term. But, of course, I shall have to. Each girl makes
at least one deduction at the end of the course. Some of
the seniors make two or three. But you have to make
_one_."

"It's a great course," I said. "No wonder you are going
to be busy; and, as you say, how much better than loafing
round here doing nothing."

"Isn't it?" said the girl student with enthusiasm in her
eyes. "It gives one such a sense of purpose, such a
feeling of doing something."

"It must," I answered.

"Oh, goodness," she exclaimed, "there's the lunch bell.
I must skip and get ready."

She was just vanishing from my side when the Burly Male
Student, who was also staying in the hotel, came puffing
up after his five-mile run. He was getting himself into
trim for enlistment, so he told me. He noted the retreating
form of the college girl as he sat down.

"I've just been talking to her," I said, "about her
college work. She seems to be studying a queer lot of
stuff--Social Endeavour and all that!"

"Awful piffle," said the young man. "But the girls
naturally run to all that sort of rot, you know."

"Now, your work," I went on, "is no doubt very different.
I mean what you were taking before the war came along.
I suppose you fellows have an awful dose of mathematics
and philology and so on just as I did in my college days?"

Something like a blush came across the face of the handsome
youth.

"Well, no," he said, "I didn't co-opt mathematics. At
our college, you know, we co-opt two majors and two
minors."

"I see," I said, "and what were you co-opting?"

"I co-opted Turkish, Music, and Religion," he answered.

"Oh, yes," I said with a sort of reverential respect,
"fitting yourself for a position of choir-master in a
Turkish cathedral, no doubt."

"No, no," he said, "I'm going into insurance; but, you
see, those subjects fitted in better than anything else."

"Fitted in?"

"Yes. Turkish comes at nine, music at ten and religion
at eleven. So they make a good combination; they leave
a man free to--"

"To develop his mind," I said. "We used to find in my
college days that lectures interfered with it badly. But
now, Turkish, that must be an interesting language, eh?"

"Search me!" said the student. "All you have to do is
answer the roll and go out. Forty roll-calls give you
one Turkish unit--but, say, I must get on, I've got to
change. So long."

I could not help reflecting, as the young man left me,
on the great changes that have come over our college
education. It was a relief to me later in the day to talk
with a quiet, sombre man, himself a graduate student in
philosophy, on this topic. He agreed with me that the
old strenuous studies seem to be very largely abandoned.

I looked at the sombre man with respect.

"Now your work," I said, "is very different from what
these young people are doing--hard, solid, definite
effort. What a relief it must be to you to get a brief
vacation up here. I couldn't help thinking to-day, as I
watched you moving round doing nothing, how fine it must
feel for you to come up here after your hard work and
put in a month of out-and-out loafing."

"Loafing!" he said indignantly. "I'm not loafing. I'm
putting in a half summer course in Introspection. That's
why I'm here. I get credit for two majors for my time
here."

"Ah," I said, as gently as I could, "you get credit here."

He left me. I am still pondering over our new education.
Meantime I think I shall enter my little boy's name on
the books of Tuskegee College where the education is
still old-fashioned.




X. The Errors of Santa Claus


It was Christmas Eve.

The Browns, who lived in the adjoining house, had been
dining with the Joneses.

Brown and Jones were sitting over wine and walnuts at
the table. The others had gone upstairs.

"What are you giving to your boy for Christmas?" asked
Brown.

"A train," said Jones, "new kind of thing--automatic."

"Let's have a look at it," said Brown.

Jones fetched a parcel from the sideboard and began
unwrapping it.

"Ingenious thing, isn't it?" he said. "Goes on its own
rails. Queer how kids love to play with trains, isn't it?"

"Yes," assented Brown. "How are the rails fixed?"

"Wait, I'll show you," said Jones. "Just help me to shove
these dinner things aside and roll back the cloth. There!
See! You lay the rails like that and fasten them at the
ends, so--"

"Oh, yes, I catch on, makes a grade, doesn't it? Just
the thing to amuse a child, isn't it? I got Willy a toy
aeroplane."

"I know, they're great. I got Edwin one on his birthday.
But I thought I'd get him a train this time. I told him
Santa Claus was going to bring him something altogether
new this time. Edwin, of course, believes in Santa Claus
absolutely. Say, look at this locomotive, would you? It
has a spring coiled up inside the fire box."

"Wind her up," said Brown with great interest. "Let's
see her go."

"All right," said Jones. "Just pile up two or three plates
or something to lean the end of the rails on. There,
notice the way it buzzes before it starts. Isn't that a
great thing for a kid, eh?"

"Yes," said Brown. "And say, see this little string to
pull the whistle! By Gad, it toots, eh? Just like real?"

"Now then, Brown," Jones went on, "you hitch on those
cars and I'll start her. I'll be engineer, eh!"

Half an hour later Brown and Jones were still playing
trains on the dining-room table.

But their wives upstairs in the drawing-room hardly
noticed their absence. They were too much interested.

"Oh, I think it's perfectly sweet," said Mrs. Brown.
"Just the loveliest doll I've seen in years. I must get
one like it for Ulvina. Won't Clarisse be perfectly
enchanted?"

"Yes," answered Mrs. Jones, "and then she'll have all
the fun of arranging the dresses. Children love that so
much. Look, there are three little dresses with the doll,
aren't they cute? All cut out and ready to stitch together."

"Oh, how perfectly lovely!" exclaimed Mrs. Brown. "I
think the mauve one would suit the doll best, don't you,
with such golden hair? Only don't you think it would make
it much nicer to turn back the collar, so, and to put a
little band--so?"

"_What_ a good idea!" said Mrs. Jones. "Do let's try it.
Just wait, I'll get a needle in a minute. I'll tell
Clarisse that Santa Claus sewed it himself. The child
believes in Santa Claus absolutely."

And half an hour later Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Brown were so
busy stitching dolls' clothes that they could not hear
the roaring of the little train up and down the dining
table, and had no idea what the four children were doing.

Nor did the children miss their mothers.

"Dandy, aren't they?" Edwin Jones was saying to little
Willie Brown, as they sat in Edwin's bedroom. "A hundred
in a box, with cork tips, and see, an amber mouthpiece
that fits into a little case at the side. Good present
for Dad, eh?"

"Fine!" said Willie appreciatively. "I'm giving Father cigars."

"I know, I thought of cigars too. Men always like cigars
and cigarettes. You can't go wrong on them. Say, would
you like to try one or two of these cigarettes? We can
take them from the bottom. You'll like them, they're
Russian--away ahead of Egyptian."

"Thanks," answered Willie. "I'd like one immensely. I
only started smoking last spring--on my twelfth birthday.
I think a feller's a fool to begin smoking cigarettes
too soon, don't you? It stunts him. I waited till I was
twelve."

"Me too," said Edwin, as they lighted their cigarettes.
"In fact, I wouldn't buy them now if it weren't for Dad.
I simply _had_ to give him something from Santa Claus.
He believes in Santa Claus absolutely, you know."

And, while this was going on, Clarisse was showing little
Ulvina the absolutely lovely little bridge set that she
got for her mother.

"Aren't these markers perfectly charming?" said Ulvina.
"And don't you love this little Dutch design--or is it
Flemish, darling?"

"Dutch," said Clarisse. "Isn't it quaint? And aren't
these the dearest little things, for putting the money
in when you play. I needn't have got them with it--they'd
have sold the rest separately--but I think it's too
utterly slow playing without money, don't you?"

"Oh, abominable," shuddered Ulvina. "But your mamma never
plays for money, does she?"

"Mamma! Oh, gracious, no. Mamma's far too slow for that.
But I shall tell her that Santa Claus insisted on putting
in the little money boxes."

"I suppose she believes in Santa Claus, just as my mamma
does."

"Oh, absolutely," said Clarisse, and added, "What if we
play a little game! With a double dummy, the French way,
or Norwegian Skat, if you like. That only needs two."

"All right," agreed Ulvina, and in a few minutes they
were deep in a game of cards with a little pile of pocket
money beside them.

About half an hour later, all the members of the two
families were again in the drawing-room. But of course
nobody said anything about the presents. In any case they
were all too busy looking at the beautiful big Bible,
with maps in it, that the Joneses had brought to give to
Grandfather. They all agreed that, with the help of it,
Grandfather could hunt up any place in Palestine in a
moment, day or night.

But upstairs, away upstairs in a sitting-room of his own
Grandfather Jones was looking with an affectionate eye
at the presents that stood beside him. There was a
beautiful whisky decanter, with silver filigree outside
(and whiskey inside) for Jones, and for the little boy
a big nickel-plated Jew's harp.

Later on, far in the night, the person, or the influence,
or whatever it is called Santa Claus, took all the presents
and placed them in the people's stockings.

And, being blind as he always has been, he gave the wrong
things to the wrong people--in fact, he gave them just
as indicated above.

But the next day, in the course of Christmas morning,
the situation straightened itself out, just as it always
does.

Indeed, by ten o'clock, Brown and Jones were playing with
the train, and Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Jones were making
dolls' clothes, and the boys were smoking cigarettes,
and Clarisse and Ulvina were playing cards for their
pocket-money.

And upstairs--away up--Grandfather was drinking whisky
and playing the Jew's harp.

And so Christmas, just as it always does, turned out all
right after all.




XI. Lost in New York

A VISITOR'S SOLILOQUY

Well! Well!

Whatever has been happening to this place, to New York?
Changed? Changed since I was here in '86? Well, I should
say so.

The hack-driver of the old days that I used to find
waiting for me at the station curb, with that impossible
horse of his--the hack-driver with his bulbous red face,
and the nice smell of rye whisky all 'round him for
yards--gone, so it seems, for ever.

And in place of him this--what is it they call it?--taxi,
with a clean-shaven cut-throat steering it. "Get in," he
says, Just that. He doesn't offer to help me or lift my
satchel. All right, young man, I'm crawling in.

That's the machine that marks it, eh? I suppose they have
them rigged up so they can punch up anything they like.
I thought so--he hits it up to fifty cents before we
start. But I saw him do it. Well, I can stand for it this
time. I'll not be caught in one of these again.

The hotel? All right, I'm getting out. My hotel? But what
is it they have done to it? They must have added ten
stories to it. It reaches to the sky. But I'll not try
to look to the top of it. Not with this satchel in my
hand: no, sir! I'll wait till I'm safe inside. In there
I'll feel all right. They'll know me in there. They'll
remember right away my visit in the fall of '86. They
won't easily have forgotten that big dinner I gave--nine
people at a dollar fifty a plate, with the cigars extra.
The clerk will remember _me_, all right.

Know me? Not they. The _clerk_ know me! How could he?
For it seems now there isn't any clerk, or not as there
used to be. They have subdivided him somehow into five
or six. There is a man behind a desk, a majestic sort of
man, waving his hand. It would be sheer madness to claim
acquaintance with him. There is another with a great book,
adjusting cards in it; and another, behind glass labelled
"Cashier," and busy as a bank; there are two with mail
and telegrams. They are all too busy to know me.

Shall I sneak up near to them, keeping my satchel in my
hand? I wonder, do they _see_ me? _Can_ they see me, a
mere thing like me? I am within ten feet of them, but I
am certain that they cannot see me. I am, and I feel it,
absolutely invisible.

Ha! One has seen me. He turns to me, or rather he rounds
upon me, with the words "Well, sir?" That, and nothing
else, sharp and hard. There is none of the ancient kindly
pretence of knowing my name, no reaching out a welcome
hand and calling me Mr. Er--Er--till he has read my name
upside down while I am writing it and can address me as
a familiar friend. No friendly questioning about the
crops in my part of the country. The crops, forsooth!
What do these young men know about crops?

A room? Had I any reservation? Any which? Any reservation.
Oh, I see, had I written down from home to say that I
was coming? No, I had not because the truth is I came at
very short notice. I didn't know till a week before that
my brother-in-law--He is not listening. He has moved
away. I will stand and wait till he comes back. I am
intruding here; I had no right to disturb these people
like this.

Oh, I can have a room at eleven o'clock. When it is
which?--is vacated. Oh, yes, I see, when the man in it
gets up and goes away. I didn't for the minute catch on
to what the word--He has stopped listening.

Never mind, I can wait. From eight to eleven is only
three hours, anyway. I will move about here and look at
things. If I keep moving they will notice me less. Ha!
books and news papers and magazines--what a stack of
them! Like a regular book-store. I will stand here and
take a look at some of them. Eh! what's that? Did I want
to _buy_ anything? Well, no, I hadn't exactly--I was
just--Oh, I see, they're on _sale_. All right, yes, give
me this one--fifty cents--all right--and this and these
others. That's all right, miss, I'm not stingy. They
always say of me up in our town that when I--She has
stopped listening.

Never mind. I will walk up and down again with the
magazines under my arm. That will make people think I
live here. Better still if I could put the magazines in
my satchel. But how? There is no way to set it down and
undo the straps. I wonder if I could dare put it for a
minute on that table, the polished one--? Or no, they
wouldn't likely allow a man to put a bag _there_.

Well, I can wait. Anyway, it's eight o'clock and soon,
surely, breakfast will be ready. As soon as I hear the
gong I can go in there. I wonder if I could find out
first where the dining-room is. It used always to be
marked across the door, but I don't seem to see it. Darn
it, I'll ask that man in uniform. If I'm here prepared
to spend my good money to get breakfast I guess I'm not
scared to ask a simple question of a man in uniform. Or
no, I'll not ask _him_. I'll try this one--or no, he's
busy. I'll ask this other boy. Say, would you mind, if
you please, telling me, please, which way the dining-room
--Eh, what? Do I want which? The grill room or the palm
room? Why, I tell you, young man, I just wanted to get
some breakfast if it's--what? Do I want what? I didn't
quite get that--_a la carte_? No, thanks--and, what's
that? table de what? in the palm room? No, I just wanted
--but it doesn't matter. I'll wait 'round here and look
about till I hear the gong. Don't worry about me.

What's that? What's that boy shouting out--that boy with
the tray? A call for Mr. Something or Other--say, must
be something happened pretty serious! A call for Mr.--why,
that's for me! Hullo! _Here I am! Here, it's Me! Here I
am_--wanted at the desk? all right, I'm coming, I'm
hurrying. I guess something's wrong at home, eh! _Here
I am_. That's my name. I'm ready.

Oh, a room. You've got a room for me. All right. The
fifteenth floor! Good heavens! Away up there! Never mind,
I'll take it. Can't give me a bath? That's all right.
I had one.

Elevator over this way? All right, I'll come along.
Thanks, I can carry it. But I don't see any elevator?
Oh, this door in the wall? Well! I'm hanged. This the
elevator! It certainly has changed. The elevator that I
remember had a rope in the middle of it, and you pulled
the rope up as you went, wheezing and clanking all the
way to the fifth floor. But this looks a queer sort of
machine. How do you do--Oh, I beg your pardon. I was in
the road of the door, I guess. Excuse me, I'm afraid I
got in the way of your elbow. It's all right, you didn't
hurt--or, not bad.

Gee whiz! It goes fast. Are you sure you can stop it?
Better be careful, young man. There was an elevator once
in our town that--fifteenth floor? All right.

This room, eh! Great Scott, it's high up. Say, better
not go too near that window, boy. That would be a hell
of a drop if a feller fell out. You needn't wait. Oh, I
see. I beg your pardon. I suppose a quarter is enough, eh?

Well, it's a relief to be alone. But say, this is high
up! And what a noise! What is it they're doing out there,
away out in the air, with all that clatter--building a
steel building, I guess. Well, those fellers have their
nerve, all right. I'll sit further back from the window.

It's lonely up here. In the old days I could have rung
a bell and had a drink sent up to the room; but away up
here on the fifteenth floor! Oh, no, they'd never send
a drink clean up to the fifteenth floor. Of course, in
the old days, I could have put on my canvas slippers and
walked down to the bar and had a drink and talked to the
bar-tender.

But of course they wouldn't have a bar in a place like
this. I'd like to go down and see, but I don't know that
I'd care to ask, anyway. No, I guess I'll just sit and
wait. Some one will come for me, I guess, after a while.

If I were back right now in our town, I could walk into
Ed Clancey's restaurant and have ham and eggs, or steak
and eggs, or anything, for thirty-five cents.

Our town up home is a peach of a little town, anyway.

Say, I just feel as if I'd like to take my satchel and
jump clean out of that window. It would be a good rebuke
to them.

But, pshaw! what would _they_ care?




XII. This Strenuous Age

Something is happening, I regret to find, to the world
in which we used to live. The poor old thing is being
"speeded up." There is "efficiency" in the air. Offices
open at eight o'clock. Millionaires lunch on a baked
apple. Bankers eat practically nothing. A college president
has declared that there are more foot pounds of energy
in a glass of peptonized milk than in--something else,
I forget what. All this is very fine. Yet somehow I feel
out of it.

My friends are failing me. They won't sit up after
midnight. They have taken to sleeping out of doors, on
porches and pergolas. Some, I understand, merely roost
on plain wooden bars. They rise early. They take deep
breathing. They bathe in ice water. They are no good.

This change I am sure, is excellent. It is, I am certain,
just as it ought to be. I am merely saying, quietly and
humbly, that I am not in it. I am being left behind.
Take, for example, the case of alcohol. That, at least,
is what it is called now. There were days when we called
it Bourbon whisky and Tom Gin, and when the very name of
it breathed romance. That time is past.

The poor stuff is now called alcohol, and none so low
that he has a good word for it. Quite right, I am certain.
I don't defend it. Alcohol, they are saying to-day, if
taken in sufficient quantities, tears all the outer
coating off the diaphragm. It leaves the epigastric
tissue, so I am informed, a useless wreck.

This I don't deny. It gets, they tell me, into the brain.
I don't dispute it. It turns the prosencephalon into mere
punk. I know it. I've felt it doing it. They tell me--and
I believe it--that after even one glass of alcohol, or
shall we say Scotch whisky and soda, a man's working
power is lowered by twenty per cent. This is a dreadful
thing. After three glasses, so it is held, his capacity
for sustained rigid thought is cut in two. And after
about six glasses the man's working power is reduced by
at least a hundred per cent. He merely sits there--in
his arm-chair, at his club let us say--with all power,
even all _desire_ to work gone out of him, not thinking
rigidly, not sustaining his thought, a mere shapeless
chunk of geniality, half hidden in the blue smoke of his
cigar.

Very dreadful, not a doubt. Alcohol is doomed; it is
going it is gone. Yet when I think of a hot Scotch on a
winter evening, or a Tom Collins on a summer morning, or
a gin Rickey beside a tennis-court, or a stein of beer
on a bench beside a bowling-green--I wish somehow that
we could prohibit the use of alcohol and merely drink
beer and whisky and gin as we used to. But these things,
it appears, interfere with work. They have got to go.

But turn to the broader and simpler question of _work_
itself. In my time one hated it. It was viewed as the
natural enemy of man. Now the world has fallen in love
with it. My friends, I find, take their deep breathing
and their porch sleeping because it makes them work
better. They go for a week's vacation in Virginia not
for its own sake, but because they say they can work
better when they get back. I know a man who wears very
loose boots because he can work better in them: and
another who wears only soft shirts because he can work
better in a soft shirt. There are plenty of men now who
would wear dog-harness if they thought they could work
more in it. I know another man who walks away out into
the country every Sunday: not that he likes the country
--he wouldn't recognize a bumble bee if he saw it--but
he claims that if he walks on Sunday his head is as clear
as a bell for work on Monday.

Against work itself, I say nothing. But I sometimes wonder
if I stand alone in this thing. Am I the _only_ person
left who hates it?

Nor is work all. Take food. I admit, here and now, that
the lunch I like best--I mean for an ordinary plain lunch,
not a party--is a beef steak about one foot square and
two inches thick. Can I work on it? No, I can't, but I
can work in spite of it. That is as much as one used to
ask, twenty-five years ago.

Yet now I find that all my friends boast ostentatiously
about the meagre lunch they eat. One tells me that he
finds a glass of milk and a prune is quite as much as he
cares to take. Another says that a dry biscuit and a
glass of water is all that his brain will stand. One
lunches on the white of an egg. Another eats merely the
yolk. I have only two friends left who can eat a whole
egg at a time.

I understand that the fear of these men is that if they
eat more than an egg or a biscuit they will feel heavy
after lunch. Why they object to feeling heavy, I do not
know. Personally, I enjoy it. I like nothing better than
to sit round after a heavy lunch with half a dozen heavy
friends, smoking heavy cigars. I am well aware that that
is wicked. I merely confess the fact. I do not palliate it.

Nor is food all, nor drink, nor work, nor open air. There
has spread abroad along with the so-called physical
efficiency a perfect passion for _information_. Somehow
if a man's stomach is empty and his head clear as a bell,
and if he won't drink and won't smoke, he reaches out
for information. He wants facts. He reads the newspapers
all though, instead of only reading the headings. He
clamours for articles filled with statistics about
illiteracy and alien immigration and the number of
battleships in the Japanese navy.

I know quite a lot of men who have actually bought the
new _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. What is more, they _read_
the thing. They sit in their apartments at night with a
glass of water at their elbow reading the encyclopaedia.
They say that it is literally filled with facts. Other
men spend their time reading the Statistical Abstract of
the United States (they say the figures in it are great)
and the Acts of Congress, and the list of Presidents
since Washington (or was it Washington?).

Spending their evenings thus, and topping it off with a
cold baked apple, and sleeping out in the snow, they go
to work in the morning, so they tell me, with a positive
sense of exhilaration. I have no doubt that they do. But,
for me, I confess that once and for all I am out of it.
I am left behind.

Add to it all such rising dangers as total prohibition,
and the female franchise, the daylight saving, and eugenic
marriage, together with proportional representation, the
initiative and the referendum, and the duty of the citizen
to take an intelligent interest in politics--and I admit
that I shall not be sorry to go away from here.

But before I _do_ go, I have one hope. I understand that
down in Hayti things are very different. Bull fights,
cock fights, dog fights, are openly permitted. Business
never begins till eleven in the morning. Everybody sleeps
after lunch, and the bars remain open all night. Marriage
is but a casual relation. In fact, the general condition
of morality, so they tell me, is lower in Hayti than it
has been anywhere since the time of Nero. Me for Hayti.




XIII. The Old, Old Story of How Five Men Went Fishing

This is a plain account of a fishing party. It is not a
story. There is no plot. Nothing happens in it and nobody
is hurt. The only point of this narrative is its peculiar
truth. It not only tells what happened to us--the five
people concerned in it--but what has happened and is
happening to all the other fishing parties that at the
season of the year, from Halifax to Idaho, go gliding
out on the unruffled surface of our Canadian and American
lakes in the still cool of early summer morning.

We decided to go in the early morning because there is
a popular belief that the early morning is the right time
for bass fishing. The bass is said to bite in the early
morning. Perhaps it does. In fact the thing is almost
capable of scientific proof. The bass does _not_ bite
between eight and twelve. It does _not_ bite between
twelve and six in the afternoon. Nor does it bite between
six o'clock and midnight. All these things are known
facts. The inference is that the bass bites furiously at
about daybreak.

At any rate our party were unanimous about starting early.
"Better make an early start," said the Colonel, when the
idea of the party was suggested. "Oh, yes," said George
Popley, the bank manager, "we want to get right out on
the shoal while the fish are biting."

When he said this all our eyes glistened. Everybody's
do. There's a thrill in the words. To "get right out on
the shoal at daybreak when the fish are biting," is an
idea that goes to any man's brain.

If you listen to the men talking in a Pullman car, or an
hotel corridor, or, better still, at the little tables
in a first-class bar, you will not listen long before
you hear one say: "Well, we got out early, just after
sunrise, right on the shoal." And presently, even if you
can't hear him, you will see him reach out his two hands
and hold them about two feet apart for the other man to
admire. He is measuring the fish. No, not the fish they
caught; this was the big one that they lost. But they
had him right up to the top of the water. Oh, yes, he
was up to the top of the water all right. The number of
huge fish that have been heaved up to the top of the
water in our lakes is almost incredible. Or at least it
used to be when we still had bar rooms and little tables
for serving that vile stuff Scotch whisky and such foul
things as gin Rickeys and John Collinses. It makes one
sick to think of it, doesn't it? But there was good
fishing in the bars, all the winter.

But, as I say, we decided to go early in the morning.
Charlie Jones, the railroad man, said that he remembered
how when he was a boy, up in Wisconsin, they used to get
out at five in the morning--not get up at five but be on
the shoal at five. It appears that there is a shoal
somewhere in Wisconsin where the bass lie in thousands.
Kernin, the lawyer, said that when he was a boy--this
was on Lake Rosseau--they used to get out at four. It
seems there is a shoal in Lake Rosseau where you can haul
up the bass as fast as you can drop your line. The shoal
is hard to find--very hard. Kernin can find it, but it
is doubtful--so I gather--if any other living man can.
The Wisconsin shoal, too, is very difficult to find. Once
you find it, you are all right; but it's hard to find.
Charlie Jones can find it. If you were in Wisconsin right
now he'd take you straight to it, but probably no other
person now alive could reach that shoal. In the same way
Colonel Morse knows of a shoal in Lake Simcoe where he
used to fish years and years ago and which, I understand,
he can still find.

I have mentioned that Kernin is a lawyer, and Jones a
railroad man and Popley a banker. But I needn't have.
Any reader would take it for granted. In any fishing
party there is always a lawyer. You can tell him at sight.
He is the one of the party that has a landing net and a
steel rod in sections with a wheel that is used to wind
the fish to the top of the water.

And there is always a banker. You can tell him by his
good clothes. Popley, in the bank, wears his banking
suit. When he goes fishing he wears his fishing suit. It
is much the better of the two, because his banking suit
has ink marks on it, and his fishing suit has no fish
marks on it.

As for the railroad man--quite so, the reader knows it
as well as I do--you can tell him because he carries a
pole that he cut in the bush himself, with a ten-cent
line wrapped round the end of it. Jones says he can catch
as many fish with this kind of line as Kernin can with
his patent rod and wheel. So he can too. Just the same
number.

But Kernin says that with his patent apparatus if you
get a fish on you can _play_ him. Jones says to Hades
with _playing_ him: give him a fish on his line and he'll
haul him in all right. Kernin says he'd lose him. But
Jones says _he_ wouldn't. In fact he _guarantees_ to haul
the fish in. Kernin says that more than once--in Lake
Rosseau--he has played a fish for over half an hour. I
forget now why he stopped; I think the fish quit playing.

I have heard Kernin and Jones argue this question of
their two rods, as to which rod can best pull in the
fish, for half an hour. Others may have heard the same
question debated. I know no way by which it could be
settled.

Our arrangement to go fishing was made at the little golf
club of our summer town on the veranda where we sit in
the evening. Oh, it's just a little place, nothing
pretentious: the links are not much good for _golf_; in
fact we don't play much _golf_ there, so far as golf
goes, and of course, we don't serve meals at the club,
it's not like that--and no, we've nothing to drink there
because of prohibition. But we go and _sit_ there. It is
a good place to _sit_, and, after all, what else can you
do in the present state of the law?

So it was there that we arranged the party.

The thing somehow seemed to fall into the mood of each
of us. Jones said he had been hoping that some of the
boys would get up a fishing party. It was apparently the
one kind of pleasure that he really cared for. For myself
I was delighted to get in with a crowd of regular fishermen
like these four, especially as I hadn't been out fishing
for nearly ten years, though fishing is a thing I am
passionately fond of. I know no pleasure in life like
the sensation of getting a four-pound bass on the hook
and hauling him up to the top of the water, to weigh him.
But, as I say, I hadn't been out for ten years. Oh, yes,
I live right beside the water every summer, and yes,
certainly--I am saying so--I am passionately fond of
fishing, but still somehow I hadn't been _out_. Every
fisherman knows just how that happens. The years have a
way of slipping by. Yet I must say I was surprised to
find that so keen a sport as Jones hadn't been out--so
it presently appeared--for eight years. I had imagined
he practically lived on the water. And Colonel Morse and
Kernin, I was amazed to find, hadn't been out for twelve
years, not since the day--so it came out in conversation
--when they went out together in Lake Rosseau and Kernin
landed a perfect monster, a regular corker, five pounds
and a half, they said; or no, I don't think he _landed_
him. No, I remember, he didn't _land_ him. He caught
him--and he _could_ have landed him, he should have landed
him--but he _didn't_ land him. That was it. Yes, I
remember Kernin and Morse had a slight discussion about
it--oh, perfectly amicable--as to whether Morse had
fumbled with the net or whether Kernin--the whole argument
was perfectly friendly--had made an ass of himself by
not "striking" soon enough. Of course the whole thing
was so long ago that both of them could look back on it
without any bitterness or ill nature. In fact it amused
them. Kernin said it was the most laughable thing he ever
saw in his life to see poor old Jack--that's Morse's
name--shoving away with the landing net wrong side up.
And Morse said he'd never forget seeing poor old Kernin
yanking his line first this way and then that and not
knowing where to try to haul it. It made him laugh to
look back at it.

They might have gone on laughing for quite a time, but
Charlie Jones interrupted by saying that in his opinion
a landing net is a piece of darned foolishness. Here
Popley agrees with him. Kernin objects that if you don't
use a net you'll lose your fish at the side of the boat.
Jones says no: give him a hook well through the fish and
a stout line in his hand and that fish has _got_ to come
in. Popley says so too. He says let him have his hook
fast through the fish's head with a short stout line,
and put him (Popley) at the other end of that line and
that fish will come in. It's _got_ to. Otherwise Popley
will know why. That's the alternative. Either the fish
must come in or Popley must know why. There's no escape
from the logic of it.

But perhaps some of my readers have heard the thing
discussed before.

So, as I say, we decided to go the next morning and to
make an early start. All of the boys were at one about
that. When I say "boys," I use the word, as it is used
in fishing, to mean people from say forty-five to
sixty-five. There is something about fishing that keeps
men young. If a fellow gets out for a good morning's
fishing, forgetting all business worries, once in a
while--say, once in ten years--it keeps him fresh.

We agreed to go in a launch, a large launch--to be exact,
the largest in the town. We could have gone in row boats,
but a row boat is a poor thing to fish from. Kernin said
that in a row boat it is impossible properly to "_play_"
your fish. The side of the boat is so low that the fish
is apt to leap over the side into the boat when half
"played." Popley said that there is no comfort in a row
boat. In a launch a man can reach out his feet and take
it easy. Charlie Jones said that in a launch a man could
rest his back against something, and Morse said that in
a launch a man could rest his neck. Young inexperienced
boys, in the small sense of the word, never think of
these things. So they go out and after a few hours their
necks get tired; whereas a group of expert fishers in a
launch can rest their backs and necks and even fall asleep
during the pauses when the fish stop biting.

Anyway all the "boys" agreed that the great advantage of
a launch would be that we could get a _man_ to take us.
By that means the man could see to getting the worms,
and the man would be sure to have spare lines, and the
man could come along to our different places--we were
all beside the water--and pick us up. In fact the more
we thought about the advantage of having a "man" to take
us the better we liked it. As a boy gets old he likes to
have a man around to do the work.

Anyway Frank Rolls, the man we decided to get, not only
has the biggest launch in town but what is more Frank
_knows_ the lake. We called him up at his boat-house over
the phone and said we'd give him five dollars to take us
out first thing in the morning provided that he knew the
shoal. He said he knew it.

I don't know, to be quite candid about it, who mentioned
whisky first. In these days everybody has to be a little
careful. I imagine we had all been _thinking_ whisky for
some time before anybody said it. But there is a sort of
convention that when men go fishing they must have whisky.
Each man makes the pretence that one thing he needs at
six o'clock in the morning is cold raw whisky. It is
spoken of in terms of affection. One man says the first
thing you need if you're going fishing is a good "snort"
of whisky; another says that a good "snifter" is the very
thing; and the others agree that no man can fish properly
without "a horn," or a "bracer" or an "eye-opener." Each
man really decides that he himself won't take any. But
he feels that, in a collective sense, the "boys" need it.

So it was with us. The Colonel said he'd bring along "a
bottle of booze." Popley said, no, let _him_ bring it;
Kernin said let him; and Charlie Jones said no, he'd
bring it. It turned out that the Colonel had some very
good Scotch at his house that he'd like to bring; oddly
enough Popley had some good Scotch in _his_ house too;
and, queer though it is, each of the boys had Scotch in
his house. When the discussion closed we knew that each
of the five of us was intending to bring a bottle of
whisky. Each of the five of us expected the other to
drink one and a quarter bottles in the course of the
morning.

I suppose we must have talked on that veranda till long
after one in the morning. It was probably nearer two than
one when we broke up. But we agreed that that made no
difference. Popley said that for him three hours' sleep,
the right kind of sleep, was far more refreshing than
ten. Kernin said that a lawyer learns to snatch his sleep
when he can, and Jones said that in railroad work a man
pretty well cuts out sleep.

So we had no alarms whatever about not being ready by
five. Our plan was simplicity itself. Men like ourselves
in responsible positions learn to organize things easily.
In fact Popley says it is that faculty that has put us
where we are. So the plan simply was that Frank Rolls
should come along at five o'clock and blow his whistle
in front of our places, and at that signal each man would
come down to his wharf with his rod and kit and so we'd
be off to the shoal without a moment's delay.

The weather we ruled out. It was decided that even if it
rained that made no difference. Kernin said that fish
bite better in the rain. And everybody agreed that man
with a couple of snorts in him need have no fear of a
little rain water.

So we parted, all keen on the enterprise. Nor do I think
even now that there was anything faulty or imperfect in
that party as we planned it.

I heard Frank Rolls blowing his infernal whistle opposite
my summer cottage at some ghastly hour in the morning.
Even without getting out of bed, I could see from the
window that it was no day for fishing. No, not raining
exactly. I don't mean that, but one of those peculiar
days--I don't mean _wind_--there was no wind, but a sort
of feeling in the air that showed anybody who understands
bass fishing that it was a perfectly rotten day for going
out. The fish, I seemed to know it, wouldn't bite.

When I was still fretting over the annoyance of the
disappointment I heard Frank Rolls blowing his whistle
in front of the other cottages. I counted thirty whistles
altogether. Then I fell into a light doze--not exactly
sleep, but a sort of _doze_--I can find no other word
for it. It was clear to me that the other "boys" had
thrown the thing over. There was no use in my trying to
go out alone. I stayed where I was, my doze lasting till
ten o'clock.

When I walked up town later in the morning I couldn't
help being struck by the signs in the butcher's shops
and the restaurants, FISH, FRESH FISH, FRESH LAKE FISH.

Where in blazes do they get those fish anyway?




XIV. Back from the Land

I have just come back now with the closing in of autumn
--to the city. I have hung up my hoe in my study; my
spade is put away behind the piano. I have with me seven
pounds of Paris Green that I had over. Anybody who wants
it may have it. I didn't like to bury it for fear of its
poisoning the ground. I didn't like to throw it away for
fear of its destroying cattle. I was afraid to leave it
in my summer place for fear that it might poison the
tramps who generally break in in November. I have it with
me now. I move it from room to room, as I hate to turn my
back upon it. Anybody who wants it, I repeat, can have it.

I should like also to give away, either to the Red Cross
or to anything else, ten packets of radish seed (the
early curled variety, I think), fifteen packets of cucumber
seed (the long succulent variety, I believe it says),
and twenty packets of onion seed (the Yellow Danvers,
distinguished, I understand, for its edible flavour and
its nutritious properties). It is not likely that I shall
ever, on this side of the grave, plant onion seed again.
All these things I have with me. My vegetables are to
come after me by freight. They are booked from Simcoe
County to Montreal; at present they are, I believe,
passing through Schenectady. But they will arrive later
all right. They were seen going through Detroit last
week, moving west. It is the first time that I ever sent
anything by freight anywhere. I never understood before
the wonderful organization of the railroads. But they
tell me that there is a bad congestion of freight down
South this month. If my vegetables get tangled up in that
there is no telling when they will arrive.

In other words, I am one of the legion of men--quiet,
determined, resolute men--who went out last spring to
plant the land, and who are now back.

With me--and I am sure that I speak for all the others
as well--it was not a question of mere pleasure; it was
no love of gardening for its own sake that inspired us.
It was a plain national duty. What we said to ourselves
was: "This war has got to stop. The men in the trenches
thus far have failed to stop it. Now let _us_ try. The
whole thing," we argued, "is a plain matter of food
production."

"If we raise enough food the Germans are bound to starve.
Very good. Let us kill them."

I suppose there was never a more grimly determined set
of men went out from the cities than those who went out
last May, as I did, to conquer the food problem. I don't
mean to say that each and every one of us actually left
the city. But we all "went forth" in the metaphorical
sense. Some of the men cultivated back gardens; others
took vacant lots; some went out into the suburbs; and
others, like myself, went right out into the country.

We are now back. Each of us has with him his Paris Green,
his hoe and the rest of his radish seed.

The time has, therefore, come for a plain, clear statement
of our experience. We have, as everybody knows, failed.
We have been beaten hack all along the line. Our potatoes
are buried in a jungle of autumn burdocks. Our radishes
stand seven feet high, uneatable. Our tomatoes, when last
seen, were greener than they were at the beginning of
August, and getting greener every week. Our celery looked
as delicate as a maidenhair fern. Our Indian corn was
nine feet high with a tall feathery spike on top of that,
but no sign of anything eatable about it from top to
bottom.

I look back with a sigh of regret at those bright, early
days in April when we were all buying hoes, and talking
soil and waiting for the snow to be off the ground. The
street cars, as we went up and down to our offices, were
a busy babel of garden talk. There was a sort of farmer-like
geniality in the air. One spoke freely to strangers.
Every man with a hoe was a friend. Men chewed straws in
their offices, and kept looking out of windows to pretend
to themselves that they were afraid it might blow up
rain. "Got your tomatoes in?" one man would ask another
as they went up in the elevator. "Yes, I got mine in
yesterday," the other would answer, "But I'm just a little
afraid that this east wind may blow up a little frost.
What we need now is growing weather." And the two men
would drift off together from the elevator door along
the corridor, their heads together in friendly colloquy.

I have always regarded a lawyer as a man without a soul.
There is one who lives next door to me to whom I have
not spoken in five years. Yet when I saw him one day last
spring heading for the suburbs in a pair of old trousers
with a hoe in one hand and a box of celery plants in the
other I felt that I loved the man. I used to think that
stock-brokers were mere sordid calculating machines. Now
that I have seen whole firms of them busy at the hoe,
wearing old trousers that reached to their armpits and
were tied about the waist with a polka dot necktie, I
know that they are men. I know that there are warm hearts
beating behind those trousers.

Old trousers, I say. Where on earth did they all come
from in such a sudden fashion last spring? Everybody had
them. Who would suspect that a man drawing a salary of
ten thousand a year was keeping in reserve a pair of
pepper-and-salt breeches, four sizes too large for him,
just in case a war should break out against Germany! Talk
of German mobilization! I doubt whether the organizing
power was all on their side after all. At any rate it is
estimated that fifty thousand pairs of old trousers were
mobilized in Montreal in one week.

But perhaps it was not a case of mobilization, or
deliberate preparedness. It was rather an illustration
of the primitive instinct that is in all of us and that
will out in "war time." Any man worth the name would wear
old breeches all the time if the world would let him.
Any man will wind a polka dot tie round his waist in
preference to wearing patent braces. The makers of the
ties know this. That is why they make the tie four feet
long. And in the same way if any manufacturer of hats
will put on the market an old fedora, with a limp rim
and a mark where the ribbon used to be but is not--a hat
guaranteed to be six years old, well weathered, well
rained on, and certified to have been walked over by a
herd of cattle--that man will make and deserve a fortune.

These at least were the fashions of last May. Alas, where
are they now? The men that wore them have relapsed again
into tailor-made tweeds. They have put on hard new hats.
They are shining their boots again. They are shaving
again, not merely on Saturday night, but every day. They
are sinking back into civilization.

Yet those were bright times and I cannot forbear to linger
on them. Nor the least pleasant feature was our rediscovery
of the morning. My neighbour on the right was always up
at five. My neighbour on the left was out and about by
four. With the earliest light of day, little columns of
smoke rose along our street from the kitchen ranges where
our wives were making coffee for us before the servants
got up. By six o'clock the street was alive and busy with
friendly salutations. The milkman seemed a late comer,
a poor, sluggish fellow who failed to appreciate the
early hours of the day. A man, we found, might live
through quite a little Iliad of adventure before going
to his nine o'clock office.

"How will you possibly get time to put in a garden?" I
asked of one of my neighbours during this glad period of
early spring before I left for the country. "Time!" he
exclaimed. "Why, my dear fellow, I don't have to be down
at the warehouse till eight-thirty."

Later in the summer I saw the wreck of his garden, choked
with weeds. "Your garden," I said, "is in poor shape."
"Garden!" he said indignantly. "How on earth can I find
time for a garden? Do you realize that I have to be down
at the warehouse at eight-thirty?"

When I look back to our bright beginnings our failure
seems hard indeed to understand. It is only when I survey
the whole garden movement in melancholy retrospect that
I am able to see some of the reasons for it.

The principal one, I think, is the question of the season.
It appears that the right time to begin gardening is last
year. For many things it is well to begin the year before
last. For good results one must begin even sooner. Here,
for example, are the directions, as I interpret them,
for growing asparagus. Having secured a suitable piece
of ground, preferably a deep friable loam rich in nitrogen,
go out three years ago and plough or dig deeply. Remain
a year inactive, thinking. Two years ago pulverize the
soil thoroughly. Wait a year. As soon as last year comes
set out the young shoots. Then spend a quiet winter doing
nothing. The asparagus will then be ready to work at
_this_ year.

This is the rock on which we were wrecked. Few of us were
men of sufficient means to spend several years in quiet
thought waiting to begin gardening. Yet that is, it seems,
the only way to begin. Asparagus demands a preparation
of four years. To fit oneself to grow strawberries requires
three years. Even for such humble things as peas, beans,
and lettuce the instructions inevitably read, "plough
the soil deeply in the preceeding autumn." This sets up
a dilemma. _Which_ is the preceeding autumn? If a man
begins gardening in the spring he is too late for last
autumn and too early for this. On the other hand if he
begins in the autumn he is again too late; he has missed
this summer's crop. It is, therefore, ridiculous to begin
in the autumn and impossible to begin in the spring.

This was our first difficulty. But the second arose from
the question of the soil itself. All the books and
instructions insist that the selection of the soil is
the most important part of gardening. No doubt it is.
But, if a man has already selected his own backyard before
he opens the book, what remedy is there? All the books
lay stress on the need of "a deep, friable loam full of
nitrogen." This I have never seen. My own plot of land
I found on examination to contain nothing but earth. I
could see no trace of nitrogen. I do not deny the existence
of loam. There may be such a thing. But I am admitting
now in all humility of mind that I don't know what loam
is. Last spring my fellow gardeners and I all talked
freely of the desirability of "a loam." My own opinion
is that none of them had any clearer ideas about it than
I had. Speaking from experience, I should say that the
only soils are earth, mud and dirt. There are no others.

But I leave out the soil. In any case we were mostly
forced to disregard it. Perhaps a more fruitful source
of failure even than the lack of loam was the attempt to
apply calculation and mathematics to gardening. Thus, if
one cabbage will grow in one square foot of ground, how
many cabbages will grow in ten square feet of ground?
Ten? Not at all. The answer is _one_. You will find as
a matter of practical experience that however many cabbages
you plant in a garden plot there will be only _one_ that
will really grow. This you will presently come to speak
of as _the _cabbage. Beside it all the others (till the
caterpillars finally finish their existence) will look
but poor, lean things. But _the_ cabbage will be a source
of pride and an object of display to visitors; in fact
it would ultimately have grown to be a _real_ cabbage,
such as you buy for ten cents at any market, were it not
that you inevitably cut it and eat it when it is still
only half-grown.

This always happens to the one cabbage that is of decent
size, and to the one tomato that shows signs of turning
red (it is really a feeble green-pink), and to the only
melon that might have lived to ripen. They get eaten. No
one but a practised professional gardener can live and
sleep beside a melon three-quarters ripe and a cabbage
two-thirds grown without going out and tearing it off
the stem.

Even at that it is not a bad plan to eat the stuff while
you can. The most peculiar thing about gardening is that
all of a sudden everything is too old to eat. Radishes
change over night from delicate young shoots not large
enough to put on the table into huge plants seven feet
high with a root like an Irish shillelagh. If you take
your eyes off a lettuce bed for a week the lettuces, not
ready to eat when you last looked at them, have changed
into a tall jungle of hollyhocks. Green peas are only
really green for about two hours. Before that they are
young peas; after that they are old peas. Cucumbers are
the worst case of all. They change overnight, from delicate
little bulbs obviously too slight and dainty to pick, to
old cases of yellow leather filled with seeds.

If I were ever to garden again, a thing which is out of
the bounds of possibility, I should wait until a certain
day and hour when all the plants were ripe, and then go
out with a gun and shoot them all dead, so that they
could grow no more.

But calculation, I repeat, is the bane of gardening. I
knew, among our group of food producers, a party of young
engineers, college men, who took an empty farm north of
the city as the scene of their summer operations. They
took their coats off and applied college methods. They
ran out, first, a base line AB, and measured off from it
lateral spurs MN, OP, QR, and so on. From these they took
side angles with a theodolite so as to get the edges of
each of the separate plots of their land absolutely
correct. I saw them working at it all through one Saturday
afternoon in May. They talked as they did it of the
peculiar ignorance of the so-called practical farmer. He
never--so they agreed--uses his head. He never--I think
I have their phrase correct--stops to think. In laying
out his ground for use, it never occurs to him to try to
get the maximum result from a given space. If a farmer
would only realize that the contents of a circle represent
the maximum of space enclosable in a given perimeter,
and that a circle is merely a function of its own radius,
what a lot of time he would save.

These young men that I speak of laid out their field
engineer-fashion with little white posts at even distances.
They made a blueprint of the whole thing as they planted
it. Every corner of it was charted out. The yield was
calculated to a nicety. They had allowed for the fact
that some of the stuff might fail to grow by introducing
what they called "a coefficient of error." By means of
this and by reducing the variation of autumn prices to
a mathematical curve, those men not only knew already in
the middle of May the exact yield of their farm to within
half a bushel (they allowed, they said, a variation of
half a bushel per fifty acres), but they knew beforehand
within a few cents the market value that they would
receive. The figures, as I remember them, were simply
amazing. It seemed incredible that fifty acres could
produce so much. Yet there were the plain facts in front
of one, calculated out. The thing amounted practically
to a revolution in farming. At least it ought to have.
And it would have if those young men had come again to
hoe their field. But it turned out, most unfortunately,
that they were busy. To their great regret they were too
busy to come. They had been working under a free-and-easy
arrangement. Each man was to give what time he could
every Saturday. It was left to every man's honour to do
what he could. There was no compulsion. Each man trusted
the others to be there. In fact the thing was not only
an experiment in food production, it was also a new
departure in social co-operation. The first Saturday that
those young men worked there were, so I have been told,
seventy-five of them driving in white stakes and running
lines. The next Saturday there were fifteen of them
planting potatoes. The rest were busy. The week after
that there was one man hoeing weeds. After that silence
fell upon the deserted garden, broken only by the cry of
the chick-a-dee and the choo-choo feeding on the waving
heads of the thistles.

But I have indicated only two or three of the ways of
failing at food production. There are ever so many more.
What amazes me, in returning to the city, is to find the
enormous quantities of produce of all sorts offered for
sale in the markets. It is an odd thing that last spring,
by a queer oversight, we never thought, any of us, of
this process of increasing the supply. If every patriotic
man would simply take a large basket and go to the market
every day and buy all that he could carry away there need
be no further fear of a food famine.

And, meantime, my own vegetables are on their way. They
are in a soap box with bars across the top, coming by
freight. They weigh forty-six pounds, including the box.
They represent the result of four months' arduous toil
in sun, wind, and storm. Yet it is pleasant to think that
I shall be able to feed with them some poor family of
refugees during the rigour of the winter. Either that or
give them to the hens. I certainly won't eat the rotten
things myself.




XV. The Perplexity Column as Done by the Jaded Journalist

INSTANTANEOUS ANSWERS TO ALL QUESTIONS

(All questions written out legibly with the name and
address of the sender and accompanied by one dollar,
answered immediately and without charge.)

Harvard Student asks:

Can you tell me the date at which, or on which, Oliver
Cromwell's father died?

Answer: No, I can't.

Student of Mathematics asks:

Will you kindly settle a matter involving a wager between
myself and a friend? A. bet B. that a pedestrian in
walking downhill over a given space and alternately
stepping with either foot, covers more ground than a man
coasting over the same road on a bicycle. Which of us
wins?

Answer: I don't understand the question, and I don't know
which of you is A.

Chess-player asks:

Is the Knight's gambit recognized now as a permissible
opening in chess?

Answer: I don't play chess.

Reuben Boob asks:

For some time past I have been calling upon a young lady
friend at her house evenings and going out with her to
friends' nights. I should like to know if it would be
all right to ask to take her alone with me to the theatre?

Answer: Certainly not. This column is very strict about
these things. Not alone. Not for a moment. It is better
taste to bring your father with you.

Auction asks:

In playing bridge please tell me whether the third or
the second player ought to discard from weakness on a
long suit when trumps have been twice round and the lead
is with dummy.

Answer: Certainly.

Lady of Society asks:

Can you tell me whether the widow of a marquis is entitled
to go in to dinner before the eldest daughter of an earl?

Answer: Ha! ha! This is a thing we know--something that
we _do_ know. You put your foot in it when you asked us
that. We have _lived_ this sort of thing too long ever
to make any error. The widow of a marquis, whom you should
by rights call a marchioness dowager (but we overlook
it--you meant no harm) is entitled (in any hotel that we
know or frequent) to go in to dinner whenever, and as
often, as she likes. On a dining-car the rule is the
other way.

Vassar Girl asks:

What is the date of the birth of Caracalla?

Answer: I couldn't say.

Lexicographer asks:

Can you tell me the proper way to spell "dog"?

Answer: Certainly. "Dog" should be spelt, properly and
precisely, "dog." When it is used in the sense to mean
not "_a_ dog" or "_one_ dog" but two or more dogs--in
other words what we grammarians are accustomed to call
the plural--it is proper to add to it the diphthong, _s_,
pronounced with a hiss like _z_ in soup.

But for all these questions of spelling your best plan
is to buy a copy of Our Standard Dictionary, published
in ten volumes, by this newspaper, at forty dollars.

Ignoramus asks:

Can you tell me how to spell "cat"?

Answer: Didn't you hear what we just said about how to
spell "dog"? Buy the Dictionary.

Careworn Mother asks:

I am most anxious to find out the relation of the earth's
diameter to its circumference. Can you, or any of your
readers, assist me in it?

Answer: The earth's circumference is estimated to be
three decimal one four one five nine of its diameter, a
fixed relation indicated by the Greek letter _pi_. If
you like we will tell you what _pi_ is. Shall we?

"Brink of Suicide" writes:

Can you, will you, tell me what is the Sanjak of
Novi Bazar?

Answer. The Sanjak of Novi Bazar is bounded on the north
by its northern frontier, cold and cheerless, and covered
during the winter with deep snow. The east of the Sanjak
occupies a more easterly position. Here the sun rises--at
first slowly, but gathering speed as it goes. After having
traversed the entire width of the whole Sanjak, the
magnificent orb, slowly and regretfully, sinks into the
west. On the south, where the soil is more fertile and
where the land begins to be worth occupying, the Sanjak
is, or will be, bounded by the British Empire.




XVI. Simple Stories of Success, or How to Succeed in Life

Let me begin with a sort of parable. Many years ago when
I was on the staff of a great public school, we engaged
a new swimming master.

He was the most successful man in that capacity that we
had had for years.

Then one day it was discovered that he couldn't swim.

He was standing at the edge of the swimming tank explaining
the breast stroke to the boys in the water.

He lost his balance and fell in. He was drowned.

Or no, he wasn't drowned, I remember,--he was rescued by
some of the pupils whom he had taught to swim.

After he was resuscitated by the boys--it was one of the
things he had taught them--the school dismissed him.

Then some of the boys who were sorry for him taught him
how to swim, and he got a new job as a swimming master
in another place.

But this time he was an utter failure. He swam well, but
they said he couldn't _teach_.

So his friends looked about to get him a new job. This
was just at the time when the bicycle craze came in. They
soon found the man a position as an instructor in bicycle
riding. As he had never been on a bicycle in his life,
he made an admirable teacher. He stood fast on the ground
and said, "Now then, all you need is confidence."

Then one day he got afraid that he might be found out.
So he went out to a quiet place and got on a bicycle, at
the top of a slope, to learn to ride it. The bicycle ran
away with him. But for the skill and daring of one of
his pupils, who saw him and rode after him, he would have
been killed.

This story, as the reader sees, is endless. Suffice it
to say that the man I speak of is now in an aviation
school teaching people to fly. They say he is one of the
best aviators that ever walked.

According to all the legends and story books, the principal
factor in success is perseverance. Personally, I think
there is nothing in it. If anything, the truth lies the
other way.

There is an old motto that runs, "If at first you don't
succeed, try, try again." This is nonsense. It ought to
read, "If at first you don't succeed, quit, quit, at
once."

If you can't do a thing, more or less, the first time
you try, you will never do it. Try something else while
there is yet time.

Let me illustrate this with a story.

I remember, long years ago, at a little school that I
attended in the country, we had a schoolmaster, who used
perpetually to write on the blackboard, in a copperplate
hand, the motto that I have just quoted:

   "If at first you don't succeed,
    Try, try, again."

He wore plain clothes and had a hard, determined face.
He was studying for some sort of preliminary medical
examination, and was saving money for a medical course.
Every now and then he went away to the city and tried
the examination: and he always failed. Each time he came
back, he would write up on the blackboard:

   "Try, try again."

And always he looked grimmer and more determined than
before. The strange thing was that, with all his industry
and determination, he would break out every now and then
into drunkenness, and lie round the tavern at the
crossroads, and the school would be shut for two days.
Then he came back, more fiercely resolute than ever. Even
children could see that the man's life was a fight. It
was like the battle between Good and Evil in Milton's
epics.

Well, after he had tried it four times, the schoolmaster
at last passed the examination; and he went away to the
city in a suit of store clothes, with eight hundred
dollars that he had saved up, to study medicine. Now it
happened that he had a brother who was not a bit like
himself, but was a sort of ne'er-do-well, always hard-up
and sponging on other people, and never working.

And when the schoolmaster came to the city and his brother
knew that he had eight hundred dollars, he came to him
and got him drinking and persuaded him to hand over the
eight hundred dollars and to let him put it into the
Louisiana State lottery. In those days the Louisiana
Lottery had not yet been forbidden the use of the mails,
and you could buy a ticket for anything from one dollar
up. The Grand Prize was two hundred thousand dollars,
and the Seconds were a hundred thousand each.

So the brother persuaded the schoolmaster to put the
money in. He said he had a system for buying only the
tickets with prime numbers, that won't divide by anything,
and that it must win. He said it was a mathematical
certainty, and he figured it out with the schoolmaster
in the back room of a saloon, with a box of dominoes on
the table to show the plan of it. He told the schoolmaster
that he himself would only take ten per cent of what they
made, as a commission for showing the system, and the
schoolmaster could have the rest.

So, in a mad moment, the schoolmaster handed over his
roll of money, and that was the last he ever saw of it.

The next morning when he was up he was fierce with rage
and remorse for what he had done. He could not go back
to the school, and he had no money to go forward. So he
stayed where he was in the little hotel where he had got
drunk, and went on drinking. He looked so fierce and
unkempt that in the hotel they were afraid of him, and
the bar-tenders watched him out of the corners of their
eyes wondering what he would do; because they knew that
there was only one end possible, and they waited for it
to come. And presently it came. One of the bar-tenders
went up to the schoolmaster's room to bring up a letter,
and he found him lying on the bed with his face grey as
ashes, and his eyes looking up at the ceiling. He was
stone dead. Life had beaten him.

And the strange thing was that the letter that the
bartender carried up that morning was from the management
of the Louisiana Lottery. It contained a draft on New
York, signed by the treasurer of the State of Louisiana,
for two hundred thousand dollars. The schoolmaster had
won the Grand Prize.

The above story, I am afraid, is a little gloomy. I put
it down merely for the moral it contained, and I became
so absorbed in telling it that I almost forgot what the
moral was that it was meant to convey. But I think the
idea is that if the schoolmaster had long before abandoned
the study of medicine, for which he was not fitted, and
gone in, let us say, for playing the banjo, he might have
become end-man in a minstrel show. Yes, that was it.

Let me pass on to other elements in success.

I suppose that anybody will admit that the peculiar
quality that is called initiative--the ability to act
promptly on one's own judgement--is a factor of the
highest importance.

I have seen this illustrated two or three times in a very
striking fashion.

I knew, in Toronto--it is long years ago--a singularly
bright young man whose name was Robinson. He had had some
training in the iron and steel business, and when I knew
him was on the look out for an opening.

I met him one day in a great hurry, with a valise in his
hand.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"Over to England," he said. "There is a firm in Liverpool
that have advertised that they want an agent here, and
I'm going over to apply for the job."

"Can't you do it by letter?" I asked.

"That's just it," said Robinson, with a chuckle, "all
the other men will apply by letter. I'll go right over
myself and get there as soon or sooner than the letters.
I'll be the man on the spot, and I'll get the job."

He was quite right. He went over to Liverpool, and was
back in a fortnight with English clothes and a big salary.

But I cannot recommend his story to my friends. In fact,
it should not be told too freely. It is apt to be dangerous.

I remember once telling this story of Robinson to a young
man called Tomlinson who was out of a job. Tomlinson had
a head two sizes too big, and a face like a bun. He had
lost three jobs in a bank and two in a broker's office,
but he knew his work, and on paper he looked a good man.

I told him about Robinson, to encourage him, and the
story made a great impression.

"Say, that was a great scheme, eh?" he kept repeating.
He had no command of words, and always said the same
thing over and over.

A few days later I met Tomlinson in the street with a
valise in his hand.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"I'm off to Mexico," he answered. "They're advertising
for a Canadian teller for a bank in Tuscapulco. I've sent
my credentials down, and I'm going to follow them right
up in person. In a thing like this, the personal element
is everything."

So Tomlinson went down to Mexico and he travelled by sea
to Mexico City, and then with a mule train to Tuscapulco.
But the mails, with his credentials, went by land and
got there two days ahead of him.

When Tomlinson got to Tuscapulco he went into the bank
and he spoke to the junior manager and told him what he
came for. "I'm awfully sorry," the junior manager said,
"I'm afraid that this post has just been filled." Then
he went into an inner room to talk with the manager. "The
tellership that you wanted a Canadian for," he asked,
"didn't you say that you have a man already?"

"Yes," said the manager, "a brilliant young fellow from
Toronto; his name is Tomlinson, I have his credentials
here--a first-class man. I've wired him to come right
along, at our expense, and we'll keep the job open for
him ten days."

"There's a young man outside," said the junior, "who
wants to apply for the job."

"Outside?" exclaimed the manager. "How did he get here?"

"Came in on the mule train this morning: says he can do
the work and wants the job."

"What's he like?" asked the manager.

The junior shook his head.

"Pretty dusty looking customer," he said. "Shifty looking."

"Same old story," murmured the manager. "It's odd how
these fellows drift down here, isn't it? Up to something
crooked at home, I suppose. Understands the working of
a bank, eh? I guess he understands it a little too well
for my taste. No, no," he continued, tapping the papers
that lay on the table, "now that we've got a first-class
man like Tomlinson, let's hang on to him. We can easily
wait ten days, and the cost of the journey is nothing to
the bank as compared with getting a man of Tomlinson's
stamp. And, by the way, you might telephone to the Chief
of Police and get him to see to it that this loafer gets
out of town straight off."

So the Chief of Police shut up Tomlinson in the calaboose
and then sent him down to Mexico City under a guard. By
the time the police were done with him he was dead broke,
and it took him four months to get back to Toronto; when
he got there, the place in Mexico had been filled long ago.

But I can imagine that some of my readers might suggest
that I have hitherto been dealing only with success in
a very limited way, and that more interest would lie in
discussing how the really great fortunes are made.

Everybody feels an instinctive interest in knowing how
our great captains of industry, our financiers and railroad
magnates made their money.

Here the explanation is really a very simple one. There
is, in fact, only one way to amass a huge fortune in
business or railway management. One must begin at the
bottom. One must mount the ladder from the lowest rung.
But this lowest rung is everything. Any man who can stand
upon it with his foot well poised, his head erect, his
arms braced and his eye directed upward, will inevitably
mount to the top.

But after all--I say this as a kind of afterthought in
conclusion--why bother with success at all? I have observed
that the successful people get very little real enjoyment
out of life. In fact the contrary is true. If I had to
choose--with an eye to having a really pleasant life
--between success and ruin, I should prefer ruin every
time. I have several friends who are completely ruined
--some two or three times--in a large way of course; and
I find that if I want to get a really good dinner, where
the champagne is just as it ought to be, and where
hospitality is unhindered by mean thoughts of expense,
I can get it best at the house of a ruined man.




XVII. In Dry Toronto

A LOCAL STUDY OF A UNIVERSAL TOPIC

Note.--Our readers--our numerous readers--who live in
Equatorial Africa, may read this under the title "In Dry
Timbucto"; those who live in Central America will kindly
call it "In Dry Tehauntepec."

It may have been, for aught I know, the change from a
wet to a dry atmosphere. I am told that, biologically,
such things profoundly affect the human system.

At any rate I found it impossible that night--I was on
the train from Montreal to Toronto--to fall asleep.

A peculiar wakefulness seemed to have seized upon me,
which appeared, moreover, to afflict the other passengers
as well. In the darkness of the car I could distinctly
hear them groaning at intervals.

"Are they ill?" I asked, through the curtains, of the
porter as he passed.

"No, sir," he said, "they're not ill. Those is the Toronto
passengers."

"All in this car?" I asked.

"All except that gen'lman you may have heard singing in
the smoking compartment. He's booked through to Chicago."

But, as is usual in such cases, sleep came at last with
unusual heaviness. I seemed obliterated from the world
till, all of a sudden, I found myself, as it were, up
and dressed and seated in the observation car at the back
of the train, awaiting my arrival.

"Is this Toronto?" I asked of the Pullman conductor, as
I peered through the window of the car.

The conductor rubbed the pane with his finger and looked
out.

"I think so," he said.

"Do we stop here?" I asked.

"I think we do this morning," he answered. "I think I
heard the conductor say that they have a lot of milk cans
to put off here this morning. I'll just go and find out,
sir."

"Stop here!" broke in an irascible-looking gentleman in
a grey tweed suit who was sitting in the next chair to
mine. "Do they _stop_ here? I should say they did indeed.
Don't you know," he added, turning to the Pullman conductor,
"that any train is _compelled_ to stop here. There's a
by-law, a municipal by-law of the City of Toronto,
_compelling_ every train to stop?"

"I didn't know it," said the conductor humbly.

"Do you mean to say," continued the irascible gentleman,
"that you have never read the by-laws of the City of
Toronto?"

"No, sir," said the conductor.

"The ignorance of these fellows," said the man in grey
tweed, swinging his chair round again towards me. "We
ought to have a by-law to compel them to read the by-laws.
I must start an agitation for it at once." Here he took
out a little red notebook and wrote something in it,
murmuring, "We need a new agitation anyway."

Presently he shut the book up with a snap. I noticed that
there was a sort of peculiar alacrity in everything he
did.

"You, sir," he said, "have, of course, read our municipal
by-laws?"

"Oh, yes," I answered. "Splendid, aren't they? They read
like a romance."

"You are most flattering to our city," said the irascible
gentleman with a bow. "Yet you, sir, I take it, are not
from Toronto."

"No," I answered, as humbly as I could. "I'm from Montreal."

"Ah!" said the gentleman, as he sat back and took a
thorough look at me. "From Montreal? Are you drunk?"

"No," I replied. "I don't think so."

"But you are _suffering_ for a drink," said my new
acquaintance eagerly. "You need it, eh? You feel already
a kind of craving, eh what?"

"No," I answered. "The fact is it's rather early in the
morning--"

"Quite so," broke in the irascible gentleman, "but I
understand that in Montreal all the saloons are open at
seven, and even at that hour are crowded, sir, crowded."

I shook my head.

"I think that has been exaggerated," I said. "In fact,
we always try to avoid crowding and jostling as far as
possible. It is generally understood, as a matter of
politeness, that the first place in the line is given to
the clergy, the Board of Trade, and the heads of the
universities."

"Is it conceivable!" said the gentleman in grey. "One
moment, please, till I make a note. 'All clergy--I think
you said _all_, did you not?--drunk at seven in the
morning.' Deplorable! But here we are at the Union
Station--commodious, is it not? Justly admired, in fact,
all over the known world. Observe," he continued as we
alighted from the train and made our way into the station,
"the upstairs and the downstairs, connected by flights
of stairs; quite unique and most convenient: if you don't
meet your friends downstairs all you have to do is to
look upstairs. If they are not there, you simply come
down again. But stop, you are going to walk up the street?
I'll go with you."

At the outer door of the station--just as I had remembered
it--stood a group of hotel bus-men and porters.

But how changed!

They were like men blasted by a great sorrow. One, with
his back turned, was leaning against a post, his head
buried on his arm.

"Prince George Hotel," he groaned at intervals. "Prince
George Hotel."

Another was bending over a little handrail, his head
sunk, his arms almost trailing to the ground.

"_King Edward_," he sobbed, "_King Edward_."

A third, seated on a stool, looked feebly up, with tears
visible in his eyes.

"Walker House," he moaned. "First-class accommodation
for--" then he broke down and cried.

"Take this handbag," I said to one of the men, "to the
_Prince George_."

The man ceased his groaning for a moment and turned to
me with something like passion.

"Why do you come to _us_?" he protested. "Why not go to
one of the others. Go to _him_," he added, as he stirred
with his foot a miserable being who lay huddled on the
ground and murmured at intervals, "_Queen's_! Queen's
Hotel."

But my new friend, who stood at my elbow, came to my
rescue.

"Take his bags," he said, "you've got to. You know the
by-law. Take it or I'll call a policeman. You know _me_.
My name's Narrowpath. I'm on the council."

The man touched his hat and took the bag with a murmured
apology.

"Come along," said my companion, whom I now perceived to
be a person of dignity and civic importance. "I'll walk
up with you, and show you the city as we go."

We had hardly got well upon the street before I realized
the enormous change that total prohibition had effected.
Everywhere were the bright smiling faces of working
people, laughing and singing at their tasks, and, early
though it was, cracking jokes and asking one another
riddles as they worked.

I noticed one man, evidently a city employe, in a rough
white suit, busily cleaning the street with a broom and
singing to himself: "How does the little busy bee improve
the shining hour." Another employe, who was handling a
little hose, was singing, "Little drops of water, little
grains of sand, Tra, la, la, la, _la_ la, Prohibition's
grand."

"Why do they sing?" I asked. "Are they crazy?"

"Sing?" said Mr Narrowpath. "They can't help it. They
haven't had a drink of whisky for four months."

A coal cart went by with a driver, no longer grimy and
smudged, but neatly dressed with a high white collar and
a white silk tie.

My companion pointed at him as he passed.

"Hasn't had a glass of beer for four months," he said.

"Notice the difference. That man's work is now a pleasure
to him. He used to spend all his evenings sitting round
in the back parlours of the saloons beside the stove.
Now what do you think he does?"

"I have no idea."

"Loads up his cart with coal and goes for a drive--out
in the country. Ah, sir, you who live still under the
curse of the whisky traffic little know what a pleasure
work itself becomes when drink and all that goes with it
is eliminated. Do you see that man, on the other side of
the street, with the tool bag?"

"Yes," I said, "a plumber, is he not?"

"Exactly, a plumber. Used to drink heavily--couldn't keep
a job more than a week. Now, you can't drag him from his
work. Came to my house to fix a pipe under the kitchen
sink--wouldn't quit at six o'clock. Got in under the sink
and begged to be allowed to stay--said he hated to go
home. We had to drag him out with a rope. But here we
are at your hotel."

We entered.

But how changed the place seemed.

Our feet echoed on the flagstones of the deserted rotunda.

At the office desk sat a clerk, silent and melancholy,
reading the Bible. He put a marker in the book and closed
it, murmuring "Leviticus Two."

Then he turned to us.

"Can I have a room," I asked, "on the first floor?"

A tear welled up into the clerk's eye.

"You can have the whole first floor," he said, and he
added, with a half sob, "and the second, too, if you
like."

I could not help contrasting his manner with what it was
in the old days, when the mere mention of a room used to
throw him into a fit of passion, and when he used to tell
me that I could have a cot on the roof till Tuesday, and
after that, perhaps, a bed in the stable.

Things had changed indeed.

"Can I get breakfast in the grill room?" I inquired of
the melancholy clerk.

He shook his head sadly.

"There is no grill room," he answered. "What would you
like?"

"Oh, some sort of eggs," I said, "and--"

The clerk reached down below his desk and handed me a
hard-boiled egg with the shell off.

"Here's your egg," he said. "And there's ice water there
at the end of the desk."

He sat back in his chair and went on reading.

"You don't understand," said Mr Narrowpath, who still
stood at my elbow. "All that elaborate grill room breakfast
business was just a mere relic of the drinking days--sheer
waste of time and loss of efficiency. Go on and eat your
egg. Eaten it? Now, don't you feel efficient? What more
do you want? Comfort, you say? My dear sir! more men have
been ruined by comfort--Great heavens, comfort! The most
dangerous, deadly drug that ever undermined the human
race. But, here, drink your water. Now you're ready to
go and do your business, if you have any."

"But," I protested, "it's still only half-past seven in
the morning--no offices will be open--"

"Open!" exclaimed Mr. Narrowpath. "Why! they all open at
daybreak now."

I had, it is true, a certain amount of business before
me, though of no very intricate or elaborate kind--a few
simple arrangements with the head of a publishing house
such as it falls to my lot to make every now and then.
Yet in the old and unregenerate days it used to take all
day to do it: the wicked thing that we used to call a
comfortable breakfast in the hotel grill room somehow
carried one on to about ten o'clock in the morning.
Breakfast brought with it the need of a cigar for
digestion's sake and with that, for very restfulness, a
certain perusal of the _Toronto Globe_, properly corrected
and rectified by a look through the _Toronto Mail_. After
that it had been my practice to stroll along to my
publishers' office at about eleven-thirty, transact my
business, over a cigar, with the genial gentleman at the
head of it, and then accept his invitation to lunch, with
the feeling that a man who has put in a hard and strenuous
morning's work is entitled to a few hours of relaxation.

I am inclined to think that in those reprehensible bygone
times, many other people did their business in this same
way.

"I don't think," I said to Mr. Narrowpath musingly, "that
my publisher will be up as early as this. He's a comfortable
sort of man."

"Nonsense!" said Mr. Narrowpath. "Not at work at half-past
seven! In Toronto! The thing's absurd. Where is the
office? Richmond Street? Come along, I'll go with you.
I've always a great liking for attending to other people's
business."

"I see you have," I said.

"It's our way here," said Mr. Narrowpath with a wave of
his hand. "Every man's business, as we see it, is everybody
else's business. Come along, you'll be surprised how
quickly your business will be done."

Mr. Narrowpath was right.

My publishers' office, as we entered it, seemed a changed
place. Activity and efficiency were stamped all over it.
My good friend the publisher was not only there, but
there with his coat off, inordinately busy, bawling
orders--evidently meant for a printing room--through a
speaking tube. "Yes," he was shouting, "put WHISKY in
black letter capitals, old English, double size, set it
up to look attractive, with the legend MADE IN TORONTO
in long clear type underneath--"

"Excuse me," he said, as he broke off for a moment. "We've
a lot of stuff going through the press this morning--a
big distillery catalogue that we are rushing through.
We're doing all we can, Mr. Narrowpath," he continued,
speaking with the deference due to a member of the City
Council, "to boom Toronto as a Whisky Centre."

"Quite right, quite right!" said my companion, rubbing
his hands.

"And now, professor," added the publisher, speaking with
rapidity, "your contract is all here--only needs signing.
I won't keep you more than a moment--write your name
here. Miss Sniggins will you please witness this so help
you God how's everything in Montreal good morning."

"Pretty quick, wasn't it?" said Mr. Narrowpath, as we
stood in the street again.

"Wonderful!" I said, feeling almost dazed. "Why, I shall
be able to catch the morning train back again to Montreal--"

"Precisely. Just what everybody finds. Business done in
no time. Men who used to spend whole days here clear out
now in fifteen minutes. I knew a man whose business
efficiency has so increased under our new regime that he
says he wouldn't spend more than five minutes in Toronto
if he were paid to."

"But what is this?" I asked as we were brought to a pause
in our walk at a street crossing by a great block of
vehicles. "What are all these drays? Surely, those look
like barrels of whisky!"

"So they are," said Mr. Narrowpath proudly. "_Export_
whisky. Fine sight, isn't it? Must be what?--twenty
--twenty-five--loads of it. This place, sir, mark my
words, is going to prove, with its new energy and
enterprise, one of the greatest seats of the distillery
business, in fact, _the_ whisky capital of the North--"

"But I thought," I interrupted, much puzzled, "that whisky
was prohibited here since last September?"

"Export whisky--_export_, my dear sir," corrected Mr.
Narrowpath. "We don't interfere, we have never, so far
as I know, proposed to interfere with any man's right to
make and export whisky. That, sir, is a plain matter of
business; morality doesn't enter into it."

"I see," I answered. "But will you please tell me what
is the meaning of this other crowd of drays coming in
the opposite direction? Surely, those are beer barrels,
are they not?"

"In a sense they are," admitted Mr. Narrowpath. "That
is, they are _import_ beer. It comes in from some other
province. It was, I imagine, made in this city (our
breweries, sir, are second to none), but the sin of
_selling_ it"--here Mr. Narrowpath raised his hat from
his head and stood for a moment in a reverential
attitude--"rests on the heads of others."

The press of vehicles had now thinned out and we moved
on, my guide still explaining in some detail the distinction
between business principles and moral principles, between
whisky as a curse and whisky as a source of profit, which
I found myself unable to comprehend.

At length I ventured to interrupt.

"Yet it seems almost a pity," I said, "that with all this
beer and whisky around an unregenerate sinner like myself
should be prohibited from getting a drink."

"A drink!" exclaimed Mr. Narrowpath. "Well, I should say
so. Come right in here. You can have anything you want."

We stepped through a street door into a large, long room.

"Why," I exclaimed in surprise, "this is a bar!"

"Nonsense!" said my friend. "The _bar_ in this province
is forbidden. We've done with the foul thing for ever.
This is an Import Shipping Company's Delivery Office."

"But this long counter--"

"It's not a counter, it's a desk."

"And that bar-tender in his white jacket--"

"Tut! Tut! He's not a bar-tender. He's an Import Goods
Delivery Clerk."

"What'll you have, gentlemen," said the Import Clerk,
polishing a glass as he spoke.

"Two whisky and sodas," said my friend, "long ones."

The Import Clerk mixed the drinks and set them on the
desk.

I was about to take one, but he interrupted.

"One minute, sir," he said.

Then he took up a desk telephone that stood beside him
and I heard him calling up Montreal. "Hullo, Montreal!
Is that Montreal? Well, say, I've just received an offer
here for two whisky and sodas at sixty cents, shall I
close with it? All right, gentlemen, Montreal has effected
the sale. There you are."

"Dreadful, isn't it?" said Mr. Narrowpath. "The sunken,
depraved condition of your City of Montreal; actually
_selling_ whisky. Deplorable!" and with that he buried
his face in the bubbles of the whisky and soda.

"Mr. Narrowpath," I said, "would you mind telling me
something? I fear I am a little confused, after what I
have seen here, as to what your new legislation has been.
You have not then, I understand, prohibited the making
of whisky?"

"Oh, no, we see no harm in that."

"Nor the sale of it?"

"Certainly not," said Mr. Narrowpath, "not if sold
_properly_."

"Nor the drinking of it?"

"Oh, no, that least of all. We attach no harm whatever,
under our law, to the mere drinking of whisky."

"Would you tell me then," I asked, "since you have not
forbidden the making, nor the selling, nor the buying,
nor the drinking of whisky, just what it is that you have
prohibited? What is the difference between Montreal and
Toronto?"

Mr. Narrowpath put down his glass on the "desk" in front
of him. He gazed at me with open-mouthed astonishment.

"Toronto?" he gasped. "Montreal and Toronto! The difference
between Montreal and Toronto! My dear sir--Toronto--Toronto--"

I stood waiting for him to explain. But as I did so I
seemed to become aware that a voice, not Mr. Narrowpath's
but a voice close at my ear, was repeating "Toronto
--Toronto--Toronto--"

I sat up with a start--still in my berth in the Pullman
car--with the voice of the porter calling through the
curtains "Toronto! Toronto!"

So! It had only been a dream. I pulled up the blind and
looked out of the window and there was the good old city,
with the bright sun sparkling on its church spires and
on the bay spread out at its feet. It looked quite
unchanged: just the same pleasant old place, as cheerful,
as self-conceited, as kindly, as hospitable, as quarrelsome,
as wholesome, as moral and as loyal and as disagreeable
as it always was.

"Porter," I said, "is it true that there is prohibition
here now?"

The porter shook his head.

"I ain't heard of it," he said.




XVIII. Merry Christmas

"My Dear Young Friend," said Father Time, as he laid his
hand gently upon my shoulder, "you are entirely wrong."

Then I looked up over my shoulder from the table at which
I was sitting and I saw him.

But I had known, or felt, for at least the last half-hour
that he was standing somewhere near me.

You have had, I do not doubt, good reader, more than once
that strange uncanny feeling that there is some one unseen
standing beside you, in a darkened room, let us say, with
a dying fire, when the night has grown late, and the
October wind sounds low outside, and when, through the
thin curtain that we call Reality, the Unseen World starts
for a moment clear upon our dreaming sense.

You _have_ had it? Yes, I know you have. Never mind
telling me about it. Stop. I don't want to hear about
that strange presentiment you had the night your Aunt
Eliza broke her leg. Don't let's bother with _your_
experience. I want to tell mine.

"You are quite mistaken, my dear young friend," repeated
Father Time, "quite wrong."

"_Young_ friend?" I said, my mind, as one's mind is apt
to in such a case, running to an unimportant detail. "Why
do you call me young?"

"Your pardon," he answered gently--he had a gentle way
with him, had Father Time. "The fault is in my failing
eyes. I took you at first sight for something under a
hundred."

"Under a hundred?" I expostulated. "Well, I should think
so!"

"Your pardon again," said Time, "the fault is in my
failing memory. I forgot. You seldom pass that nowadays,
do you? Your life is very short of late."

I heard him breathe a wistful hollow sigh. Very ancient
and dim he seemed as he stood beside me. But I did not
turn to look upon him. I had no need to. I knew his form,
in the inner and clearer sight of things, as well as
every human being knows by innate instinct, the Unseen
face and form of Father Time.

I could hear him murmuring beside me, "Short--short, your
life is short"; till the sound of it seemed to mingle
with the measured ticking of a clock somewhere in the
silent house.

Then I remembered what he had said.

"How do you know that I am wrong?" I asked. "And how can
you tell what I was thinking?"

"You said it out loud," answered Father Time. "But it
wouldn't have mattered, anyway. You said that Christmas
was all played out and done with."

"Yes," I admitted, "that's what I said."

"And what makes you think that?" he questioned, stooping,
so it seemed to me, still further over my shoulder.

"Why," I answered, "the trouble is this. I've been sitting
here for hours, sitting till goodness only knows how far
into the night, trying to think out something to write
for a Christmas story. And it won't go. It can't be done
--not in these awful days."

"A Christmas Story?"

"Yes. You see, Father Time," I explained, glad with a
foolish little vanity of my trade to be able to tell him
something that I thought enlightening, "all the Christmas
stuff--stories and jokes and pictures--is all done, you
know, in October."

I thought it would have surprised him, but I was mistaken.

"Dear me," he said, "not till October! What a rush! How
well I remember in Ancient Egypt--as I think you call
it--seeing them getting out their Christmas things, all
cut in hieroglyphics, always two or three years ahead."

"Two or three years!" I exclaimed.

"Pooh," said Time, "that was nothing. Why in Babylon they
used to get their Christmas jokes ready--all baked in
clay--a whole Solar eclipse ahead of Christmas. They
said, I think, that the public preferred them so."

"Egypt?" I said. "Babylon? But surely, Father Time, there
was no Christmas in those days. I thought--"

"My dear boy," he interrupted gravely, "don't you know
that there has always been Christmas?"

I was silent. Father Time had moved across the room and
stood beside the fireplace, leaning on the mantelpiece.
The little wreaths of smoke from the fading fire seemed
to mingle with his shadowy outline.

"Well," he said presently, "what is it that is wrong with
Christmas?"

"Why," I answered, "all the romance, the joy, the beauty
of it has gone, crushed and killed by the greed of commerce
and the horrors of war. I am not, as you thought I was,
a hundred years old, but I can conjure up, as anybody
can, a picture of Christmas in the good old days of a
hundred years ago: the quaint old-fashioned houses,
standing deep among the evergreens, with the light
twinkling from the windows on the snow; the warmth and
comfort within; the great fire roaring on the hearth;
the merry guests grouped about its blaze and the little
children with their eyes dancing in the Christmas
fire-light, waiting for Father Christmas in his fine
mummery of red and white and cotton wool to hand the
presents from the yule-tide tree. I can see it," I added,
"as if it were yesterday."

"It was but yesterday," said Father Time, and his voice
seemed to soften with the memory of bygone years. "I
remember it well."

"Ah," I continued, "that was Christmas indeed. Give me
back such days as those, with the old good cheer, the
old stage coaches and the gabled inns and the warm red
wine, the snapdragon and the Christmas-tree, and I'll
believe again in Christmas, yes, in Father Christmas
himself."

"Believe in him?" said Time quietly. "You may well do
that. He happens to be standing outside in the street at
this moment."

"Outside?" I exclaimed. "Why don't he come in?"

"He's afraid to," said Father Time. "He's frightened and
he daren't come in unless you ask him. May I call him in?"

I signified assent, and Father Time went to the window
for a moment and beckoned into the darkened street. Then
I heard footsteps, clumsy and hesitant they seemed, upon
the stairs. And in a moment a figure stood framed in the
doorway--the figure of Father Christmas. He stood shuffling
his feet, a timid, apologetic look upon his face.

How changed he was!

I had known in my mind's eye, from childhood up, the face
and form of Father Christmas as well as that of Old Time
himself. Everybody knows, or once knew him--a jolly little
rounded man, with a great muffler wound about him, a
packet of toys upon his back and with such merry, twinkling
eyes and rosy cheeks as are only given by the touch of
the driving snow and the rude fun of the North Wind. Why,
there was once a time, not yet so long ago, when the very
sound of his sleigh-bells sent the blood running warm to
the heart.

But now how changed.

All draggled with the mud and rain he stood, as if no
house had sheltered him these three years past. His old
red jersey was tattered in a dozen places, his muffler
frayed and ravelled.

The bundle of toys that he dragged with him in a net
seemed wet and worn till the cardboard boxes gaped asunder.
There were boxes among them, I vow, that he must have
been carrying these three past years.

But most of all I noted the change that had come over
the face of Father Christmas. The old brave look of cheery
confidence was gone. The smile that had beamed responsive
to the laughing eyes of countless children around unnumbered
Christmas-trees was there no more. And in the place of
it there showed a look of timid apology, of apprehensiveness,
as of one who has asked in vain the warmth and shelter
of a human home--such a look as the harsh cruelty of this
world has stamped upon the faces of its outcasts.

So stood Father Christmas shuffling upon the threshold,
fumbling his poor tattered hat in his hand.

"Shall I come in?" he said, his eyes appealingly on Father
Time.

"Come," said Time. He turned to speak to me, "Your room
is dark. Turn up the lights. He's used to light, bright
light and plenty of it. The dark has frightened him these
three years past."

I turned up the lights and the bright glare revealed all
the more cruelly the tattered figure before us.

Father Christmas advanced a timid step across the floor.
Then he paused, as if in sudden fear.

"Is this floor mined?" he said.

"No, no," said Time soothingly. And to me he added in a
murmured whisper, "He's afraid. He was blown up in a mine
in No Man's Land between the trenches at Christmas-time
in 1914. It broke his nerve."

"May I put my toys on that machine gun?" asked Father
Christmas timidly. "It will help to keep them dry."

"It is not a machine gun," said Time gently. "See, it is
only a pile of books upon the sofa." And to me he whispered,
"They turned a machine gun on him in the streets of
Warsaw. He thinks he sees them everywhere since then."

"It's all right, Father Christmas," I said, speaking as
cheerily as I could, while I rose and stirred the fire
into a blaze. "There are no machine guns here and there
are no mines. This is but the house of a poor writer."

"Ah," said Father Christmas, lowering his tattered hat
still further and attempting something of a humble bow,
"a writer? Are you Hans Andersen, perhaps?"

"Not quite," I answered.

"But a great writer, I do not doubt," said the old man,
with a humble courtesy that he had learned, it well may
be, centuries ago in the yule-tide season of his northern
home. "The world owes much to its great books. I carry
some of the greatest with me always. I have them here--"

He began fumbling among the limp and tattered packages
that he carried. "Look! _The House that Jack Built_--a
marvellous, deep thing, sir--and this, _The Babes in the
Wood_. Will you take it, sir? A poor present, but a
present still--not so long ago I gave them in thousands
every Christmas-time. None seem to want them now."

He looked appealingly towards Father Time, as the weak
may look towards the strong, for help and guidance.

"None want them now," he repeated, and I could see the
tears start in his eyes. "Why is it so? Has the world
forgotten its sympathy with the lost children wandering
in the wood?"

"All the world," I heard Time murmur with a sigh, "is
wandering in the wood." But out loud he spoke to Father
Christmas in cheery admonition, "Tut, tut, good Christmas,"
he said, "you must cheer up. Here, sit in this chair the
biggest one; so--beside the fire. Let us stir it to a
blaze; more wood, that's better. And listen, good old
Friend, to the wind outside--almost a Christmas wind, is
it not? Merry and boisterous enough, for all the evil
times it stirs among."

Old Christmas seated himself beside the fire, his hands
outstretched towards the flames. Something of his old-time
cheeriness seemed to flicker across his features as he
warmed himself at the blaze.

"That's better," he murmured. "I was cold, sir, cold,
chilled to the bone. Of old I never felt it so; no matter
what the wind, the world seemed warm about me. Why is it
not so now?"

"You see," said Time, speaking low in a whisper for my
ear alone, "how sunk and broken he is? Will you not help?"

"Gladly," I answered, "if I can."

"All can," said Father Time, "every one of us."

Meantime Christmas had turned towards me a questioning
eye, in which, however, there seemed to revive some little
gleam of merriment.

"Have you, perhaps," he asked half timidly, "schnapps?"

"Schnapps?" I repeated.

"Ay, schnapps. A glass of it to drink your health might
warm my heart again, I think."

"Ah," I said, "something to drink?"

"His one failing," whispered Time, "if it is one. Forgive
it him. He was used to it for centuries. Give it him if
you have it."

"I keep a little in the house," I said reluctantly perhaps,
"in case of illness."

"Tut, tut," said Father Time, as something as near as
could be to a smile passed over his shadowy face. "In
case of illness! They used to say that in ancient Babylon.
Here, let me pour it for him. Drink, Father Christmas,
drink!"

Marvellous it was to see the old man smack his lips as
he drank his glass of liquor neat after the fashion of
old Norway.

Marvellous, too, to see the way in which, with the warmth
of the fire and the generous glow of the spirits, his
face changed and brightened till the old-time cheerfulness
beamed again upon it.

He looked about him, as it were, with a new and growing
interest.

"A pleasant room," he said. "And what better, sir, than
the wind without and a brave fire within!"

Then his eye fell upon the mantelpiece, where lay among
the litter of books and pipes a little toy horse.

"Ah," said Father Christmas almost gayly, "children in
the house!"

"One," I answered, "the sweetest boy in all the world."

"I'll be bound he is!" said Father Christmas and he broke
now into a merry laugh that did one's heart good to hear.
"They all are! Lord bless me! The number that I have
seen, and each and every one--and quite right too--the
sweetest child in all the world. And how old, do you say?
Two and a half all but two months except a week? The very
sweetest age of all, I'll bet you say, eh, what? They
all do!"

And the old man broke again into such a jolly chuckling
of laughter that his snow-white locks shook upon his
head.

"But stop a bit," he added. "This horse is broken. Tut,
tut, a hind leg nearly off. This won't do!"

He had the toy in his lap in a moment, mending it. It
was wonderful to see, for all his age, how deft his
fingers were.

"Time," he said, and it was amusing to note that his
voice had assumed almost an authoritative tone, "reach
me that piece of string. That's right. Here, hold your
finger across the knot. There! Now, then, a bit of beeswax.
What? No beeswax? Tut, tut, how ill-supplied your houses
are to-day. How can you mend toys, sir, without beeswax?
Still, it will stand up now."

I tried to murmur by best thanks.

But Father Christmas waved my gratitude aside.

"Nonsense," he said, "that's nothing. That's my life.
Perhaps the little boy would like a book too. I have them
here in the packet. Here, sir, _Jack and the Bean Stalk_,
most profound thing. I read it to myself often still.
How damp it is! Pray, sir, will you let me dry my books
before your fire?"

"Only too willingly," I said. "How wet and torn they are!"

Father Christmas had risen from his chair and was fumbling
among his tattered packages, taking from them his children's
books, all limp and draggled from the rain and wind.

"All wet and torn!" he murmured, and his voice sank again
into sadness. "I have carried them these three years
past. Look! These were for little children in Belgium
and in Serbia. Can I get them to them, think you?"

Time gently shook his head.

"But presently, perhaps," said Father Christmas, "if I
dry and mend them. Look, some of them were inscribed
already! This one, see you, was written '_With father's
love_.' Why has it never come to him? Is it rain or tears
upon the page?"

He stood bowed over his little books, his hands trembling
as he turned the pages. Then he looked up, the old fear
upon his face again.

"That sound!" he said. "Listen! It is guns--I hear them."

"No, no," I said, "it is nothing. Only a car passing in
the street below."

"Listen," he said. "Hear that again--voices crying!"

"No, no," I answered, "not voices, only the night wind
among the trees."

"My children's voices!" he exclaimed. "I hear them
everywhere--they come to me in every wind--and I see them
as I wander in the night and storm--my children--torn
and dying in the trenches--beaten into the ground--I hear
them crying from the hospitals--each one to me, still as
I knew him once, a little child. Time, Time," he cried,
reaching out his arms in appeal, "give me back my children!"

"They do not die in vain," Time murmured gently.

But Christmas only moaned in answer:

"Give me back my children!"

Then he sank down upon his pile of books and toys, his
head buried in his arms.

"You see," said Time, "his heart is breaking, and will
you not help him if you can?"

"Only too gladly," I replied. "But what is there to do?"

"This," said Father Time, "listen."

He stood before me grave and solemn, a shadowy figure
but half seen though he was close beside me. The fire-light
had died down, and through the curtained windows there
came already the first dim brightening of dawn.

"The world that once you knew," said Father Time, "seems
broken and destroyed about you. You must not let them
know--the children. The cruelty and the horror and the
hate that racks the world to-day--keep it from them. Some
day _he_ will know"--here Time pointed to the prostrate
form of Father Christmas--"that his children, that once
were, have not died in vain: that from their sacrifice
shall come a nobler, better world for all to live in, a
world where countless happy children shall hold bright
their memory for ever. But for the children of To-day,
save and spare them all you can from the evil hate and
horror of the war. Later they will know and understand.
Not yet. Give them back their Merry Christmas and its
kind thoughts, and its Christmas charity, till later on
there shall be with it again Peace upon Earth Good Will
towards Men."

His voice ceased. It seemed to vanish, as it were, in
the sighing of the wind.

I looked up. Father Time and Christmas had vanished from
the room. The fire was low and the day was breaking
visibly outside.

"Let us begin," I murmured. "I will mend this broken
horse."




END







End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Frenzied Fiction, by Stephen Leacock

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRENZIED FICTION ***

This file should be named frzfc10.txt or frzfc10.zip
Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, frzfc11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, frzfc10a.txt

This etext was produced by Gardner Buchanan.

Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.

We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
even years after the official publication date.

Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.

Most people start at our Web sites at:
http://gutenberg.net or
http://promo.net/pg

These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).


Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.

http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03

Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90

Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
as it appears in our Newsletters.


Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.

The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.

Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):

eBooks Year Month

    1  1971 July
   10  1991 January
  100  1994 January
 1000  1997 August
 1500  1998 October
 2000  1999 December
 2500  2000 December
 3000  2001 November
 4000  2001 October/November
 6000  2002 December*
 9000  2003 November*
10000  2004 January*


The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.

We need your donations more than ever!

As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
that have responded.

As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.

In answer to various questions we have received on this:

We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
just ask.

While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
donate.

International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
ways.

Donations by check or money order may be sent to:

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655-4109

Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
method other than by check or money order.

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.

We need your donations more than ever!

You can get up to date donation information online at:

http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html


***

If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
you can always email directly to:

Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>

Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.

We would prefer to send you information by email.


**The Legal Small Print**


(Three Pages)

***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.

*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.

ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.

Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
any commercial products without permission.

To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from. If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.

THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
or [3] any Defect.

DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:

[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
     including any form resulting from conversion by word
     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
     *EITHER*:

     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
          does *not* contain characters other than those
          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
          author, and additional characters may be used to
          indicate hypertext links; OR

     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
          OR

     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
          or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
     "Small Print!" statement.

[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
     let us know your plans and to work out the details.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
in machine readable form.

The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
Money should be paid to the:
"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
hart@pobox.com

[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
they hardware or software or any other related product without
express permission.]

*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*