Penguin persons & peppermints

IRLF

B M IDE

?

PENGUIN PERSONS
PEPPERMINTS

PENGUIN PERSONS
PEPPERMINTS

BY

WALTER PRICHARD EATON

AUTHOR OF

green Trails & Upland ^Pastures, flays & flayers,
The Idyl of TW/z Fires, &c.

W. A. WILDE COMPANY

BOSTON - - CHICAGO

Copyrighted 1922

By W. A. WILDE COMPANY

All rights reserved

Penguin Persons and Peppermints

22

J^ittle Sister

who 'was born just in time

to know the old, quiet ways of life

in their gentle decline — to

know and to love

them

Contents

"Page

Author's Foreword ix

Penguin Persons I

Spring Comes to Thumping Dick 18

The Passing of the Stage Sundial 33

On Singing Songs with One Finger .... 41

The Immorality of Shop-windows 46

A Forgotten American Poet 51

New Poetry and the Lingering Line .... 65

The Lies We Learn in Our Youth 77

The Bad Manners of Polite People 87

On Giving Up Golf Forever 96

"Grape-Vine" Erudition 108

Business Before Grammar 114

Wood Ashes and Progress 1 1 8

The Vacant Room in Drama 128

On Giving an Author a Plot 132

The Twilight Veil 136

Spring in the Garden 154

The Bubble, Reputation . .168

The Old House on the Bend 180

Concerning Hat-trees 184

The Shrinking of Kingman's Field 189

Mumblety-peg and Middle Age 211

Barber Shops of Yesterday 229

The Button Box 234

Peppermints 239

^Author s Foreword

IT is not a little unfortunate that no one can
attempt the essay form nowadays, more especially
that type of essay which is personal, reminiscent,
"an open letter to whom it may concern," with
out being accused of trying to write like Charles
Lamb. Of course, if we were ever accused of
succeeding, that would be another story! There
is, to be sure, no doubt that the gentle Elia im
pressed his form and method on all English writers
who followed him, and still reaches out across
a century to threaten with his high standards
those who still venture into this pleasant and
now so neglected field. Such are the rigors of
triumphant gentleness. Still — and he would have
been the first to recognize the fact — it is rather
unfair to demand of every essayist the revelation
of a personality like Lamb's. Fundamentally, all
literature, even naturalistic drama, is the reve
lation of a personality, a point of view. But it
is the peculiar flavor of the essay that it reveals

x Author's Foreword

an author through his chat about himself, his
friends, his memories and fancies, in something
of the direct manner of a conversation or a letter;
and he himself feels, in writing, a delightful
sense of intimacy with his future readers. That
Lamb was a master of this art like no other,
without a visible or probable rival, hardly con
stitutes a reason for denying to less delightful
men and gifted artists the right also to practice
it, to put themselves and their intimate little
affairs and idiosyncrasies into direft and personal
touch with such few readers as they may find.
For the readers of his essays are the author's
friends in a sense that the readers of his novels
or dissertations, or the witnesses of his plays,
can never be. There will be no story to hold
them, no fictional, independent characters, no
ideas nor arguments on high questions of policy.
There will be only a joint interest in the mi
nutiae of life. If I like cats and snowstorms, and
you like cats and snowstorms, we are likely to
come together on that mutual ground, and clasp
shadow hands across the page. But if you do
not like cats and snowstorms, why then you
will not like me, and we needn't bore each
other, need we?

^Author *s Foreword xi

The little papers in this volume, issued from
the peaceful town of Sewanee atop the Cumber
land plateau, between Thumping Dick Hollow
and Little Fiery Gizzard Creek, have been written
at various times and places in the past fifteen
years, many of them while I still dwelt in New
York, and babbled o' green fields, many before,
and some few after, the outbreak of the Great
War. That War, you will perhaps discorer, finds
in them no reflection. It has been consciously
excluded, for though the world can never be
the same world again, as we are in no danger
of forgetting, there are some things which even
war and revolution cannot change, such as the
memories of our childhood, the joy of violets
in the Spring, the delight in melody, the hu
mor of small dogs, the coo of babies. I have
fancied we are sometimes by way of forgetting
that. At any rate, of such matters, in hours when
he has no thought but to please himself, the essay
ist chats, and shall chat in the happy years that are
to come again, or all our bloodshed has been in
vain. If, at the same time, he chances to please
an editor also, and then to make a few friends who
like what he likes, smiles sympathetically at what
makes him smile, why, that is clear again!

xii ^Author's Foreword

This author has been fortunate enough to
please several editors in the past, and to all of
them, who have given him permission to reprint
such papers in this volume as have appeared in
their periodicals, he extends his gratitude. They
are specifically, the editors of The Atlantic Monthly,
Scribners, House and Garden, The Dial, Ainslee's,
The Scrap Book, The Boston Transcript and The
New York Tribune.

W. P. E.

Twin Fires,

Sheffield,

Mass.

'Penguin Persons

AFTER all, one knows so little about a man from
his printed works! They are the gleanings of
his thoughts and investigations, the pick of his
mind and heart; and they are at best but an
impersonal and partial record of the writer.
Even autobiography has something unsatisfac
tory about it; one feels the narrator is on guard
always, as it were, and, aware of an audience
cold and of strangers, keeps this back and trims
up that to make himself more what he should
be (or, in some perverse cases, what he should
not be). But probably no man who is worthy
of attention sits down to write a letter to a
good friend with one eye on posterity and the
public. In his intimate correspondence he is
off guard. Hence, some day, when he has
died, the world comes to know him by fleet
ing glimpses as he was, — which is almost as
near, is it not, as we ever get to knowing one
another? — knows him under his little private
moods, in the spell of his personal joys and sor
rows, sees his flashes of unexpected humor, —

!%*:'<; n g u i n 'Persons

eve.a,- ;it; -liiay! be,- , his unexpected pettinesses
Thus dangerous and thus delightful is it to pub
lish a great man's letters.

Such letters were Ruskin's to Charles Eliot
Norton, which Professor Norton has given to
the world. No one can fail from those letters
to get a more intimate picture of the author of
Modern Painters than could ever be imagined
out of that work itself, and out of the rest of
his works besides, not excepting the wonderful
Fors C/avigera; and not only a more intimate,
but a different picture, touched with greater
whimsicality, and with infinite sadness, too.
Not his hard-wrung thoughts and theories, but
his moods of the moment — and he was a man
rich in the moods of the moment — tell most
prominently here. And with how many of
these moods can the Ordinary Reader sympa
thize! Again and again as the Ordinary Reader
turns the pages he finds the great man under
the thralldom of the same insect cares and
annoyances which rule us all, until he real
izes as perhaps never before that poet and
peasant, genius and scribe, are indeed one in
a common humanity, and sighs, with a lurk
ing smile of satisfaction, "So nigh is grandeur
to our dust!"

One of the points of convergence between
Ruskin and the Ordinary Reader which has ap
pealed to me with peculiar force occurs in a

'Penguin 'Persons 3

letter from London dated in 1860. "When I
begin to think at all," Ruskin writes, "I get
into states of disgust and fury at the way the
mob is going on (meaning by the mob, chiefly
Dukes, crown-princes, and such like persons)
that I choke; and have to go to the British
Museum and look at Penguins till I get cool.
I find Penguins at present the only comfort in
life. One feels everything in the world so
sympathetically ridiculous; one can't be angry
when one looks at a Penguin."

Why, of course one can't! It is absurdly true,
when one comes to think of it, this beneficent
influence of penguins, stuffed penguins, at that,
which cannot even waddle. I dare say few
readers ever thought of this peculiar bird (if it
is a bird) in just that light before Mr. Ruskin's
letter came to view; I'm sure I never did. But
few readers will fail to recall at a first reading
of the words that piclure of a penguin which
used to adorn the school geographies, and pres
ently will come to them the old sensation of
amusement at the waddly fellow propped up on
his impossible feet, the smile will break over
their lips, and they will be one in mood with
Mr. Ruskin. They may affirm that of course
the author was only indulging in a little whim
sicality, and they may two thirds believe it, as
it is no doubt two thirds true; but just the
same, unless I am much mistaken, the image of

4 'Penguin "Persons

a penguin will persist in their minds, as it per
sisted in Raskin's mind — else how did he come
to write of it in this letter? — and they will be
the better and the happier for the smile it
evokes, as Ruskin was the better and the
happier. Indeed, that letter was his cheeriest
for months.

For me, however, the image has not faded
with the passing of the mood, or rather it has
changed into something more abiding. It has
assumed, in fact, no less a guise than the human ;
it has become converted into certain of my
friends. I now know these friends, in my
thoughts of them, as Penguin Persons. I find
they have the same beneficent effedt on me, and
on others around them, as the penguins on
Ruskin. I mean here to sing their praises, for
I believe that they and their kind (since every
one enters on his list of friends, as I do, some
Penguin Persons) have, even if they do not
know it, a mission in the world, an honorable
destiny to fulfill. They prevent us from taking
life too seriously; they make everything "sym
pathetically ridiculous"; they are often "as the
shadow of a great rock in a weary land."

But, at the very outset, I would not be mis
understood. I do not mean that a Penguin
Person must resemble the amusing bird in
physical aspect. There are, I know, certain
people, a far more numerous class than is

'Penguin 'Persons 5

generally supposed, who see in almost everybody
a resemblance to some animal, bird, or fish. I
am one of these people myself. It is on record
as far back as the fourth generation that some
one of my successive ancestors had the same
unhappy faculty, for it is unhappy, since it im
poses on the person who resembles for us a pig,
in our thoughts of him, the attributes of that
beast, and so on through the natural history
catalogue. It is not pleasant to watch a puma
kitten sitting beside you in the opera house,
especially when your mere brain tells you she is
probably a sweet, even-tempered little matron,
or to wait in pained expectancy for your large-
eared minister to bray, even though you know
he will not depart from his measured exposition
of sound and sane doclrine. However, the Pen
guin Persons are such by virtue of their moral
and mental attributes solely, of the similar effect
they produce on those about them by their
personalities. I have never met a man yet who
physically resembled a penguin, though I fancy
the experience would be interesting.

Still less would I have it understood that
Penguin Persons are stupid. Far from it. Dr.
Crothers declares, in his Gentle Reader, that he
would not like to be neighbor to a wit. "It
would be like being in proximity to a live
wire," he says. "A certain insulating film of
kindly stupidity is needed to give a margin of

6 'Penguin 'Persons

safety to human intercourse." I do not. think
that Dr. Crothers could have known a Penguin
Person when he wrote that. The Penguin Per
son is not a wit, there is no barb to his shafts of
fun, no uneasiness from his preternatural clever
ness, for he is not preternaturally clever. You
never feel unable to cope with him, you never
feel your mind keyed to an unusual alertness to
follow him; you feel, indeed, a sense of com
forting superiority, for, after all, you do take the
world so much more seriously than he! And
yet he is not stupid; he is bright, alert,
"kindly," to be sure, but delightfully humorous,
deliciously droll. Life with him appears to be
one huge joke, and there is an undion about
him, a contagion in his point of view, that
affedts you whether you will or no, and when
you are in his presence you cannot take life
seriously, either, — you can but laugh with him.
He does you good. You say he is " perfectly
ridiculous," but you laugh. Then he smiles
back at you and cracks another of those absurd
remarks of his, and you know he is "sympa
thetically ridiculous." Perhaps you were out
of sorts with life when you met him, but one
cannot be angry when one looks at a Penguin
Person.

But do you say that the original bird is not
like that at all, that he is the most stupid of
fellows? Ah! then you have never seen a pen-

'Penguin Persons 7

guin swim! He is grace and beauty and skill
in the water. If it were only his stupidity that
made us smile, not he, but the hen, would be
the most amusing of God's creatures. It is
something more subtle, more personal, than
that. It can only be described as Penguinity.

Penguinity! The word is not in the diction
aries; it is beyond the pale of the "purists"; in
coining it I am fully aware that I violate the
canons of the Harvard English Department,
that I fly in the face of philology, waving a red
rag. Yet I do it gladly, assertively, for I have
confidence that some day, when Penguin Per
sons have taken their rightful place in the
world's estimation, the world will not be able
to dispense with my little word, which will
then overthrow the dictionary despotism and
enter unchallenged the leather strongholds of
Webster and Murray.

Yet before that day does come, and to hasten
its coming, I would record a tribute to my
first and firmest Penguin friend, — my friend
and the friend of how many others? — long and
lank of limb, thin and high-boned of face, alert,
smiling, ridiculous. On the nights when steam
ships were sunk in the East River, or incipient
subways elevated suddenly above ground, or
other exciting features of New York life came
clamoring for publicity, he would sit calm and
smiling, coatless, a corncob pipe between his

8 "Penguin "Persons

teeth, and read "copy" with the speed of two
ordinary men. The excited night city editor
would rush about, shouting orders and counter
manding them; reporters would dash in and
out; telegraph instruments would buzz; the
nerve-wracking whistle of the tube from the
composing room would shrill at sudden inter
vals, causing everybody to start involuntarily
each time and to curse with vexation and anger;
the irritable night editor, worried lest he miss
the outgoing trains with his first edition, would
look furtively at the clock at three-minute
periods and plunge his grimy hand over his
sweating forehead; but the Penguin Person
would sit smiling at his place by the "copy"
desk, blue pencil in hand, serene amid the
Babel. And when the tension was greatest, the
strain nerve-breaking to get the big story, in all
its complete and coherent details, into the
hungry presses that seemed almost visible,
though they waited the stroke of one, ten
stories down, in the sub-basement, the Pen
guin Person would sit back in his chair, grin
amiably, and say with a drawl, "Hell, ain't
it, fellers? D* you know what I'm going to
do to-morrow, though? I'm going to put
on my asbestos collar, side track some beaut,
take her to the theatre, and after the show,
thanks to the princely salary I'm paid for
keeping split infinitives out of this sheet, I'm

'Penguin "Persons 9

going to rush her round to Sherry's or Del-
monico's and blow her to a glass of beer and
a frankfurter."

Then as if by magic the drawn faces of all
his associates would clear, the night editor
would laugh and forget to look at the clock,
we would resume our toil, momentarily forget
ful of the high pressure under which we la
bored, and working the better for the forget-
fulness; and the Penguin Person, the smile still
expanding his mouth, would tilt down his chair
and work with us, only faster. If he had serious
thoughts, he never disclosed them to us —
seriously. When he opened his lips we waited
always in the expectation of some ridiculous
remark, even though it should clothe a platitude
or a piece of good, common-sense advice. And
we were never disappointed. Life with him was
apparently one huge joke, and it came about
that when we thought of him or spoke of him
among ourselves, it was always with a smile.
Yet now he is gone — and what a hole! Other
men can do his work as well, if not as quickly.
The paper still goes to press and the public sees
no change; but we, who worked beside him,
see it nightly. By twelve o'clock on a busy
night, nervous, drawn faces surround the central
desk, and profanity is snapped crossly back and
forth. There is no alleviation of cheerful in
anity. Presently somebody looks up, remarking,

io ^Penguin Persons

"I wish Bobbie Barton was back." And some
body else replies with profane asperity and lax
grammar, "I wish he was!" Bobbie, mean
while has become a lawyer, and can now af
ford a whole plate of frankfurters at Delmon-
ico's. But we are the poorer, and, I do not
hesitate to declare, the worse men for the loss
of his Penguinity.

Then there is David. David is penguinacious
by fits and starts, not wholly to be depended
on, sometimes needing himself to be cheered
with the Penguinity of others, but, when the
mood is on him, softly, fantastically ridiculous,
like the nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll, a sort
of Alice in Wonderland person. I should not hes
itate to recommend him to Dr. Crothers as a
neighbor; indeed I suspecl: the good doctor is
almost such a man himself, — too gentle, too
fantastic in humor to suggest, however remotely,
a "live wire," and yet how far from being stu
pid! David's mind works so unexpectedly. You
are quite sure you know what he is going to say,
and yet he never says it, giving his remark a
verbal twist which calls up some absurdly im
possible picture, and evokes, not a laugh, but a
deep, satisfying smile. There is something quaint
and refreshing about such a mind as David's. It
does not so much restore one's animal spirits, or
one's good nature, as it rejuvenates the springs of
fancy, brings back the whimsical imagination of

'Penguin 'Persons n

childhood. David will people a room with his
airy conceits, as Mr. Barrie peopled Kensington
Gardens with Peter Pan and his crew; and it is
as impossible not to forget anger and care, not to
feel sweeter and fresher, for David's jests, as for
The Little White Bird. Only a Penguinity like
David's is subtle, a little unworldly, and, like
most gracious gifts, fragile. There are days when
the world is too much for David, when his jests
are silent and his conceits do not assemble. Then
it is that he in turn needs the good cheer of an
other's Penguinity, and it is then my happy
privilege to reward him by hunting up Bobbie
Barton, if I can, and joining them at a dinner
party. Bobbie's Penguinity is based on an inex
haustible fount of animal spirits, he is never any
thing but a Penguin. He usually has David put
to rights by the roast.

The other day, while Bobbie was running on
in his ridiculous fashion, in an idiom all his own
that even Mr. Ade could not hope to rival, tell
ing, I believe, about some escapade of his at
Asbury Park, where he had "put the police
force of two men and three niggers out of busi
ness" by asking the innocent and unsuspecting
chief the difference between a man who had
seen Niagara Falls, and one who hadn't, and a
ham sandwich, I fell to musing on Ruskin's un
happy lot, who did not know Bobbie, nor appar
ently anybody like him. Poor Ruskin! After

12 'Penguin 'Persons

all, there is more pathos than humor in his
periodic visits to the penguins. Isolated, from
childhood, by parental care, from the common
friendships and associations of life, still further
isolated in mature years by his own genius and
early and lasting intellectual eminence, the won
der is that he was not more unhappy, rather
than less. He had few friends, and those few, like
Professor Norton, were intellectual companions
as well, always ready and eager to debate with
him the problems of Art and Life which were
forever vexing him. Their companionship must
often have been a stimulant — when he needed,
perhaps, a narcotic. Their intercourse drove him
continually in upon himself, where there
was only seething unrest, when he needed so
often to be taken completely out of himself,
where there was peace. And, in his hours of
need, he turned to the Alps, and the penguins.
But both were dumb things, after all, that
could not quite meet his mood, could not quite
satisfy that hunger which is in all of us for
the common association of our kind, for the
humble jest and cheery laugh of a smiling
humanity. Neither of them was Bobbie, who
adds personality to the penguin, and satisfies a
double need.

Bobbie would not have talked Art with Rus-
kin, and for a very good reason, — he knows
nothing about it. Bobbie would not have cared

'Penguin 'Persons 13

a snap about his Turners, though he would have
been greatly reverent of them for their owner's
sake. But Bobbie would have enjoyed tramping
over the mountains with him, an eager and alert
listener to all his talks about geology and clouds,
and ten to one Bobbie would have made friends
of every peasant they met, every fellow traveler
on the road, and taught Ruskin in turn a good
bit about humdrum, picturesque mankind. And
he would have made him laugh! Possibly you
think it incongruous, impossible, the picture of
happy-go-lucky, ridiculous Bobbie, with his slang
and his grin and his outlook on life, and Ruskin,
the great critic, the master of style, the intellec
tual giant. But then you reckon without Bob
bie's quality of Penguinity, and without Ruskin's
humanness. It is alike impossible to withstand
the contagion ' of Bobbie's Penguinity, and to
fancy a genius so great that he does not at times
yearn for the common walks and the common
talks of his humbler fellow creatures. He may
not always know how to achieve them, his own
greatness may be a barrier he cannot cross, or his
temperament and circumstances may hinder; but
be sure that he feels the loss, though he may not
himself, for all his genius, be quite aware of it.
That Ruskin lived in moody isolation, while
Shakespeare caroused in an alehouse, does not
prove Ruskin the greater man or the deeper
seer; it only shows that one knew how to

14 'Penguin ^Persons

achieve what the other did not, — contadt with
the everyday, merry world, escape from the
awful and everlasting solemnity of life. Rus-
kin could not achieve it for himself, he did
not know how; but Bobbie, all unknown to
either of them, would have shown him. Bob
bie would have made life for him "sympa
thetically ridiculous/' for Bobbie is a Penguin
Person. And Bobbie would have been a living,
breathing human being, by his side and ready
to aid him, even to creep into his heart; not
a stuffed biped on a shelf in a musty museum.
Poor Ruskin, how much life robbed him of
when it made it impossible for him to win
in his youth the careless, unthinking, but undy
ing friendship of a few men like Bobbie, a few
Penguin Persons!

Ah, well! "The dice of God are always
loaded." Doubtless we must always pay for
greatness by isolation, or some more bitter toll.
And for our insignificance, in turn, come the
Bobbies as reward. It behooves those of us,
then, who are insignificant, to appreciate our
blessing, to cherish our penguins, the more since
we, when "the world is too much with us,"
when the tyranny of economic conditions op
presses and the wrongness of life seems almost
more than we can bear, have not that inward
strength, that Titanic defiance, which is the
possession of the great, ultimately to fall back

^Penguin Persons 15

upon, and so sorely need to be shown a joke
somewhere, anywhere, in the universal scheme,
to find something that is "sympathetically ridic
ulous." That is why the Penguin Persons are
sent to us; thus we can see in them the swing
of the Emersonian pendulum.

But they are naturally modest, and doubtless
have no idea of their mission, further than to
realize that "people are glad to have them
around," as Bobbie would express it, and that it
is "up to them" (in the same idiom) to be
cheerful, — not a hard task, since cheeriness sits
in their soul. It is awful to think how self-
conciousness might ruin the flavor of their Pen-
guinity if they ever were awakened to a reali
zation of the fact that they were involved in
anything so serious as the Law of Compensa
tion! Though I do believe that David at his
best could make the eternal verities look ridic
ulous. No, when the Penguin Persons do be
come aware of their Penguinity, it is in a
funny, shamefaced fashion, as if they had been
up to boyish tricks their manhood should blush
for. Came Bobbie to me the other day and
confessed that he had about made up his mind
to be "serious."

"Everybody thinks I'm a joke," he said, with
a melancholy grin; "they always expect me to
say something asinine, and get ready to laugh
before I speak. What shall I do?"

16 'Penguin ^Persons

"Do!" I cried. Do what you've been doing,
only do it more. Keep right on being a Pen
guin, and God bless you!"

Bobbie looked perplexed and a little hurt; but
I was too wise to explain, and three minutes later
he was rattling off some delicious absurdity to
my four-year-old hopeful, who had fallen down
on his nose and needed comforting — and a han-
kerchief. Bobbie was supplying the latter from
his pocket, and from his penguinacious brain the
former was effectively coming in the shape of a
description of Rocky Mountain sheep, which,
according to Bobbie, have right-side legs much
shorter than their left-side legs, so they can run
along the mountain slopes without ever falling
on their noses.

"But how do they get back?" asks the hope
ful, still bleeding, but eager for information.

"They put their . heads between their hind
legs and run backward," says Bobbie. "They
have long necks, you know."

That, of course, may be unnatural history, but
it was a very present help in time of trouble.
Indeed, it made Bobbie, as well as the boy, for
get, and I have heard no more of his dreadful
intention to be serious.

Some one — probably it was Emerson — once
said, "Each man has his own vocation. The
talent is the call." It is no small thing, in this
grim world, to make people smile, to be absur^

"Penguin "Persons 17

for their alleviation, to render all things "sympa
thetically ridiculous" for a time, to bear in a
chalice of mirth the water of Lethe. If one's
talent lies that way, why, the call should be
clear! The Penguin Person should have no
doubt or shame of his vocation, nor should any
one else allow him to. Little Joe Weber, who
was on the stage the most perfect example of
Penguinity, was as a stage character beloved of
all the thousands who saw him. He heard his
call and followed his vocation, and honor and
wealth and fame are now his. The merry host
of Penguin Persons who move outside the radius
of the spluttering calcium, whose proscenium is
the door frame of a home, may earn neither
wealth nor fame by doing as he has done, but
they will win no less a reward, for they will
have lightened for all around them the burdens
of life, they will have smoothed the gathering
frown and summoned the forgotten laugh, they
will have made of the ridiculous a little religion,
and out of Penguinity brought peace.

Spring Comes to Thumping

\VHEN the ordinary American who "does
things'' — atrocious phrase, symbol of our un-
recking materialism that does not consider
the value of the things done — wants to give
a place a name, he affixes his own, or that of
his sister-in-law or the congressman from his
district. Thus our noblest North American
mountain is called McKinley, though it already
bore a beautiful Indian name — Denali, "The
Great One"; and thus in Glacier Park we find
a Lake McDermott, a Lake McDonald, and a
Mount Jackson, to contrast painfully with such
beautiful titles as Going-to-the-Sun Mountain,
Rising Wolf Mountain, and Morning Eagle
Falls. The Indians expressed their poetry in
their names. The pioneers and the colonial
rural Americans expressed, if not poetry, at
least a fine, spicy flavor of the local tradition;
their names grew out of the place. In the
corner of New England where I was born we
had a Slab City, a Tearbreeches Hill, a Puddin'
P'int — well-flavored names, all of them, de
scriptive and significant, even the last, which

Spring Comes to Thumping T>ic^ 19

strangers mispronounced Pudding Point. Even
in old New York there were once such names
rich in historical association as Long Acre
Square, now reduced to Times Square to please
the vanity or cupidity of a newspaper. But,
save the Indians, no body of people on this
continent, not even the old-time cowboys and
prospectors with their Bright Angel Trail, have
ever rivaled the southern highlanders, the moun
tain folk of the Blue Ridge, the Great Smokies
and the Cumberlands, in the bestowal of pic
turesque titles. It is hard, sometimes, to say
whether the southern mountaineers are poets
or humorists or realists; they may be one or the
other, or all three at once. But they never fail
with the inevitable appellation. Not Flaubert
with his one right word, not the school "gang"
with its nicknames, can equal them.

Thumping Dick Hollow, Milk-sick Hollow,
Little Fiery Gizzard Creek, Falling Water Cove,
Maniac's Hell, Lost Creek Cove, Jump Off
Point, Rainbow Hollow, Slaughterpen Hollow
— they come back to me in picturesque array,
and with them come back the memories of
the gray cabins, the clear bright water on the
race, the silent forests, the billows of laurel, the
song of the brown thrashers, the shy children
in a dusky doorway, the lean pigs not shy at all,
the bloodroot underfoot, the soft, hazy sky
overhead, the sense that here life was always as

2O Spring Comes to Thumping T>i

it is, and always will be, with no change but
the changing seasons. I remember once more
how I met the Spring at Thumping Dick, like
a dryad dancing through the wood, caught her
in the very a6t of climbing up from the cove
below to find a road to take her north. So we
loitered together for one whole, blissful day,
and when I came back to the college campus I
wore her violets in my hat.

But first I must tell you how Thumping
Dick Hollow got its name. That is more im
portant even than knowing where it is. Many,
many years ago, so long ago that all traces of
his cabin have disappeared, a man called Dick
dwelt beside the little brown brook which flows
through a slight hollow on its way to the cove
below. Now, this Dick was averse to over
much effort, unless it were effort connected with
the pursuit of bears or panther, and being of
an ingenious turn of mind he invented a labor-
saving device to pound his corn. (Unfortu
nately, he still had to grow it himself.) He
took a hollow log and pivoted it across the
brook, at a little fall, in such a way that the
upper end would rest in the water while the
lower end projected over the rocks below the
falls. Then he fastened a board across the
lower half of this lower opening, and under
neath the log, also at the lower end, he fixed a
pestle. He then placed his mortar on a stone

Spring Comes to Thumping *Dic^ 21

directly beneath. The water, flowing into the
hollow log, ran to the lower end and piled up
against the board till there was weight enough
to tip the entire log down. Then enough ran
out to tilt the log back again. Of course, each
time the lower end of the log descended the
pestle struck a blow in the mortar. All Dick
had to do was now and then to empty out his
pounded grain and put in a fresh supply. The
log kept at its solemn seesaw night and day, its
dull thumps resounding through the woods. So
Thumping Dick Hollow it is to this day, and
being close to Sewanee, Tennessee, instead of
New York City, Thumping Dick Hollow it
will remain, instead of becoming the Pratt
Street section of Elmhurst Manor.

To be precise, it is four miles from Sewanee,
and to be more precise, Sewanee is eight miles
straight up hill from Cowan, and to be still
more precise, Cowan is thirty-five or forty miles
from Chattanooga, and now you begin to know
where you are. Chattanooga, as you know, is
in Tennessee, and sits beside the superb Moc
casin Bend of the Tennessee River, under the
shadow of Lookout Mountain, entirely sur
rounded by freight trains. It runs Schene&ady,
New York, a close race for the title of the
noisiest city in the United States. But after you
have taken a west-bound train in the quaint old
station of the N. C. & St. L. railroad you pass

22 Spring Comes to Thumping T)i

rapidly into silence, down the gorge of the
splendid river, and then into the broken, ragged
hills. At Cowan a pig meets you on the plat
form, with the amiable curiosity of the small
town resident toward the arriving stranger.
Here you change to the little branch line which
runs north, up the side of the gorge, to the
coal mines. Up and up the train climbs, puffing
and straining, through a tall forest of hard
woods, and eventually reaches an almost level
plateau. Once on this plateau, you lose all
sense of mountain country and if you had not
been aware of the steep climb to get here, you
would not believe that you were on the southern
nose of the Cumberland Range. Presently you
reach a station — and that is Sewanee.

There are no academic squatters at Sewanee,
in their $100,000 cottages, as there are at
Princeton. It is too far removed from any
cities, in the midst of its timbered mountain
domain. There is a little hotel, much fre
quented in summer, to be sure, but for the most
part the town is the university and its prepara
tory academy, and the university is the town.
Here is the Gothic chapel, the ivy-clad scho
lastic buildings, the tree-shaded campus walks,
the wandering groups of hatless boys, the en
circling street lined with professors' houses — all
the traditional flavor of a college, in a setting
of forest. For it is one of the unique charms

Spring Comes to Thumping T>ic{^ 23

of Sewanee that a walk of a mile in any direc
tion is a walk back into the ancient order, into
the wilderness of the southern mountaineer,
into the eighteenth century. A class that
studies Shaw's plays in the morning may even
catch the vocabulary of Shakespeare in the
afternoon, repeated unconsciously by the lips of
mountain children in the coves.

The word cove is omnipresent here. Even the
mountain folk are called cove-ites. It needs but
a short walk to show you why. The lower
Cumberlands, on the southern border of Ten
nessee, are unlike any other mountain region,
w^ith a charm all their own, inherent in their
topography. Apparently an almost level stretch
of timbered country along the little railroad, in
reality this level is the plateau top of a great
rock wall, a kind of huge mesa extending north
and south. If you walk to the edge, you dis
cover that it suddenly falls away with startling
abruptness, sometimes in sheer descents of
several hundred feet till the top of the ancient
shale pile is reached (now covered deep with
soil) and then dropping away more gradually
with that lovely curve of debris. But nowhere
is this Palisade-like wall continuous, and here
is where the southern Cumberlands get their
unique flavor. The descending water from the
plateau top has eroded deep into the precipice
every mile or even every half mile, each brook

24 Spring Comes to Thumping 'Di

in the course of ages eating far back into the
mountain mass, forming a V-shaped depression
called a cove, and between two coves thus
formed is a reverse A, called a point, always,
naturally, composed of the hardest rock, and
not infrequently ending in a literal point so
sharp that it is like a vast granite bowsprit
thrust out into the green plains far below, ter
minating in a sheer precipice of several hundred
feet. Roughly, then, you may visualize this
section of the Cumberlands as a giant double-
edged saw, a thousand feet thick, laid down
across the State, each tooth a "point," each V
between the teeth a "cove." Standing far out
on one of these rock bowsprits, in the soft, hazy
air of the southern mountains, you look over the
far valley lands below, you look north and south
at the other thrusting bowsprits growing bluer
and more mysterious as they recede, you look
to left and right down into the timbered green
lushness of the coves, where invisible water
tinkles.

But the simile of the saw is only a rough
one, after all, because erosion is never mathe
matical, some coves have bitten back far deeper
than others, side coves have developed, and if
you follow down the mystery of some brown
brook, Little Fiery Gizzard Creek, let us say,
for love of the name, you may very soon pre
cipitate yourself into such a maze of coves, such

Spring Comes to Thumping T>ick^ 25

a tangle of tough, tearing shrubbery (the term
"laurel hell" is the mountaineer as realist), that
you will regret, perhaps, the day you abandoned
what in this region is euphemistically called a
road. But you will hardly forget the view
from some inland point, where you look, not
out over the Tennessee plains, but over a
branching canon of coves, cut like the Grand
Canon out of an apparent plain, but, unlike
that epic of naked magnificence, timbered with
great, upstanding hardwoods from floor to rim,
a soft, silent, hazy green hole where the forest
floor has sunk a thousand feet, to rise again in
the smoky distance and melt into the blue.
There is no sign of human habitation, though
in those coves, where the forest mould is rich
to clear and cultivate and the springs are never
dry, the cove-ites dwell, stock of the highlanders
who are almost a race apart in the fastnesses of
our southern Appalachians. They have no roads,
only dim trails or footpaths. The protecting
forest hides their little clearings. Only a hawk
sails on silent wings over the leafy depths, and
perhaps the faintest thread of smoke winds up
and is lost in the haze of the air, a haze which
seems faintly tinged with the all-pervading green.
But I wander as aimlessly as the enchanted
visitor to Sewanee, and am by way of forgetting
that it was Spring I set out to recapture with
my pen — as if one could recapture the vanished

26 Spring Comes to Thumping T)icf(

Aprils! It was April, to be sure, early April,
very cold in the Berkshires, with great, dirty
drifts of snow still lingering on the northern
sides of walls and hedges, and ice on the pools
of a morning. Down here on the Cumberland
plateau the trees were still bare, too, and the
mornings chill, though you could easily find a
blade of grass "big enough to blow," and the
brown thrashers sang in the dooryards. But
there came a day when the sun rose misty and
hot, and I wandered out through the woods, by
a dim, sandy cart track, missing the solemn
evergreen note of our northern forests but happy
in the fragrance of life reviving under last year's
leaves — that peculiar odor of the woods in
Spring. The little brown brook at Thumping
Dick was softly vocal, and it, too, smelled of
leaves. After a time I reached a point which
jutted out diredHy over the tops of the trees
growing on the debris pile below. These trees
were as tall as masts, and as straight, though
they were hardwoods, and from my rocky perch
I looked through their upper tracery of budding
twigs, as through a veil of faint green and red,
out on the brown and green plains of Tennessee
shining in the sun, or left and right across the
canons of the coves to the stately procession of
receding headlands. Then I cast about for a
way down into one of the coves, and presently
came upon a footpath.

Spring Comes to Thumping T>ick^ 27

It led down the headwall by sharp switch
backs till it reached the easier declivity below,
passed a gushing spring where a tin dipper hung
on a twig proclaiming unseen passers, and
presently picked up the bed of a tumbling
brook. It was when I reached this brook that
I was aware of Spring coming up the slope. I
could see ahead, and to either side, a consider
able distance through the open woods, and, lo!
the Judas trees were in flower, stray bursts or
purplish pink lighting up the forest floor like
bright-robed, wandering dryads. (The mountain
folk call this shrub the red-bud.) I loitered on
down the brook side, through moist leaf-mould
and rocks, while overhead the trees began to
cover me with their frail, new foliage, and
under foot the forest floor began to burgeon
with bloom. Great double bloodroots came
first — I stepped suddenly into a garden of them
and hastily stooping crushed some juice on my
fingers. Next the umbrella tops of the May
apple leaves began to push up. There was a
great dogwood tree in full bloom beside the
path. A hedge-like bank of azaleas were show
ing bud. Then came the violets, yellow violets,
wood violets, but especially the birdfoot variety,
with their pink-tinged blue petals ubiquitous
amid the leaves. To me this violet is particu
larly dear, for it was the flower which in my
childhood was culled to fill those bright-colored

28 Spring Comes to Thumping T^l

May baskets we hung upon our sweethearts'
doors at the festival of Spring, gathering them
in the village cemetery, where they grew in
great beauty and profusion, quite as Omar would
have expected. Now I gathered a handful
again, for memory's sake, and stuck them in
the band of my hat, before I resumed my jour
ney down the cove.

The first intimation I had of coming habi
tation was a pig, a lean, black, razor-back pig
which grunted at my intrusion beneath his oak
tree and went racing off at a great pace, almost
gracefully, I might say, for even a pig which
wanders on a mountainside develops something
of the agility of a wild creature. Not far beyond
I came quite suddenly upon such a picture as you
may see nowhere in the world but in our southern
highlands, in the Spring. Aware of my coming,
if I was not aware of their proximity, six tow-
headed, bare -footed, single -gar men ted children,
the eldest a girl not over ten, the youngest an in
fant just able to stand, were ranged in solemn row,
like a flight of steps, upon the top of a large flat
stone at the edge of a little clearing, in perfect
silence watching jne approach, the violets and
bloodroot blossoms they had been gathering
dangling in loose bunches from their hands.
Behind them, just across the brook which ran,
like a road, in front of the gate, stood a weath
ered-gray cabin, of rough boards, with a central

Spring Comes to Thumping T)ic^ 29

doorway and windows without sashes. At one
end was an outside chimney of field-stone, laid,
it seemed, with clay. Surrounding this cabin
was a rough picket fence, again of untrimmed
boards, with a gate opening on the brook and
stepping stones across to the path. In the littk
compound thus enclosed, and almost overtopping
the cabin, were half a dozen peach and plum
trees, veritable geyser jets of pink and white
bloom. Behind, in a small clearing, was the
stubble of last year's corn. Squalid and poor
and mean enough a dwelling, a shiftless clear
ing, a dirty family of children — yes. But under
its geyser jets of blossom that little gray cabin
was the essence of the picturesque, with the
forest wall rising behind it, and behind that the
great headwall of the cove. It was weathered
and old and primitive and lovely; and the six
little shy ragamuffins on the stone, still staring
at me with the eyes of timid animals, were —
well, they were six little shy ragamuffins, and
that is nice enough!

"Hello," said I, "I see you've got the baby
out to gather wild flowers, too."

The eldest girl found speech, after an effort.
"That ain't the baby," she said, with a show of
scorn for my ignorance. "The baby's in the
house with maw."

My respect for the capacity of that little
cabin was still further increased by this reve-

30 Spring Comes to Thumping cDi

lation. I asked the eldest girl some questions
about the way, finding her directions for spot
ting a trail in this forest maze remarkably lucid,
and went again on my wanderings, my last back
ward glimpse of the mouse-gray cabin under its
pink and white geysers of blossom still showing
the six little tow-headed, barefooted youngsters
standing like six little patiences on a pedestal,
staring after me. But when I had disappeared
down the trail I heard from far off, mingling
with the murmur of the brook, the shrill sound
of childish glee, as they resumed their search for
wild flowers. Then it was that Spring smiled,
and gave my fingers a little squeeze!

So I wandered on, with Spring for company,
all that blissful day, through forests of oak and
chestnut where the Judas trees danced, past dog
wood thickets and over beds of violets, into un
expected little clearings where always the same
gray cabin of rough, weathered boards sat under
its geyser jets of pink and white, while shy,
pretty children peeped like startled rabbits from
the dim doorway and the pig ran off through
the woods (when he did not follow me), and
finally up the steep slope at the head of a cove
again, into the region of the earliest bloodroots,
and so to the final shin up the last precipitous
wall to the plateau above. As I reached the
summit and looked back, I saw the cove was
green, and the veil I had gazed through that

Spring Comes to Thumping T>ic^ 3 1

morning was hazier now; Spring had climbed
with me back up the slope and even here on the
two-thousand foot rim the trees were bursting
into leaf. There was a carpet of brilliant red
stonecrop on the rock at my feet. As I came
once more to the brook in Thumping Dick I
saw a bloodroot on the bank, with the dead leaf
it had that day pushed up still clinging to it.
Yes — and here was a tiny bed of violets, in a
warm, sheltered glade, opening to the sun. I
gathered them all, and redecorated my hat.
Then I bathed my hot face in the brook and
lay listening to a thrasher for a while, as the
long shadows of afternoon crept like lean, ghostly
fingers through the forest and between me and
the sky I could see the lacework of the budding
twigs, with here and there a tree that actually
showed leaf. No one passed me on the trail.
The thrasher and I had the woods all to our
selves, except, of course, for Spring, who sat
beside me singing mezza <uoce, to herself, a song
curiously like the ripple of a brook.

At last I rose and followed the dim trail back
toward the college, entering the campus as the
evening lights were coming on in the dormitory
windows, and somewhere a group of boys were
singing, not lustily but with the plaintive
quality that sometimes steals into the voices of
the young and happy at the twilight hour. I
tossed my hat on a table, and saw my withered

32 Spring Comes to Thumping

violets falling dejectedly over the band. But I
did not care. Back below Thumping Dick was
a cove full on the march, coming up the slope,
the blue battalions of the Spring. Outside, in
the smoky, warm dusk, a thrasher still sang.
Spring had left me, for she had far to go, but all
the way north I should see the signs where her
feet had trod, and when at last I reached once
more my northern mountain home, I should find
her waiting with a smile, perhaps with just a
trillium in her hand to offer me, before she sped
on again toward Labrador. But, I thought, I
could never know her quite so well again as I
had this day; she would not loiter with me quite
so familiarly, with her dear, friendly squeeze of
my fingers as the childish voices drifted with the
brook song down the cove. I had kept tryst
with Spring at Thumping Dick, for once the
favored of all her myriad lovers.

The 'Passing of the Stage Sundial

IT HAS been many years since I have seen a sun
dial on the stage. There was a time when the
stage could not get along without them; but
styles have changed. "Iram indeed has gone
with all his rose," and Eddie Sothern, best be
loved of romantic adtors in your generation and
mine, has written his theatrical memoires, which
is the player's method of saying farewell. The
Melancholy Tale of Me, he calls them, perhaps
because they are not in the least melancholy —
a good and sufficient reason. Yet Mr. Sothern
strangely neglects the subject of sundials in his
book, although they were his prop in how many
a play back in the golden Nineties! — the golden,
promise-laden, contradictory Nineties, that Jin-
de-siecle decade when Max Nordau thundered
that we were going to the dogs of degeneracy,
and we youngsters knew that we were headed
not alone for a new heaven, but what is much
more important, a new earth.

My school and college days fell entirely in
the Nineties, or almost entirely, for I finally
emerged with a sheepskin written in Latin I

3

34 The ^P as sing of the Stage Sundial

could no longer translate, in June, 1900. I saw
my first modern realistic play in 1893, wnen I
was a little junior middler at Phillips Andover.
It was Shore Acres, and I have not yet for
gotten, after a quarter of a century, the thrill of
that revelation. It was almost as if my grand
father's kitchen had been put upon the stage,
and with Herne himself to play the leading role,
to blow on the frosty pane that he could peer
into the night, to bank the fires, tip the stove
lids, lock the door, and climb slowly up to bed
while the old kitchen, in semi-darkness, seemed
like a closing benediclion before the downrush
of the final curtain, I caught the poetry of the
commonplace, I had my first unconscious lesson
in literary and dramatic fidelity. And I ended
my college days, a much more sophisticated
person, championing Pinero and Jones, rushing
eagerly to special performances of Ibsen, and
ardently admiring the plays of G. B. Shaw, two
of which, Arms and the Man and The Devil's
Disciple, had been acted in America by Richard
Mansfield before the end of the century.

Considering these plays now, and their effect
upon me — and not forgetting, either, the pas
sionate admiration, almost the worship, we
young men of twenty had in those days for the
acting of Mrs. Fiske — it would be easy to infer
that the whole period of the Nineties for us

The fas sing of the Stage Sundial 35

youngsters was a period of revolt and forward-
urging, that we were crusaders for what Henry
Arthur Jones called "the great realities of
modern life" in art. Crusaders we were, to be
sure. I well remember long debates with my
father, a man of old-fashioned tastes in poetry,
and a particular fondness for Burns, over the
merits of Kipling's poems. (Think of consid
ering Kipling's poems revolutionary! Indeed,
think of considering some of them poems!).
We debated from still more divergent view
points over the novels of d'Annunzio. In col
lege, in my last year or two, some of us even
adopted the views of Tolstoy in his What is
Art? and under the urge of this new sociolog
ical passion we took volunteer classes in night
schools. I remember instructing a group of
Jewish youths in the principles of oral debate,
or, rather, debating the principles of debating
with them, for being unblessed with an expen
sive preparatory school and college education,
and being Jews into the bargain, they did not
propose to take anything on faith. I used to
return to my room in the college Yard wonder
ing just why it was that these working lads,
mere "foreigners", of a race infinitely inferior,
of course, to the Anglo-Saxon, and without the
precious boon of a Harvard training, had so
much more real intellectual curiosity and men
tal grasp than any of us "superior" youths.

36 'The T as sing of the Stage Sundial

These classes interfered seriously with my aca
demic work, yet it seems to me now that they
were infinitely more profitable.

However, it was a curious paradox of the
Nineties that while we were discovering Pinero,
Ibsen, Shaw, Tolstoy, we were also reading The
Prisoner of Zenda and yielding ourselves with
luxurious abandon into the arms of honey-sweet
romance. At the very time when the new,
realistic drama was leading us out of a paste
board world into something approximating an
intelligent comment on life, the cloak-and-
sword drama was having a fine little reactionary
renaissance, the calcium moon was shining down
on many a gleaming garden and flashing blade,
and ears were rapturously strained to catch the
murmur of love-laden words. Then it was that
the stage sundial flourished in all its glory,
generally flooded, to be sure, with moonlight —
that peculiar moonlight of the American
theatre which turns grease-paint to a horrible
magenta — and we youths, with the divine flex
ibility of imagination only youth can know,
responded alike to Hedda Gabler and <L/#tf Enemy
to the King.

Do you remember the sundial, exactly at
stage centre, in the latter play? In what dulcet
tones, love-laden, the future Hamlet and Mac
beth murmured to his lady fair! Even the
sword duel in the last acl, all over the chamber,

The Massing of the Stage Sundial 37

across the great bed ripping down the curtains,
back and forth with flash of steel and rattle of
blade, was not so thrilling as that moonlit scene
across the dial plate. My constant companion
in those days was a boy who to-day preaches
each week from a famous pulpit, with gravity
and eloquence. He is a man of substantial parts,
on whom life's bitter realities press very hard as
he battles to relieve them. Does he now recall,
I wonder, how for weeks after we had hung
from the gallery rail at *An Enemy to the King
he even said "Thank you," when somebody
passed him a piece of bread, in the deep, long-
drawn tones of Sothern's romantic passion? He
was a handsome youth, and I know not what
mischief he wrought that winter in gentle
bosoms, with his vocabulary enlarged and ro
manticized, his tones colored with emotion, as
he sought secluded corners at our dances and
practised his new art. Our Tolstoian moods
were not for dances, you may be sure! We
lived in a dual universe. In one world were
sundials and moonlight and the thrill of a
woman's eyes; there was slow music and the
ache of unfilled desire ever about to be gratified
by some hoped-for miracle. In the other world
were only fa6ts, hard fa&s, and the scorn of
considering them emotionally, of considering
them in any way but with the intellect. I fear
in those days our moods did not conned: intel-

38 The Massing of the Stage Sundial

left and the fair sex. Perhaps youth never does.
And perhaps youth is right, not in thus passing
judgment on women, for that is not what is
done, but in refusing to surrender any portion
of the divine romantic mystery of sex at two-
and-twenty to the cold light of reason. When
Shaw and Ibsen wrote, they wrote of daily life,
and we were learning to accept their contention
that it should be written about truthfully. But
there was no lie in these other plays, these sun
dial romances, for they were not daily life, they
were ages long ago and far away, they belonged
to the Never-Never-Land of romantic fable — of
dreams and the heart's desire. There is no such
thing as a complete realist at twenty. Or, if there
is, he should be interned as an enemy alien.

A generation has passed since the Nineties,
and there are no stage sundials any more. Per
haps that is but another way of saying that I
am middle-aged, but, upon my word, I do not
think so. Do you remember the sundial over
which Dolly and Mr. Carter philandered, the
one which bore the motto —

$ota0 non numrro nisi 0mna#?

I reread that dialogue the other day, and cap-
trued some of the ancient thrill. No, the real
trouble is that a generation of realism, or what
has passed for realism on our American stage,
has done its deadly work. It has killed romance.

The Massing of the Stage Sundial 39

That is not at all what realism was intended to
do. Indeed, to the larger view, romance is a
part of the reality of life. Realism was a re-
aftion against sham and falsity and sentimental-
ism, and, above all, perhaps, triviality of theme.
But the net result, so far as the American drama
is concerned, seems to have been the substitution
of a realistic setting and dialogue for a false one,
and then a continuance of the old sham, senti-
mentalism, triviality. How else can we account
for the success of Mr. Belasco? But the taste
engendered by the realistic settings and dialogue
has banished the cloak and sword and sundial,
stripped romance of its charm and allure; and
once stripped of these, it ceases to be romance,
for it ceases to reach the heart through the sense
of beauty and of mystery. We have succeeded
in substituting a chocolate caramel for the apples
of Hesperides.

Yet it cannot be that this condition will be
permanent. Comes a little play like The Gypsy
Trail, wherein even through the realistic setting
a strain of romance strikes, and all hearts re
spond. Youth will not be denied, but, like
Sentimental Tommy, will "find a way." It
may be that the old dualism of the Nineties
was the sane solution, as so many of the modern
"art theatre " directors maintain, at least by their
practice, and the realistic drama should stick
relentlessly to its last, while romance flourishes

40 The Massing of the Stage Sundial

untroubled by any fetters, in free, fantastic, per
haps poetic, form. I do not know. I only
know that the sundial must come back to the
stage, not, it may be, as the garden ornament
of old, but in some guise to further the dreams
and dear delusions of our beauty-hungry hearts.
For, as you may have guessed, the sundial is a
symbol.

On Singing Songs ^ith One Finger

JAMES HUNEKER has pointed out that lovers of
the drama, who are sound judges as well, too
frequently have so little taste in music that they
tolerate or even approve the most atrocious
noises emitted in the name of musical comedy;
while lovers and sound judges of music are quite
as often woefully remiss in their knowledge of
stagecraft, accepting scenery and stage manage
ment in their opera which would put men less
skilled in the creation of theatric illusion than
David Belasco to the blush.

How true it is that unto him who hath shall
be denied, and unto him who hath not shall be
given what the other man could use to such ad
vantage! The composer who can both pucker
the lips of the gallery-gods and satisfy the ears of
the musical critics, how infrequent a visitor on
this planet! so that Offenbach and Sullivan must
often have suffered from loneliness. The singer
who can also a£t, how rare a song-bird! The
interpreter of the lieder of Franz or Schubert or
Grieg who will sacrifice vocal display to the
composer's meaning, and who has the fineness

42 On Singing Songs ^ith One Finger

of soul to grasp and make manifest the mood of
the lyric, how welcome a guest! And yet those
who could write undying comic music if only
they were composers, who could lift the hearts
of their hearers into the skies with "Hark, hark,
the lark," if only they could sing, are legion in
number. How often, in short, like those two
in Lord Houghton's poem, are temperament
and technique — "strangers yet."

So are they in me, alas! total strangers. From
my earliest years I have been filled with the joy
ous impulse of song, but never were ears more
false to the one true pitch than mine, never was
voice less commensurate with ambition. My
youthful dreams, when they were not of foot
ball or swimming, were all of the Sirens, and I
deemed Ulysses, if prudent, none the less a lack-
sentiment sort of hero, not inspiring to know,
because he stopped his ears to their song. The
jeers of my fellows long ago taught me the bitter
lesson to keep my melody to myself, but the im
pulse is still in me to sing, the myriad moods of
music are still mine, and I still consider Ulysses
the first of the Philistines.

For some time I thought my own case unique,
but acquaintance with a music critic who cannot
hum a tune, and with a celestial tenor (such
tenors are so rare I fear this may be too personal
for print) who was the most stupid of men,
without the slightest capacity for high passion

On Singing Songs ^ith One Finger 43

of any sort, convinced me of my error: and
many subsequent conversations with men and
women like myself incapacitated by nature for
self-expression, as well as much listening to bad
singers with good voices, have but forced con
viction home. And now, when unfeeling rela
tives and scoffing friends smile the superior smile
of the "musically talented " at sight of my piano
which I play with one finger, and at the pile of
music upon it, I let them smile, calm in the as
surance that songs and instrument are mine by
better right, perhaps, than theirs, who can raise
voices quite on pitch to the accompaniment of
eight fingers and two thumbs.

For, when none of them is by, I play with
my one finger the airs of the world's great lieder,
and hear from that slight suggestion the songs
as they should be sung. As I would rather read
Hamlet in my library than see the average adtor
attempt the part, so I would rather play Der Atlas
with one finger, with my own imagination call
ing forth the tragic power and grief, the supurb
climax of surprise and thunder, than hear it sung
by any man at present on the concert stage.
The poignant sadness cross-shot with humor of
another of Schubert's songs, The Hurdy Curdy,
vanishes in the concert room, melts hopelessly
into the dulcet tones of the young lady soprano,
whose friends titter when she is done, "What a
pretty song." But my one-fingered rendering —

44 On Singing Songs ^vith One Finger

aided in this song by occasional jabs with three
fingers of the left hand — brings to my inward
ear the pathos of the barrel-organ, heard over
the distant hum of a careless city, laden with
the sorrow of all the world; brings memories,
too, of that consummate singer of songs, Mar-
cella Sembrich. Under the touch of my blunt
forefinger the songs of MacDowell distill their
delicate melancholy, that in the homes of my
friends, where daughters ripple well-dusted piano
keys and display expensive voices, yield only
treacle and honey. Why should I mind the
supercilious smile of my neighbor next door
when he occasionally catches me at my unidigi-
tal performance, he who is a soloist in a noted
church choir, but who, I very well know, pre
fers The Palms or Over There to Purcell's I'll
sail upon the Dog Sfar, if, indeed, he ever heard
the madly melodious boast of the "roaring boy"?
After all, there is nothing wonderful in this.
It but shows that the genius which creates and
the imagination which appreciates are akin, even
as Professor Spingarn has asserted. Even operas
and symphonies were composed at a piano.
Strauss heard the one hundred and five instru
ments which are called on to represent the cry
of the baby in his Symphonia T)omestica all toot
ing and scraping in the notes his ten fingers
evoked from his piano keys. (Personally I
should rather have heard them so!) And why

On Singing Songs ^ith One Finger 45

cannot I hear at least a simple little song in the
melody that my one finger plays? The numer
ical ratio is in my favor, surely, although my
neighbor would doubtless rudely suggest that I
am not Richard Strauss. At any rate, for me
there is a great joy in singing songs as they
ought to be sung, if only with one finger, which
has done much to console me for the technical
powers nature has so plentifully denied me. I
offer the same solution to all others who are in
my case, only suggesting that it would be wise
of them, perhaps, to learn while they are yet
plastic the use of all ten fingers. They will not
thereby secure ten times as much enjoyment,
but their families will thank them.

Immorality of Shop-windows

AT THE heart of morality lies content. That is
a statement either optimistic or cynical, as you
choose to look at it; but it is a statement of fad:.
Even the reformer seeks to allay his discontent,
which does not arise from the morality in him,
but from the immorality in other people. Any
body who has lived with a reformer knows this.
Therefore are modern shop-windows — by steel
construction made to occupy the maximum
amount of space, to assault by breadth and bril
liance the most callous eye — one of the most
immoral forces in modern city life.

This is especially true of the shop-windows on
Fifth Avenue, New York. For these windows,
even at night illuminated like silent drawing-
rooms vacant of people, expose to the view of
the most humble passer on the curb as well as
to the pampered rich racing by in motors, the
spoils of all the world. Here are paintings by
the old masters and the new; rare furniture and
marbles from Italian palaces; screens from Japan;
jewels and rugs from the Orient; silk stockings,
curios, china, bronzes, hats, furs; and again more

The Immorality of Shop-windows 47

curios, cabinets, statues, paintings; things rare
and beautiful and exotic from every quarter of
the globe, "from silken Samarcand to cedared
Lebanon/' And they are not collections, they
are not the treasures of some proud house, al
though they might have been once; they are
for sale; they may be bought by anybody — who
has the price.

But who has the price? That stout woman
riding by in her limousine, with a Pomeranian
on her lap instead of a baby? That fifteen-dol-
lar-a-week chorus-girl in a cab, half buried
under a two-thousand-dollar chinchilla coat?
That elderly man who hobbles goutily out of
his club and walks a few short blocks to his
house on Murray Hill, "for exercise "? Assur
edly, somebody has the price, for the shops are
ever open, the allurement of their windows
never less. But not you, who gaze hungry-eyed
at these beautiful objects, and then go to a Sixth
Avenue department store and wonder if you can
afford that Persian rug made in Harlem, marked
down from $50 to $48.87; or that colonial ma
hogany bookcase glistening with brand new
varnish. Envy gnaws at your heart. And yet
you had supposed that yours was a comfortable
sort of income — maybe four thousand dollars a
year. Your father, on that income, back in a
New England suburb, was counted quite a man
in the community, and you put on airs. He se-

48 The Immorality of Shop-windows

levied the new minister, and you set the style
in socks. But now you are humiliated, embit
tered. You rave against predatory wealth. Thus
shop-windows do make Socialists of us all.

Nor are you able to accept the shop-windows
educationally, recalling that when you went to
Europe you saw nothing that had not already
stared at you through plate-glass on Fifth Ave
nue — for sale. Who wants to view one of the
chairs that a Medici sat in, only to recall that
months before he saw its mate in a shop-window
at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first
Street; or to contemplate a pious yellow heathen
bowed down before the image of Buddha, while
the tinkly temple bells are tinkling, only to
have rise in his mind the memory of a much
larger and more venerable Buddha which used
to smile out inscrutably at the crossing of
Twenty-ninth Street, below a much sweeter
string of tinkly temple bells?

We've a bigger, better Buddha in a cleaner (!),

greener (!!) land,
Many miles from Mandalay.

There is no romance in an antique, be it god or
chair or China plate, when it is exposed for sale
in a shop-window. And there is no romance in
it amid its native surroundings when you realize
that any day it may be carried off and so ex
posed. Thus do shop-windows destroy romance.

The Immorality of Shop-windows 49

But in the humbler windows off the Avenue
there is an equal, if grosser, element of immoral
ity. For these are the windows where price-tags
are displayed. The tag has always two prices, the
higher marked through with red ink, the lower,
for this very reason, calling with a siren voice.
The price crossed off is always just beyond your
means, the other just within it. "Ah," you think,
swallowing the deception with only too great
willingness, "what a bargain! It may never come
again!" And you enter the fatal door.

Perhaps you struggle first. "Don't buy it,"
says the inhibition of prudence. "You have
more neckties now than you can wear."

"But it's so cheap," says impulse, with the
usual sophistry.

And you, poor victim that you are, tugged on
and back by warring factions in your brain, —
poor refutation of the silly old theological super
stitions that there is such a thing as free will, —
vacillate on the sidewalk till the battle is over,
till your mythical free will is down in the dust.
Thus do shop-windows overthrow theology.

Then you enter that shop, and ask for the
tie. Or perhaps it is something else, and they
haven't your size. You ought to feel glad, re
lieved. Do you? You do not! You are angry.
You feel as if you had lost just so much money,
when in reality you have saved it. Thus do
shop-windows destroy logic.

50 The Immorality of Shop-windows

This has been a particularly perilous season
for the man with a passion for shirts. By some
diabolic agreement, all the haberdashers at one
and the same time filled their windows with
luscious lavenders and faint green stripes and soft
silk shirts with comfortable French cuffs, and
marking out $2.00 or $3.00, as the case might
be, wrote $1.50 or $2.50 below. The song of
the shirt was loud in the land, its haunting
melody not to be resisted. Is there any lure for
a woman in all the fluffy mystery of a January
"white sale" comparable to the seduction for a
man of a lavender shirt marked down from
$2.00 to $1,50? I doubt it. Heaven help the
woman if there is! So the unused stock in
trunk or bureau drawer accumulates, and the
weekly reward for patient toil at an office drib
bles away, and the savings-bank is no richer for
your deposit — and the shop-windows flare as
shamelessly as ever. There is only one satisfaction.
The man who sells shirts always has a passion for
jewelry. And that keeps him poor, too!

^A Forgotten ^American

I HAVE written the title, "A forgotten Ameri
can poet," and I shall let it stand, though I am
not sure that he was ever well enough known
to be spoken of now as forgotten. Ten or a
dozen years ago a friend of mine who was
working on an anthology of American poetry,
at the John Carter Brown library in Providence,
wrote to me with great enthusiasm of a poet he
had "discovered," and of whom he had never
heard before. "His name is Frederick Goddard
Tuckerman," my friend said, "and you will not
find him in Stedman's anthology, though it
seems incredible that Stedman left out anybody
or anything. Get a copy of his poems if you
can — Ticknor and Fields, 1860."

I sent in my order for the book, to Good-
speed's, and then forgot the incident. But Good-
speed didn't. A year later the book came. Evi
dently it is an infrequent item at the auctions.
The copy I received was a second edition, dated
1864 (which seems to indicate the poems had
found some readers), but still in the familiar
brown of Ticknor and Fields, matching my

52 <iA Forgotten ^American

first American editions of The ^4ngel in the
House. This copy was of special interest be
cause it was a presentation copy from the author
to Harriet Beecher Stowe. The leaves had been
opened, but if Mrs. Stowe read, she had made
no marginal comments. The only addition to
the book was an old newspaper clipping pasted
in the back — a condensed history of the Beecher
family ! I read the volume myself with increas
ing interest and enthusiasm, and at the close I
desired to learn more of Frederick Goddard
Tuckerman, not of the Beechers. Mr. Sted-
man's complete omission of these poems could
only have been explained, I felt, by an equally
complete ignorance of their existence. Com
pared to the poems of Henry T. Tuckerman,
included by Stedman, the verses of his unknown
cousin were as gold to copper. Why, I won
dered, had this man been so completely ob
literated by Time, or why had he failed in his
life to reach a niche where Time could not
utterly efface him?

I wrote to Colonel Thomas Wentworh Hig-
ginson, who, I discovered, had been a classmate
of Tuckerman's at Harvard, and who of course
knew practically everybody of consequence in
the literary world of his generation. Colonel
Higginson was able to supply some data, but
not much. Tuckerman was born in 1821, of a
rather well-known Boston family. Joseph Tuck-

Forgotten ^American 'Poet 5 3

erman, philanthropist and early Unitarian clergy
man, was his uncle. He was a younger brother
of Edward Tuckerman, long famous as a pro
fessor of botany at Amherst College, and who
gave his name to Tuckerman's Ravine on Mount
Washington. Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
entered Harvard with the class of 1841, but
remained only a year, passing over to the Law
School a little later where he secured his LL.B.
in 1842, and for a period evidently practised
law in Boston. "I remember he came back
among us at some kind of gathering during our
college course," Colonel Higginson wrote, "and
seemed very friendly and cordial to all. I re
member him as a refined and gentlemanly fel
low, but did not then know him as a poet. I see
him put down as a lawyer in Boston (in Adams's
T&tiionary of American Authors}, but I have no
recolle&ion of that facl."

It was not until I had written and published
in the Forum magazine a little appreciation of
his poetry that I learned from his son, now a
resident of Amherst, Massachusetts, that Fred
erick Tuckerman, even as his verses seemed to
imply, early moved away from cities to the
beautiful valley under the shadow of the Hoi-
yoke Range, and there passed his days, evidently
the world forgetting, and by the world forgot.
He issued his single volume of poems in 1860,
when he was thirty-nine, just before the out-

54 ^ Forgotten ^American

break of the Civil War, but no shadow of that
coming contest crosses their pages, as it crossed
the pages of Whittier and Emerson, or as it
affedted the a&ive life of his classmate Colonel
Higginson. The second edition, in 1864, was
still unaffedted by the great struggle. He pro
duced his slender sheaf of poems amid the fields,
in quiet introspection, and he might well be
accused of a species of Pharisaism, were these
poems not so artlessly and passionately sincere,
and often so tinged with religious awe. His
withdrawal, in his verse, from the life of his
times was the a6t of a natural recluse.

At the time Tuckerman's poems were issued,
it is interesting to consider briefly some of the
poetic influences which affected the public.
The two best-selling poets just then, even in
America, were Tennyson and Coventry Pat-
more, the latter represented, of course, by The
Angel in the House. Indeed, the poems of these
two sold better than novels! Whitman was
hardly yet an influence. Julia Ward Howe had
written, and Booth had accepted, a drama in
blank verse. Our minor poets still wrote in the
style of Pope, and the narrative shared honors
with the moral platitude in popular regard.
Tennyson, of course, was a great poet, and
Patmore no mean one, even at that time, but
it is questionable whether the huge popular suc
cess of their works, such as The 'Princess and

Forgotten ^American *Poet 55

The tAngel in the House, was due to their
stridtly poetic merits. At any rate, the poetry
of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, lacking nar
rative interest, palatable platitudes, lyric lilt, but
being, rather, contemplative, aloof, delicately
minor and in many ways curiously modern,
must have fallen on ears not attuned to it. He
had none of the Bolshevik revolutionary vitality
of Whitman, to thrive and grow by the opposi
tion he created. He could have aroused no oppo
sition. It would have been his happy fate to
find men and women who could appreciate his
delicate observation of nature, his golden bursts
of imaginative vigor, his wistful, contemplative
melancholy, his disregard of academic form less
because it hampered him than because he was
careless of anything but the exact image. Such
readers it was apparently not his fate to find in
sufficient numbers to bring him fame. He was,
in a sense, a modern before his time, but with
out sufficient consciousness of his modernity to
fight. He was a mute, inglorious Robert Frost —
like Frost for one year a Harvard student, like him
retiring to the New England countryside, like
him intent chiefly on rendering the common
place beauty of that countryside into something
magical because so true. Only he lacked Frost's
dramatic sense, and interest in human problems.
Tuckerman's favorite medium was the sonnet;
but a sonnet to him was a thing of fourteen five-

56 ^4 Forgotten ^American

foot iambic lines, and there all rules ended.
Sometimes he even crowded six feet into a line.
It is possible his laxness of form was due to igno
rance, but more likely that it was due to a greater
interest in his mood than in the "rules" of poetry.
Many of his sonnets were in sequence, one flow
ing into the next. Here are two, thus unified,
which show in flashes his sweep of imaginative
phrase, and his transcendental bent:

The starry flower, the flower-like stars that fade
And brighten with the daylight and the dark —
The bluet in the green I faintly mark,
The glimmering crags with laurel overlaid,
Even to the Lord of light, the Lamp of shade,
Shine one to me — the least, still glorious made
As crowned moon or heaven's great hierarch.
And so, dim grassy flower and night-lit spark,
Still move me on and upward for the True;
Seeking through change, growth, death, in new and old
The full in few, the statelier in the less,
With patient pain; always remembering this —
His hand, who touched the sod with showers of gold,
Stippled Orion on the midnight blue.

And so, as this great sphere (now turning slow

Up to the light from that abyss of stars,

Now wheeling into gloom through sunset bars)

With all its elements of form and flow,

And life in life, where crown' d yet blind must go

The sensible king — is but a Unity

Compressed of motes impossible to know;

Which worldlike yet in deep analogy

Have distance, march, dimension and degree;

Forgotten ^American "Poet 57

So the round earth — which we the world do call —
Is but a grain in that which mightiest swells,
Whereof the stars of light are particles,
As ultimate atoms of one infinite Ball
On which God moves, and treads beneath His feet
the All !

Turning the page we come on a poem called
The Question. "How shall I array my love?"
he asks, and ranges the earth for costly jewels
and silks from Samarcand; but because his love
is a simple New England maid, he rejefts them
all as unworthy and inappropriate, and closing

sings :

The river-riches of the sphere,

All that the dark sea-bottoms bear,

The wide earth's green convexity,

The inexhaustible blue sky,

Hold not a prize so proud, so high,

That it could grace her, gay or grand,

By garden-gale and rose-breath fanned;

Or as to-night I saw her stand,

Lovely in the meadow land,

With a clover in her hand.

Have not these lines a magic simplicity ? It seems
so to me. They flow rippling and bright to the
inevitable finish, and there is no more to say.

Tuckerman's power of close yet magical ob
servation, used not so much in the Tennysonian
way (for Tennyson was a close observer, make
no mistake about that) as in what we now think
of as the modern way, that is, as a part of the

58 *A Forgotten ^American "Poet

realistic record of homely events, with beauty
only as a by-produdr,, is well illustrated in the
opening lines of a narrative poem called The
School Girl, a New England Idyll. Here again
a kinship with Frost is seen, rather than with
Tuckerman's contemporaries:

The wind, that all the day had scarcely clashed
The cornstalks in the sun, as the sun sank
Came rolling up the valley like a wave,
Broke in the beech and washed among the pine,
And ebbed to silence; but at the welcome sound —
Leaving my lazy book without a mark,
In hopes to lose among the blowing fern
The dregs of headache brought from yesternight,
And stepping lightly lest the children hear —
I from a side door slipped, and crossed a lane
With bitter Mayweed lined, [and over a field
Snapping with grasshoppers, until I came
Down where an interrupted brook held way
Among the alders. There, on a strutting branch
Leaving my straw, I sat and wooed the west,
With breast and palms outspread as to a fire.

These powers of observation are again illus
trated in a poem of quite different import, called
<3xCargitesy a lyric of thirteen stanzas, some of
which are inexcusably crude. It begins:

I neither plow the field nor sow,

Nor hold the spade nor drive the cart,

Nor spread the heap, nor hill nor hoe,
To keep the barren land in heart.

Forgotten ^American 'Poet 59

After four more stanzas in similar vein, comes
this bit of magic word-painting, so instindt with
our New England Autumn, yet so entirely the
work of a realist, with his eye on the objedt:

But, leaning from my window, chief
I mark the Autumn's mellow signs —

The frosty air, the yellow leaf,
The ladder leaning on the vines.

The maple from his brood of boughs
Puts northward out a reddening limb;

The mist draws faintly round the house;
And all the headland heights are dim.

The poem then continues to its close:

And yet it is the same as when

I looked across the chestnut woods,

And saw the barren landscape then
O'er the red bunch of lilac buds;

And all things seem the same. 'Tis one

To lie in sleep, or toil as they
Who rise beforetime with the sun,

And so keep footstep with their day;

For aimless oaf and wiser fool

Work to one end by differing deeds; —

The weeds rot in the standing pool;
The water stagnates in the weeds;

And all by waste or warfare falls,

Has gone to wreck, or crumbling goes,

Since Nero planned his golden walls,
Or the Cham Cublai built his house.

60 *A Forgotten ^American "Poet

But naught I reck of change and fray;

Watching the clouds at morning driven,
The still declension of the day;

And, when the moon is just in heaven,

I walk, unknowing where or why;

Or idly lie beneath the pine,
And bite the dry brown threads, and lie

And think a life well lost is mine.

"A life well lost"! The phrase is perhaps
pathetically revealing — and prophetic. Or are
we stretching the poet's ambitions to be known
as a poet? That he published what he wrote
indicates a normal desire for recognition, yet it
can hardly be doubted, either, that he was an
amateur in verse, whose life was rather centred
in his contemplative, retiring existence among
the fields and hills of Amherst. There may
even seem to some a delicate Pharisaism about
this sonnet, a Pharisaism removed from the ro
bustness of Thoreau, who would certainly have
argued the point with the farmer:

"That boy," the farmer said, with hazel wand
Pointing him out, half by the haycock hid,

"Though bare sixteen can work at what he's bid
From sun till set, to cradle, reap or band."
I heard the words, but scarce could understand
Whether they claimed a smile or gave me pain;
Or was it aught to me, in that green lane,
That all day yesterday, the briers amid,
He held the plough against the jarring land
Steady, or kept his place among the mowers;

Forgotten ^American 'Poet 6 1

Whilst other fingers, sweeping for the flowers,
Brought from the forest back a crimson stain?
Was it a thorn that touched the flesh? or did
The poke-berry spit purple on my hand ?

Yet, as we have said, Tuckerman was far from
Pharisaism of any sort, either of the aesthete or
nature-lover. His mind was too genuinely occu
pied with spiritual problems. Take, for exam
ple, this closing sonnet in a sequence depicting
the discords of Nature:

Not the round natural word, not the deep mind,
The reconcilement holds: the blue abyss
Collects it not; our arrows sink amiss;
And but in Him may we our import find.
The agony to know, the grief, the bliss
Of toil, is vain and vain ! clots of the sod
Gathered in heat and haste, and flung behind,
To blind ourselves and others — what but this,
Still grasping dust and sowing toward the wind?
No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead;
But leaving straining thought and stammering word
Across the barren azure pass to God;
Shooting the void in silence, like a bird —
A bird that shuts his wings for better speed!

Here, surely, is poetry that would not seem the
least among the myriad hosts in Mr. Stedman's
hospitable anthology! The rhyme scheme may
be quite unorthodox, but the poet's lips have
been touched by a coal from the high altar,
none the less.

The volume closes with a sonnet sequence
which is poignantly intimate; almost it is a

62 zA Forgotten ^American "Poet

diary of the poet's grief for the loss of the
woman he loved, and in its stabbing intensity
holds a hint of such poems as Patmore's The
Azalea. Here is one:

Again, again, ye part in stormy grief
From these bare hills and bowers so built in vain,
And lips and hearts that will not move again —
Pathetic Autumn and the writhled leaf;
Dropping away in tears with warning brief:
The wind reiterates a wailful strain,
And on the skylight beats the restless rain,
And vapour drowns the mountain, base and brow.
I watch the wet black roofs through mist defined,
I watch the raindrops strung along the blind,
And my heart bleeds, and all my senses bow
In grief; as one mild face, with suffering lined,
Comes up in thought : oh, wildly, rain and wind,
Mourn on! she sleeps, nor heeds your angry
sorrow now.

Such use of pi&orial observation as "the rain
drops strung along the blind/' and "the wet
black roofs through mist defined/' is something
you will look for in vain through the pages of
Longfellow, for instance. This is the sonnet of
a realist. So, also, is this one, which does not
seem to me to deserve oblivion, and certainly so
long as my memory retains its power will have
that little span of immortality:

My Anna! when for thee my head was bowed,
The circle of the world, sky, mountain, main,
Drew inward to one spot; and now again

Forgotten ^American "Poef 63

Wide Nature narrows to the shell and shroud.
In the late dawn they will not be forgot,
And evenings early dark; when the low rain
Begins at nightfall, though no tempest rave,
I know the rain is falling on her grave;
The morning views it, and the sunset cloud
Points with a finger to that lonely spot;
The crops, that up the valley rolling go,
Ever toward her slumber bow and blow!
I look on the sweeping corn and the surging rye,
And with every gust of wind my heart goes by!

It must not be supposed that the predominant
note in Tuckerman's poetry is elegiac; rather is
it a note of tender, wistful, and scrupulously
accurate contemplation of the New England
countryside, mingled with spiritual speculation.
But as the volume closed with the elegiac
poems, and as thereafter no more poems were
published, it may be surmised that the poet's
will to create was smothered in the poignant
ripple of his personal sorrow. Had it not been,
and had his pen continued to write, one cannot
help wondering how much closer he would
have come to the modern note in poetry. That
he already felt a tendency to progress from the
old metres to freer forms is constantly apparent;
and this tendency, combined with his uncon
sciously scrupulous realism, might well have
brought him near to the present. I should like
to close this little paper to his memory with
one of his lyrics which throws over rhyme alto-

64 *A Forgotten ^American

gether, and stridlly formal metre, also, though
the fetters are still there. It is the stab of grief
which comes through to haunt you, the bare
simplicity and the woe. Obje&ive it certainly
is not, as the modernists maintain they are. Yet
the personal note will always be modern, for it
has no age. This lyric belongs to you and me to
day, not in the pages of a forgotten book, on the
shelves of a dusty library. I would that some
of our vers libre practitioners could equal it:

I took from its glass a flower,
To lay on her grave with dull, accusing tears;
But the heart of the flower fell out as I handled the rose,
And my heart is; shattered and soon will wither away.

I watch the changing shadows,
And the patch of windy sunshine upon the hill,
And the long blue woods; and a grief no tongue can tell
Breaks at my eyes in drops of bitter rain.

I hear her baby wagon,
And the little wheels go over my heart:
Oh! when will the light of the darkened house return?
Oh! when will she come who made the hills so fair?

I sit by the parlor window,

When twilight deepens and winds grow cold without;
But the blessed feet no more come up the walk,
And my little girl and I cry softly together.

New "Poetry and the J^ingering J^jne

I HAVE one grave objection to the "new poetry" —
I cannot remember it. Some, to be sure, would
say that is no objection at all, but I am not of
the number. It would hardly become me, in
fa6t, since I have, in a minor pipe, committed
"new poetry" myself on various and sundry oc
casions, or what I presume it to be, particularly
when I didn't have time to write in rhyme or
even metre. The new poets may objed: all they
like, but it is easier to put your thought (when
you happen to have one) into rhythm than into
rhyme and metre. If, indeed, as the vers libre
practitioners insist, each idea comes clothed in
its own inevitable rhythm, there can be very
little trouble about the matter. The poem
composes itself, and your chief task will be with
the printer! I don't say the rhythmic irregular
ity is not, perhaps, more suitable for certain ef-
fefts, or at any rate that it cannot achieve effects
of its own; I certainly don't say that it isn't
poetry because it does not trip to formal meas
ure. Poetry resides in deeper matters than this.
I recall Ibsen's remark when told that the

66 New "Poetry and the Lingering Line

reviewers declared "Peer (jynt wasn't poetry.
"Very well," said he, "it will be." Since it
now indubitably is, one is cautious about ques
tioning the work of the present, such work as
Miss Lowell's, for instance. Of course the mere
chopping up of unrhythmic prose into capital
ized lines without glow, without emotion, is
not poetry, any more than the blank verse of
the second-rate nineteenth-century "poetic
drama," which old Joe Crowell, comedian, de
scribed as "good, honest prose set up hind-side
foremost." We may eliminate that from the
discussion once and for all. But the genuine
new poets, who know what they are about, and
doubtless why they are about it, I regard with
all deference, hailing especially their good fight
to free poetry of its ancient inversions, its minc
ing vocabulary, its thous and thees, its bosky
dells and purling streams, its affe&ations and un
realities, both of speech and subject. But I do
say they miss a certain triumphant craftsman's
joy at packing precisely what you mean, hard
enough to express in unlimited prose, into a
fettered, singing line; and I do say that I can't
remember what they write.

At least, nobody can dispute this latter state
ment. He may declare it the fault of my mem
ory, which has been habituated to retain only
such lines as have rhyme and metre to help it
out. But I hardly think his retort adequate,

New Poetry and the Lingering Line 67

because, in the first place, the memory is much
less amenable to training and much more a
matter of fixed capacity and acliion than certain
advertisements in the popular magazines would
have the "twenty-dollar-a-week man" believe,
and in the second place, because my case, \ find,
is the case of almost everybody with whom I
have talked on the subject. The solution, I be
lieve, is perfectly simple. Nearly anyone can
remember a tune; even I can, within limits.
At least, I can do better than Tennyson, who
could recognize, he said, two tunes; one was
"God Save the Queen" and the other wasn't.
But when music is broken into independent
rhythms, irregular and oddly related phrases, it is
only the person exceptionally endowed who can
remember it without prolonged study. The very
first audience who heard Rigoletto came away
humming "Donna e mobile." And the very last
audience who heard Pelleas et Melisande came
away humming — "Donna e mobile." It is the
law. Needless to say, I enjoyed Pelleas et Meli
sande, but I cannot whistle it. What I recall is a
mood, a pidture, a vague ecstasy, a hushed terror.
It was James Huneker, was it not, who, when
asked what he thought of the opera, replied that
Mary Garden's hair was superb.

"But the music?" he was urged.

"Oh, the music," said he, " — the music didn't
bother me."

68 New Poetry and the Lingering Line

But the new poetry does bother me, because
I strive to remember not the mere mood or
pidture of the poem, but the adhial words which
created them, and I cannot. I want to compel
again, at will, the actual poetic experience, and
I cannot, without carrying a library in my
pocket. The words hover, sometimes, just be
yond the threshold of my brain, like a forgotten
name ("If you hadn't asked me, I could have
told you" — you know the sensation); but they
never come. I have no comfort of them in the
still hours of the day when I would be whisper
ing them to myself. Instead, I have to fall back
upon the old-fashioned Golden Treasury. I can
not remember a single line that Amy Lowell has
written about her Roxbury garden, but I shall
never forget what Wordsworth said about that
field of gold he passed; I repeat his lines, and
then my heart, too, with pleasure fills and dances
with his daffodils.

It is an immemorial delight, this pleasure in
the lingering line, in the haunting couplet, in
the quatrain that will not let you forget. By
sacrificing it, the new poetry has sacrificed some
thing precious, something that a common in
stinct of mankind demands of the minstrel. It
will not suffice for the new poets to deny that
they are minstrels, to assert that they write for
the eye, not speak for the ear, that it is not
their mission to emit pretty sounds but so to pre-

New Poetry and the Lingering Line 69

sent their vision of the world that it shall etch
itself on men's minds with the bite of reality.
Such a creed is admirable, but defective. It is
defective because, in the first place, if the new
poets did not write for the ear quite as much as
the old poets, there would be no excuse even
for rhythm. Any reader who is sensitive enough
to care to read poetry is sensitive enough to hear
it with his inward ear even as he sees it with his
outward eye, and his after-pleasure, as it were,
his lingering delight, will be in proportion as
his ear retains the echo of the song. All poets
are minstrels, still. Such a creed is defective,
in the second place, because it has always
been the mission of genuine poets to impress
their vision of the world vividly on mankind,
though their vision included more, sometimes,
than what the realists choose to consider reality.
There is nothing new in such an effort. In
slack ages of poetic inspiration, however, the
versifiers have no vision of the world, but only
of its pale mirrored reflections in visions dead
and gone, and some jolt is needed to bring the
poets back to first-hand observation. Such a jolt
are the new poets. Spoon River is a medicine, a
splendid tonic. But the form of Spoon River is
not conditioned by eternal needs, only by tem
porary ones. Its complete absence of loveliness,
of lines that linger, will be its greatest handicap
to immortality — for poetic immortality to-day as

jo New Poetry and the Lingering Line

much as ever is not in the pages of a book on a
library shelf, but on the lips of men and women.
A poem from which nobody ever quotes is a
poem forgotten.

Tennyson was something of an Imagist at
times, presenting his mood or picture with a
Flaubertian precision of epithet that even Amy
Lowell could not criticise. Consider, for exam
ple, his famous Fragment on the eagle:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands
Close to the sun in distant lands,
Ringed with the azure world he stands.

Beneath, the wrinkled ocean crawls,
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

The precision of wording here, the tremendous-
ness of scene evoked with stark economy of
means, the triumphant vividness of the adjective
"wrinkled," transporting the reader at once to a
great height above the plain of the sea, the
complete absence of any touch of the "poetic"
(surely the beautiful word azure may be admit
ted in modern company), make this poem a
masterpiece without date or time. It is as "new"
as the latest Imagist anthology. And, be it
noted, I have quoted it correctly, I feel confi
dent, from memory. My copy of Tennyson is
in storage, and I have not read the fragment
probably in ten or a dozen years. Yet whenever

New Poetry and the Lingering Line 7 1

I wish to relive its mood, to see again its incom
parable picture, I have only to move my lips,
even only to repeat the lines inwardly, in silence,
and the poem is mine again.

But I have just been reading the latest Im-
agist anthology, especially the Lacquer Prints
by Amy Lowell, not ten years, but hardly ten
minutes ago — and I cannot repeat one of them.
I could learn them, of course, by an effort. But
that is not the way man desires to remember
music and poetry. It must come singing into
his head and heart — and remain there without
his effort. Here is a "Lacquer Print " called Sun
shine. It is indeed vivid, though (quite prop
erly, of course) a little garden pool to Tenny
son's vast ocean.

The pool is edged with blade-like leaves of irises.
If I throw a stone into the placid water
It suddenly stiffens
Into rings and rings
Of sharp gold wire.

Here is a vivid picture, here is economy and
scrupulous selection of epithet, here is no "po
etic" didtion of the despised sort. But some
thing is lacking, none the less. It does not haunt
you, it does not ingratiate itself with your ear,
you do not find yourself repeating it days and
months later. Close the book — and the poem
perishes, even as those rings subside on the pool.

72 New Poetry and the Lingering Line

It would be only too easy to find much more
striking examples in the new verse. Take, for
instance, the opening stanza of Ezra Pound's
poem, The Return:

See, they return ; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering !

It is doubtful if any reader will fail to see the
trouble in the pace of these lines! No doubt it
was exactly the effecT: the poet desired, but it
will forever effectually prevent the repetition of
his poem by anybody without the book. When
a woman once boasted that she could repeat
anything on a single hearing, Theodore Hook
rattled off the immortal nonsense, beginning,
"'She went into the garden patch to get a cab
bage head to make an apple pie, and a great she
bear coming up the road thrust her head into
the shop and cried 'What, no soap?' and so he
died — " and the woman was floored. Such a
poem as The Return would have floored her
quite as completely. I find, after reading care
fully all the twenty pages assigned to Ezra
Pound in The New "Poetry ^Anthology, edited by
Miss Monroe (a greater space, I believe, than was
awarded to any other poet), that I can now repeat

New Poetry and the Lingering Line 73

just one line — or, rather, two lines, such is Mr.
Pound's odd way of phrasing his rhythms. Here

they are:

Dawn enters with little feet

Like a gilded Pavlova.

There is a certain humorous charm of epithet
here, and a rhythmic suggestion of metrical beat
to follow. That, no doubt, is why the line has
stuck in my memory. But the metrical beat did
not follow, and the rest of the stanza has gone
from me. I am sure even a gilded Pavlova
would be at some difficulty to dance to Mr.
Pound's rhythms.

But Miss Monroe is catholic in her choice ot
new poets. She includes, for instance, Walter
de la Mare, if in less than two pages. She se
lects his wonderful poem The Listeners, and the
quaint, haunting, Epitaph. It is a little hard to
see just why The Listeners is new poetry, except
chronologically. Its odd, apparently simple but
really intricate and triumphantly fluid metrical
structure, so unified that there is no break from
the first syllable to the last ; its lyric romanticism
of subject; its obvious delight in tune; even its
occasional lapses into the ancient "poetic" vocab
ulary (the traveler "smote" the door, the listen
ers "hearkened," and so on), are all a part of the
nineteenth-century tradition of English verse.

74 New Poetry and the Lingering Line

It is no more modern than La Belle Dame Sans
Merci — which, to be sure, is quite modern in
deed to some of us. And it has lyric beauty, it
has lines of unforgettable musical loveliness, it
creeps in through the ear and echoes in the
memory. You surely remember the close:

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake :
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the stillness surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Is there really any loss of sharpness in the im
agery here because of the rhyme and metre?
Could any phrase, of any rhythm, however free,
render any better and more economically the
peculiar noise of a horse turning on a hard drive
and starting away in the night, than "the sound
of iron on stone"? The last two lines, surely,
are close to perfection. A genuine new poet
would probably have hunted long for a less
hackneyed word than "plunging," but though
it would possibly have sharpened his final image,
it would, at the same time, in all probability,
have robbed it of that very vagueness sought
and captured. No, the passage pidtorially and
emotionally is as near perfection as it is often

New Poetry and the Lingering Line 75

permitted mortals to approach, and it lingers and
echoes in the memory, it will not be forgotten.
It has the lilt of music, the chime of tune, the
immemorial loveliness of song. If the precise
image, the desired emotional effect, the intel
lectual content can be imparted in fettered verse,
and, in addition, the ancient loveliness can be
retained, which the new verse lacks, can it be
possible that the world will long endure to read
vers libre when vers libre has done its work of
bringing poets back to first-hand reality for their
subjects, relating the minstrels to the spirit of
their age? I cannot think so. I cannot but be
lieve that any poetry long to endure must be
memorable, in the literal sense, and that is
just what the new poetry is not. Already, it
seems to me from my acquaintance with under
graduates and the just-graduated, vers libre is a
little the cult of the middle-aged, while youth,
the future, is swinging back gladly to the fetters
of metre and rhyme, and probably forgetful that
the public which awaits their effort has been pre
pared anew for poetry by this revolt from what
was stale in tradition. I believe that memorable
poetry always has been, and always must be, ir
radiated by

The light that never was on sea or land,

which is but another way of saying that it
must have elevation and the haunting mystery

j6 New Poetry and the Lingering Line

of beauty. The trouble is, of course, to catch
this authentic radiation, instead of some pale
reflection from Patmore or Rossetti. It was
against the sham of second-hand mood and
subjedt, rather than the great truth of music
and loveliness, that the new poets broke into
unmetrical protest. They have done a brave and
needed work, — but they have produced aston
ishingly little quotable poetry, they have sung
their way not far into the hearts of their lis
teners. The lingering, lovely line is not for
them. No, for still,

The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

The J^ies We J^earn in Our Youth

THE world for a great many years has accepted
the didhim of the poet, that —

Of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these : It might have been.

Even those people who refused to accept the
rhyme have accepted the reason. But the facl
is that the reason of this copybook couplet is as
bad as the rhyme. It would be much nearer the
truth to say that o± all sad words of tongue or
pen, the saddest are these: He's succeeded again'
Here, too, the rhyme may be questioned, but
the reason is sound. An entirely successful man
is the most pitiful objecl: in the universe. Not
only has he nothing to look forward to, but he
has nothing to look back upon. Having no re
grets, no shadows, in his life, he has no chiaro
scuro, no depth, no solidity in his picture. It is
painted in the flat. "Regret," says George
Moore, to change the figure a little, "is like a
mountain top from which we survey our dead
life, a mountain top on which we pause and
ponder." He has no point of view, then, either.

78 The Lies We Learn in Our Youth

So after all the words, "It might have been," do
bear a sadness about them in his case; his life
might have been a success if it had only been a
failure. "It might have been" thus becomes
sad when it reflects back upon itself, when it
means there might have been a might have been
but there was only a was. So life whirls into
paradox!

Let any man in honesty retire into the soli
tude of his soul and reflect on his joys that
might have been and those that were, and let
him then answer whether any of his realizations
were the equal of his anticipations. Therefore,
if he had achieved the anticipated but lost de
lights which form the burden of his "Might
have been," they, too, would have been as ashes
in the mouth. The truth is that the essence of
delight is in the anticipation, the best of life is
the vision, not the reality. It is pathetic not to
have entertained the vision, but more pathetic,
perhaps, to have attained it. Wasn't it Oscar
Wilde who said that there is only one thing
more tragic than failure — success?

Did our regretful poet dream at twenty-one
of being the perfect lover? In his dreams he
was the perfect lover, then. Yet actually what
was he? What was she? What was their court
ship, their marriage? You, prosy, contented,
forty and forgetful, by your prosy hearth or
shaking down the furnace fire, while the chil-

The Lies We Learn in Our Youth 79

dren are being put to bed, you dare to call "It
might have been" the saddest words of tongue
or pen? Those now almost forgotten dreams of
what might have been are the best you ever
were. Remember them as often as you can, as
bitterly, as happily, for your soul's salvation.
Without them you are the lowest of God's
creatures, a mere married man.

Or take the case of Maud Muller herself, and
her judge. We learn that the judge —

Wedded a wife of richest dower,
Who lived for fashion, as he for power.

Maud, on the other hand, —

Wedded a man unlearned and poor,

And many children played round her door.

Probably in both cases this was for the best.
Only the wildest sentimentalist could in serious
ness urge that Maud would have made a good
wife for the judge. Being a man who "lived for
power," the probable unpresentableness of Maud
in a town house would have been a constant
thorn in his flesh. She could not appear bare
footed at his receptions, and the feet that have
gone bare through an agricultural girlhood do
not readily adapt themselves to the size of shoe
which urban fashion dictates. Moreover, the
vague yearnings of a young girl for an alliance
with a handsome stranger above her station, do

8o The Lies We Learn in Our Youth

not fit her to speak the speech and think the
thoughts and meet the social demands of that
station. No, Maud would have been a constant
thorn in the judge's side. Summer sunshine, the
smell of hay, a drink of cold water, a pretty,
barefoot girl — the mood is compounded. An
uneducated farmer's daughter for a wife — the
reality is accomplished.

And as for Maud, who will say for certain
that she would not eventually have eloped with
the coachman because he praised her pies in
stead of criticising her grammar?

So to each of them — barefoot girl and bald-
headed judge (he probably was bald-headed,
though the poem omits to say so) did what was
best, and the school children for several gener
ations have been taught to waste unnecessary
sympathy over their fate, have been inculcated
with a false view of the whole matter. Both of
them found far more happiness in dreaming of
what might have been than ever they could
have found in the realization; for each of them
this dream brought undoubted sadness, but the
sadness which is really pleasure, the sadness, that
is, which comes over all of us when we realize
that though we have missed certain ideals in our
lives we are still able to recall those ideals, we
are still not like all the dead, forgetful clods
around us, our wives and husbands and neigh
bors and friends. We live with these people as

The Lies We Learn in Our Youth 81

one of them, of course, but we might have been
so much better than they! Such reflections as
these are a great comfort. They bring a sadness
which makes us mournfully happy. They rec
oncile us with the scheme of things. They are
the outcroppings of that secret vanity which the
best and the worst of us nourish, and of which is
born our self-respect, our happiness, our heroism.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was
a town called Abdera. The good people of
the town were so much upset at seeing a per
formance of the Andromeda of Euripides that
they caught a sort of tragic fever. This began
with bleeding and perspiration and was followed
in about a week's time, according to the course of
the disease, by an uncontrollable desire to recite.
The effect upon Abdera was surprising. The
people walked about in the streets day and
night reciting pages of Euripides until the epi
demic was cured by a return of the cold weather.
Well, Tolstoy would have us believe that the
European and English-speaking world to-day is
about in this condition regarding Shakespeare,
and that there is little hope of a cold spell. A
second-rate fellow, this Bard of Avon, according
to Tolstoy, whom by a gigantic process of hyp
notic suggestion we have been taught to think
great, till we go about quoting him as the law
and the prophet, while he fills some hundred
and seventeen pages of Bartlett.

82 The Lies We Learn in Our Youth

There is undoubtedly something in this view
of the matter. Without holding a brief either
for the alleged immortal William or the author
of What Is Art?, it may safely be hazarded
that at least fifty per cent of the "familiar quo
tations" we children laboriously copied into ruled
blank books in our school days and have ever
since regarded as nuggets of truth and gems of
poetry are neither true nor, beyond the fad: of
rhyme, poetic. Something as a wave of sugges
tion passed over Europe and sent thousands of
little ones down to their deaths in the Chil
dren's Crusades, thousands of youngsters in our
schools to-day are hypnotized into a lasting be
lief in the poetic value of numberless couplets of
second-rate verse, and never come to know real
poetry at all. Having been forced to swallow
rhymed platitudes in the belief that they are
poetry, a permanent and perfectly natural re
pulsion for the very name of poetry is too often
the children's only acquisition. In fad:, it is a
pretty question if the decline of poetic appre
ciation cannot be dired:ly traced to the rise of
the memory-gem book.

How well I remember my own sense of
weariness and repulsion when I was compelled
at the tender age of ten to copy out the whole
of The Psalm of Life, unconsciously committing
it to memory as I did so.

The Lies We Learn in Our Youth 83

Life is real, life is earnest,

And the grave is not its goal ;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul. —

My infant lips muttered the meaningless words
while my poor little brain and imagination tried
to find some joy, some pi6hire, some tangible
delight, some inspiration in the mournful, op
pressive poem. If I had then been assigned in
telligible verses to copy, an Elizabethan lyric, a
song that sang because it had to, a bit of imagery,
my childish fancy would have been fired, and I
should not have had to wait till I was eighteen
years old before I read a single poem voluntarily.
And I should not have detested The Psalm of
Life all the rest of my days — at least I don't
think I should. Longfellow when I was a child
was a particularly prolific mine of memory
gems, running as high as three thousand quota
tions to the ton. I never had a teacher who
didn't know her Longfellow with an intimacy
almost as great as her ignorance of Keats, Shelley,
Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, Herbert, Campion,
Coleridge, Burns and the rest of the kings who
lived before Agamemnon. Longfellow was a
lovely soul, and, within his limits, a very true
poet. But I was fed on his platitudes. I was
daily informed that —

The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight. —

84 The Lies We Learn in Our Touth

Just as if I cared, at ten, whether they were or
not. I was told in tripping measures of the vil
lage chestnut tree, to the total exclusion of the
linden and ilex; and as for the land where the
citrons bloom, and golden oranges are in the
gloom, and the long silences of laurel rise —
1 Kennst du das Land?" Not I! The spreading
chestnut tree alone cast its oppressive shadow
across my childish fancy.

Another memory gem that I remember with
a lasting grudge was —

Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.

This I knew was false, and to be forced glibly
to chatter -the words before the class shamed
and angered me. Had not a maiden aunt of
mine, after many trips to the library of the New
England Genealogical Society, traced back our
line to William the Conqueror? Was there
another boy or girl in the school who had de
scended from William the Conqueror? No, sir!
Several of them had kind hearts, and doubtless
simple faith — whatever that was — but side of
my Norman blood this counted for nothing. It
is a vastly superior thing to have Norman blood,
and as for coronets — well, it may be that the
new age will wipe them literally out in a surge
of Democracy — some of us hope so — but to the
romantic heart of childhood they are a symbol

The Lies We Learn in Our Youth 85

not of caste and oppression but of dignity and
beauty and the heroic. Certainly they are not to
be eliminated by throwing at the child's head
such adult platitudes in rhyme as these, and tell
ing him it is poetry. Alas! he believes you, and that
is why he hates the very word poetry all the rest
of his days.

My memory-gem book lies before me as I
write, saved I know not how out of the wreck of
boyhood. I have searched it in vain for a single
quotation of lyric song, a single scrap of verse that
paints the world in rosy colors and lets moral plat
itudes go hang, a single strain of "Celtic magic/'
Instead, I learn that as a boy I was taught that —

We are living, we are dwelling
In a grand and awful time.

I find that at eleven years of age —

I held it truth with him who sings
To one clear harp of divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones

Of their dead selves to higher things.

Indeed, I must have been a very remarkable
child, how remarkable I had not hitherto sus
pected! Evidently, too, I displayed an early
tendency to melancholia, for I find I was ad
monished in the following words, with their
incontestable statement of fad::

Be still, sad heart, and cease repining,
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining.

86 The Lies We Learn in Our Touth

Whether my sadness was caused by too much
reflection on the facl: that life is real, life is
earnest, and the grave is not its goal, or on the
fact that Bill Carter's air-gun cost more than
mine, I cannot now recall. Either cause would
have been sufficient. At any rate I apparently
braced up and smiled once more, for the next
page is blank. That means I went fishing!

Poor kiddies! Shall we grown-ups never learn
that their minds don't work as ours do, and what
may be poetry for some of us is cod-liver oil for
them? Why must we be forever nagging them at
home with "Don't do this" and "Don't do that/'
and forever preaching at them in school with pon
derous prose platitudes cut up into lengths? How
much wiser than we they are, who know that life
is free and pleasant and full of melody and beautiful
things, and dreams more real than reality, and real
ity born of the dream ! Yet we try our best to con
vince them that they are wrong. We see to it that
Longfellow lies about them in their infancy.

But perhaps all this is changed since my day,
and the nightmare this battered memory-gem
book recalls to my mind is no longer a load on
the children of the present. I profoundly hope
so. Can it be that the present revival of poetry
is due to the passing of the memory-gem book?
At least, no teacher would have the courage to
set her class the task of copying Amy Lowell
or The Spoon River ^Anthology \

The 2W '^Manners ofTolite ^People

ALL my life I have suffered from politeness —
not my own, but the politeness of other people.
So far as I know, nobody has ever accused me
of being polite. I suspect that I must be, how
ever, for hitherto I have borne the politeness of
other people without a protest. But I must
protest now, if only to vindicate my lack of
politeness; in other words, to prove my good
manners.

For what I object to in polite people is their
bad manners. It is this I have suffered from,
as, I suspect, have many thousands of my fel
lows, to whom life is real and earnest, and gab
ble not its goal. As a rule, the politer the person
the worse are his (or more often, perhaps, her)
manners. The limit is reached when the ama
teur is sunk entirely in the professional, and that
curious product of "Society'' is developed, the
professional hostess. I cannot better illustrate
my theme than with a description of the profes
sional hostess.

I call her professional because all the joy of
entertaining for its own sake has gone out of

88 The 'BadtManners of ^Polite People

her work. She does not invite people to her
parties because she is glad to see them, because
she is interested in them, or wishes to give them
pleasure. She invites them because to entertain
them is a part of her day's work — whether her
work be to get into a certain social stronghold,
to keep that stronghold against assault, or merely
to kill time, her arch-enemy. And, in perform
ing this task of hers, she has developed a tech
nique of politeness which is to the amateur's
technique what the professional golf-player's
style is to the form of the mere bumblepuppy.
Her politeness is astonishingly brilliant, flexible,
resourceful. It is aspired to by the lowly and
aped on the stage. And yet her manners are the
worst in the world.

Let us suppose her about to give a dinner.
She is trimmed down to the fashionable slender-
ness (perhaps), and brilliant with jewels. Can-
nel coal snaps pleasantly in the drawing-room
grate, and the lights are gratefully shaded. A
guest or two arrive, whom she greets with af
fable handshake. The man moves over to the
fire, warming his back; his wife talks to the
hostess rapidly, in the way women have when
they seem to think it better to say anything than
not to speak at all. But the hostess is quite at
her ease. Her politeness is triumphant. Pres
ently she turns to the man, who is, perhaps, an
author.

The *BadtManners ofTollte People 89

"Your new book/' she begins, as if she had
been waiting all day to ask that question, " — what
is it going to be about? I'm tremendiously eager
to know."

Already the genial fire has warmed the noted
author after his chilling ride in a street car to
this mansion of luxury. The kindly question
positively expands him. He launches eagerly
into his answer.

"You see," he begins, "the great modern
question is—

But suddenly he is aware that he has no listener.
His hostess has gone toward the door with out
stretched hand, and his own wife is gazing at the
gowns of the women entering. The author turns
and prods the grate with his toe. Perhaps, if he is
new at being "entertained," he fancies that his
hostess will presently return to hear his answer.
He holds it in readiness. Poor man!

The newcomers are brought into the circle.
When introductions are necessary, they are made
with studied informality. And then the author
hears the hostess say to a big, energetic woman,
who is among the arrivals, "Oh, dear Miss
Jones, I have heard so much about your per
fectly splendid work down there among the
horrid poor! I did so want to hear you talk
about it at the Colonial Club, this afternoon,
but I simply couldrit get there. Won't you tell
me just a bit of what you said?"

90 The ^ad ^Manners ofTolite "People

The tone of entreaty betrays the utmost in
terest. The big, energetic woman smiles, and
begins, "Well," she says, "I was just trying to
get the members interested in our new health-
tenement for consumptives. You see, we need — "

Then she, too, becomes aware that her audi
ence has departed toward the door. She turns
about to see if anybody else was listening, but
nobody was. The other women are engaged in
inspecting the newcomers. The men are look
ing uncomfortable, or chatting with one another.
Only the author's sympathetic gaze meets hers.

The guests have all gathered by now, but
dinner is not yet announced. The hostess moves
easily among them, stopping by each with a
winning smile, to ask some carefully chosen
personal question. Each as politely replies, only
to find himself talking to the empty air.

There is soon a confused babble of voices, a
whir of windy words — and no one hears.

The author watches her, still curious to know
whether she will remember that she has not yet
heard his answer. But she has quite forgotten.
She moves, the incarnate spirit of politeness,
about the room, rousing trains of eager ideas in
her guests, and as speedily leaving them to run
down a side-track into a bumper.

She has no real interest in any of them,
probably she has no real understanding of them.
She thinks her manners are above reproach, that

The 'Bad ^Canners of Oolite Teople 91

she is treating her guests in the most exemplary
fashion. In reality, nothing could be worse than
her manners, and she is treating her guests most
shabbily. By being polite, she ends by being rude.
For nothing is so rude in this world as to ask a
man a question about some subject close to his
heart when you have no intention of listening to
his answer, nor any interest in it. The hostess
thinks to feed his vanity; she ends by wounding
it. She thinks to make her guests comfortable;
she ends by making them uncomfortable.

The best manners I have ever seen were pos
sessed by the most impolite man I have ever
known. As a result, nobody that he ever in
vited to his house felt uncomfortable there. He
was interested in all kinds and conditions oj
people, all kinds and conditions of activities.
If he asked you a question, it was because he
wanted to hear your answer. He paid you the
compliment of assuming that it was worth
listening to, and other people waited till you
were through. At his table you weren't supposed
to. confine your talk to the sweet young thing
on your left, who was more interested in the
gay young blade on her left, nor to the sedate,
elderly female person on your right, who was
more interested in the bishop on her right. Talk
was largely for the whole table; and if you
hadn't some definite contribution to make, you
were usually glad to keep still.

92 "The *Bad ^Manners ofTolite ^People

I say nobody ever felt uncomfortable in his
house. That is not quite true. Occasionally the
person who expressed an opinion on a subject he
knew nothing about must have felt uncomfort
able. For, though he was listened to gravely
while speaking, conversation was at once re
sumed as if nothing whatever had been said.

Nothing could have been more conventionally
impolite. And yet the act was so utterly free
from sham that it seemed the only decorous and
decent thing to do. Thus was the dignity of
conversation maintained; thus was each man and
woman made to feel his or her worth along
personal lines of endeavor; thus was a true
democratic spirit preserved, which is the real
essence of good manners. True democracy con
sists in bringing each man out, not in reducing
him to a common level of inanity. Good man
ners consist in showing him respect for what is
worthy of respecl in him, treating him as a
rational human being, not as a mere social unit
who deposits his hard-won opinions, along with
his hat and stick, in the care of the butler when
he enters the house.

That is why men have, as a rule, better man
ners than women, though they are far less po
lite. A man respects the judgment of a special
ist on any given subjecl:, and he is rather intoler
ant of the snap judgments of the dabbler or the
dilettante. He listens, if forced to, with uncon-

The *Bad \Manners ofPolite "People 93

cealed impatience to the babbling of his pretty
neighbor at table about art, perhaps, or engi
neering, or some other topic concerning which
her ignorance is as profound as her cocksureness
is lofty. But, after all, to be polite to her is to
insult a whole race of engineers or artists! Put
one of them beside him, and see how readily he
will listen.

Politeness too often consists of shamming. Good
manners are the absence of sham. It is not the gen
tleman's place, certainly, to insult the lady. Good
manners seldom go quite so far as that. But even
politeness cannot expert him to endure the torture
for more than a limited time, especially if the topic
chosen chances to be his own specialty. It is his
place to lead the conversation, as gently as possible,
back upon more neutral ground, where he may
find what consolation he can in sprightly person
alities — while praying for the coffee.

I enjoy the privilege of acquaintance with a
very charming person, who has never paid a
compliment to her sex except by being a wo
man. Some of her sex say that she is a delight
ful hostess and very beautiful. Others say that
she is atrociously rude, and they "can't see what
it is people admire in her." Most men adore
her. She herself says that the only people she
cares to entertain are those who have earned
their own living. Her reasons are, I believe, in
teresting and significant.

94 The ^ad Manners ofPolite ^People

She earns her own living, I may state, and a
very considerable one, for she is famous ana
highly successful in her branch of artistic en
deavor. Socially, one may say of her, in that
atrocious phrase which implies a queer jumble
of values, that she is "very much in demand/'
But, though a man in livery opens her front door,
the street-cars bring quite as many guests to her
house as do expensively purring motor-cars.

"For," as she puts it, "I can stand the talk of
the average woman in 'Society' just about fifteen
minutes, and then I have to scream. I don't
know how the fidion arose that American women
of the leisure classes are so superior mentally to
the women of other nations. The fad: is, they
are not. The fad; is, that they are so superficial
that a person who has really done something —
I don't mean who has played at it, but who has
really under the spur of necessity got to the bot
tom of some one subjed — can hardly endure
their conversation. They chatter, chatter, chat
ter, about everything under heaven, and if you
happen to know anything about any of the sub
jects, it is simply torture to listen.

"Life is too short, and too interesting, and
the world too full of real people, to bother with
the folks who don't know their business. The
man or woman who has had to be self-support
ing has got to the bottom of some branch of ac
tivity, however small, and learned humility. To

The 2W ^Manners ofTolite "People 95

learn that mastery of even a tiny subject requires
effort and concentration and skill, is to learn re-
sped: for other subjects; and it is to learn, too,
how to listen.

"Nobody can listen who isn't truly interested,
and who hasn't the grasp of mind to appreciate
the complexities of a craft not his own, who
doesn't know enough to know when he doesn't
know anything. If I'm going to talk my shop,
I want to talk it with folks who've been in it.
If I'm going to hear some other shop discussed,
it must be by someone who is familiar with
that, not by direftoired dabblers who, you feel
after three minutes have elapsed, don't know a
thing about the subject. If politeness consists in
letting them suppose that I take any stock in
what they say, then I plead guilty to being a
boor."

Probably no one who has experienced the
awful ordeal of listening to some female chatter
about his chosen subject, or who has undergone
the even worse ordeal of dropping great thoughts
of his own into the deep, deep pools of her in
comprehension, will fail of sympathy with my
friend.

"But I tire you," said an incessant gabbler
one day to the great Due de Broglie.

"No, no," replied the duke; "I wasn't lis
tening."

On (jiving up Qolf Forever

LAST season I gave up golf forever two days
before our course opened in May, on the even
ings of June 1 7th and July 4th, at noon on
July 27th, on the evenings of August 2nd, gth,
1 5th, and 2ist, at 11:15 A-M- on Labor Day,
again Labor Day evening, on September igth,
23rd, 30th, and October 3rd, nth and i8th.
I am writing this in mid-January, when the
drifts are piled five feet deep over our bunkers,
and the water-carries are frozen solid. I have
played my last game of golf. The coming sea
son I shall devote to the intensive cultivation of
my garden. The links have no allure for me.

"And if," says rny wife, "I could believe that,
I should be happier than ever before in the long
years of my golf widowhood."

"But you can," I answer, with grieved sur
prise.

She looks at me, with that superior and
tolerant smile women know so well how to
assume.

"You men are all such children!" is her, it
seems to me, somewhat irrelevant retort.

On (jiving up Golf Forever 97

I fell to musing on my friend, the noted war
correspondent (now a Major in the United States
Army in France). All things considered, he
was the most consistent, or perhaps I should
say persistent, quitter the game of golf has ever
known. He used to quit forever on an average
of three times a week, and I have known him to
abandon the game twice during a round, which
is something of a record. He played every sum
mer on our beautiful Berkshire course, which
crosses and recrosses the winding Housa tonic,
not to mention sundry swamps, and boasts the
most luxuriant fairway, and by the same token
the rankest rough, in all America. It is the
course Owen Johnson once immortalized in his
story, Even Threes.

How well I remember that peaceful, happy
May, back in 1914! Our course had emerged
from its annual spring flood, newly top-dressed
with rich river silt, and a few warm days brought
the turf through the scars and made the whole
glorious expanse of fairway, winding through
the silver willows, a velvet carpet. I had given
my orders to the greens-keepers, and gone to
New York for a day or two — reludlantly, of
course — and there met the famous war cor
respondent, in those peaceful times out of a
regular job and turned novelist pro tern. He had
just relieved himself of his final chapter, and
readily yielded to my persuasions to return with

8

98 On Cfiving up Golf Forever

me to the velvet field and the whistling drive.
We "entrained," as he would say in one of his
military dispatches.

As far as the Massachusetts- Connecticut state-
line he talked of Mexican revolutions, Theodore
Roosevelt, Japanese art, <uers libre, mushrooms,
and such other topics as were of interest in the
spring of 1914. But at the state-line, chancing
a look out of the window, he saw the doming
billow of blue mountains which marks the en
trance to our Berkshire intervales, and a strange
gleam came into his eyes. His square jaws set.
His whole countenance was transformed. Turn
ing back to me, he half hissed, grimly, —

"I am not going to press this season!"

I knew he was fairly on his way to giving
up golf forever.

Of course, when a man hasn't played all
winter, but has been engaged in the mild and
harmless exercise of writing a novel, his hands
become soft. Then, when he suddenly begins
to play thirty-six holes a day, and takes a lock-
grip on his clubs as tightly as if he supposed
somebody was trying to snatch them away from
him, he is apt to develop certain blisters. To a
war correspondent and traveler over the Dawson
Trail, such blisters are nothing. To a golf player
they are of profound importance. The next day,
in our foursome, they affected the war corre
spondent's game. He became softly querulons.

On (jiving up Golf Forever 99

"I wish you wouldn't talk when I am about
to drive," he complained to a caddie.

"This mashie is too heavy for me/' he mut
tered to himself.

"Every time I make a stroke, that crack on
the third finger of my left hand, above the top
joint, opens and pains me," he declared to any
body who would listen.

His drive from the eighteenth tee went ker
plunk into the mud, and buried itself like a
startled woodchuck. He said nothing, but took
a left-handed club from his bag — for he began
the game left-handed, and had switched over the
year before, upon hearing our professional say that
no left-handed player could ever become a great
golfer. With this fresh implement, he began to
dig. He finished the hole left-handed, with three
perfect shots ! We tried to cheer him up, but he
was not to be cheered.

"What's the use!" he wailed. "Here I've
spent a year and a fortune unlearning how to
play left-handed. I'm never going to play the
confounded game again!"

And, by way of token, he began to talk about
Theodore Roosevelt.

That was his first renunciation for 1914. The
next few days the game went well, and so did
work on a new novel he had commenced, fired
by his success in getting off seventeen perfecl tee-
shots. But he reached his fourth chapter and an

ioo On (jiving up Golf Forever

off afternoon on the same fair Saturday. What
a lovely day it was! — you know, one of those
early June days that invariably causes some woman
to quote Lowell. But the famous war correspon
dent saw no charm in the leafy luxury around him,
in the blue sky, the lush grass. He heard no
pipe of birds nor whisper of the breeze. His
driver wasn't working right. Then his over
worked mashie went back on him. By the
fourth green he was taking three putts, and by
the eighth he was picking up. His face was a
thundercloud; his vocabulary disclosed a rich
ness gleaned from camp and field which was a
revelation even to our caddies; and that is no
insignificant accomplishment.

Our tenth hole in those days was close to the
club-house, and the tee was but 195 yards away —
a good iron to the green. By the time we reached
this tee, the war correspondent had very nearly
exhausted even the stock of expletives he had
acquired on the Dawson Trail, and had declared
seven times that he was through, yes, forever!

"Oh, come on and play just this hole — keep
going to the-club house anyway," we pleaded.

"Well," he said, "I'll take one more shot-
it's my last — positively. I'm going back to New
York to-morrow."

He tossed a scarred, cut, battered ball on the
turf, scorning to make a tee. Yanking a cleek
from his bag, he stepped up with the speed of

On (giving up Golf Forever I.GI

Duncan and swung. To our amazement, the
ball flew like a bullet to the mark and disappeared
over the lip of the green, headed straight for the
pin. But he never saw it. He wasn't watching.

"Good shot ! " we cried, with real enthusiasm.

"I wasn't looking, where'd it go?" he asked,
with an attempt at scorn, which, however, was
manifestly weakening.

"Got a putt fer a two," said his caddie.

The noted man cast a withering look at this
object of his previous invective. He still sus
pected something. We backed the caddie up,
and he strode down the fairway with a certain
reviving spring in his step.

There on the green, not six inches from the
cup, reposed his battered ball !

"Been anybody else it would have gone in!"
he muttered, as he sank it for a two.

That was his proud surrender. He said no
more. He strode ahead to the next tee, and tore
out a long, straight drive. Then he lit a ciga
rette and remarked that he had never seen the
willows more beautiful, more silvery in the
afternoon light.

Ah, well, poor chap, he did give up golf on
the first of August, if not forever at least for the
longest period of abstinence in his career on the
links. On our last afternoon over the velvet to
gether, before he left for the steamer that was
to take him into the maelstrom, he paid little

On (jiving up Golf Forever

attention to his game, and a surprised and, I
fancied, even a slightly disappointed caddie fol
lowed him. (He was always most generous to
his caddie when he had most abused him, like
the hero of Goldoni's comedy.)

"I sha'n't see nice, sweet, unscarred green sod
again for a long time," he said, digging up a
huge divot with unconscious irony. "I'm going
to my last war, though/'

"Gracious," said I, "are you going to give up
War forever, too?"

"The world is going to give it up forever,
after this one," he replied.

I have seen him twice since, once when he
was still a correspondent, once more recently
when he came back in the uniform of Uncle
Sam. And each time his greeting has been the
same: —

"Have you got rid of that hook yet?"

Then he smiled — a wistful, tragic smile, and
asked where all the new traps and bunkers are,
how we contrived to lengthen the course, whether
the new sixth green is in play yet, all the pathet
ically unimportant little gossip of our eighty acres
of green meadow.

"Ah," he said the last time we parted, "some
day I'm coming back and make that 79 at last!
Anybody can go over the top, but to break 80
at Stockbridge — !"

Then he left for the trenches of France.

On (giving up Golf Forever 103

I have another good friend who, unlike the
Major, has never given up golf forever. This, as
he himself admits (or I should not dare offer the
explanation), is because he has never yet really
played it. He, too, is ratner well known at his
avocation of play-writing; but golf is his real
business in life when the season once gets under
way. He has enabled several professionals to buy
motor-cars, he has sent numerous fore-caddies
through the high school, he has practised by the
hour with individual clubs, but still, after almost
a quarter of a century, he has never broken 90
on a first-class course. From my superior posi
tion (I have on three never-to-be-forgotten oc
casions broken 80, one of them at Manchester!),
I sometimes wonder what keeps him at the game.
Then I play with him, and realize. He has the
divine, inexplicable faculty, once or twice in a
round, of tearing off an astounding drive of 300
yards, by some subtle miracle of timing, which
after hours of rolling finally comes to rest far
out beyond any other ball in the foursome, or
even the professional's drive. What does it mat
ter if he scruffs his approach? What does it 'mat
ter if he takes three putts? He has the memory
of that drive, the unexpected, thrilling feel of it
in arms and body, the tingling vision of the day
when he will find out how he did it, and be
able to repeat at will! That keeps him going —
that, and a trophy he once achieved by winning

104 On (jiving up Golf Forever

the beaten eight division of the sixth sixteen. It
was a little pocket match-safe, but it is more
precious in his eyes than pearls, aye, than much
fine gold or his reputation as perhaps the deft
est writer of dialogue on the American stage.
It represents definite achievement in the game
of Golf.

You may suppose, dear Reader, if by some mir
acle you are not a golfer, that I have been press
ing the essayist's privilege and indulging in an
attempt at whimsicality. Nothing, I assure you,
could be farther from the fact. I am, in this
chapter, a realist. All I have here set down is a
record of actuality. Nay, I have erred on the
other side. I have said nothing whatever about
my own reasons for giving up golf forever. Nor
have I told the story of the elderly gentlemen at
a course near Boston, whom I once observed in an
exhibition of renunciation that perhaps deserved
recording.

This course was of nine holes (it is now the
site of several apartment houses), and the last
hole called for a carry over a little pond, to a
green immediately in front of the club-house.
The somewhat elderly and irascible gentleman
in question, playing in a foursome, had reached
this ninth tee on the shore of the pond, and even
from the club veranda it was evident that his
temper was not of the best. Things had not
been going right for him. His three companions

On (jiving up Golf Forever 105

carried the pond. Then he teed up, and drove —
spash! — into the water. A remark was wafted
through the still air. He teed again — another
splash. Then followed an exhibition which I
fear my wife would describe as childish. First
this elderly gentleman spoke, in a loud, vexed
voice. Then he hurled his driver into the pond.
Then he snatched his bag of clubs from the cad
die's shoulder, seized a stone from the pond side,
stuffed it into the bag, grasped the strap as a ham
mer-thrower the handle of his weight, swung the
bag three times around his head, and let it fly
far out over the water. It hit with a great splash,
and sank from sight. His three companions, re-
spe&ing his mood, discreetly continued their game,
while he came up to the club-house, sought a
far corner of the veranda, and with a face closely
resembling a Greek mask of Tragedy, sank down
huddled into a chair.

On the veranda, too, his grief was respe<5ted.
No one spoke to him. In fa6t, I think no one
dared. We were careful that even our mirth
did not reach his ears. He was alone with his
thoughts. The afternoon waned. His three com
panions again reached the ninth tee, drove the
pond, and came into the club-house to dress.
The caddies were about to depart. Then a strange
thing happened; at its first intimation we tip
toed to a window to observe. He roused himself,
leaned over the rail, and called a caddie.

io6 On (jiving up Golf Forever

"Boy," we heard him say, in a deep, tragic
voice, "can you swim?"

"Yes, sir," the caddie replied.

"All right. About thirty feet out in front of
the ninth tee there's a bag at the bottom of the
pond. Go get it for me, and I'll give you five
dollars."

The caddie ran, peeling his garments as he
went. Modestly retaining his tattered under
clothes, he splashed in from the tee, while the
somewhat elderly golf player gesticulated di
rections on the bank. Presently the boy's toes
detected something, and he did a pretty surface
dive, emerging with the bag strap in his right
hand. He also rescued the floating driver, and
we saw the promised bill passed to him, and
watched him drag on his clothes over his wet
undergarments. Slowly, even tenderly, the some
what elderly gentleman emptied the water and
the stone from his bag, and wiped the clubs
on his handkerchief. With the wet, dripping
burden over his shoulder he came across the foot
bridge and into the locker room, while we
hastened to remove our faces from the door and
windows, and attempted to appear casual.

He entered in silence, and strode to his locker.
The silence grew painful. Somebody simply had
to speak, or laugh. Finally somebody did speak,
which was probably the safer alternative.

"Decided to try again, eh?"

On (giving up Golf Forever 107

The somewhat elderly gentleman wheeled
upon the assemblage, his dripping bag still hang
ing from his shoulder.

"Yes, damn it!" he thundered.

Well, I have never thrown my clubs into a
pond, and I am sure you 'have never done any
thing so childish, either. But how many times
have you and I both given up golf forever, and
then returned to links the following day — "damn
it"! We do not play for the exercise, we do not
play because it "keeps us out in the open air."
Neither motive would hold a man for a week
to the tantelizing, costly, soul-racking, nerve-
and temper-destroying game. We play it be
cause there it some diabolical — or celestial —
fascination about the thing; some will-o'-the-
wisp of hope lures us over swamp and swale,
through pit and pasture, toward the smooth
haven of the putting green; some subtle, mys
terious power every now and then coordinates
our muscles and lets us achieve perfection for a
single stroke, whereafter we tingle with remem
brance and thrill with anticipation. Golf is the
quest of the unattainable, it is a manifestation
of the Divine Unrest, it spreads before us the
soft green pathway down which we follow the
Gleam. That is why you and I shall be giving
it up forever on our eightieth birthday.

"Qrape-*Uine" Srudition

You may recall that Mr. Ezra Barkley acquired
a great reputation for learning by imparting to
the spinsters of Old Chester such astonishing fafts
as the approximate number of roe contained in
a shad. His sister-in-law, in her ignorance, sup
posed there were only two hundred! Ezra also
knew who first kept bees, and many other im
portant things, usually of a statistical nature. I
cannot recall that Mrs. Deland has told us where
Ezra acquired his erudition, and I used at one
time to wonder. But now I know. He read
the "grape-vine" in the first editions of our daily
papers.

Perhaps you don't know what "grape-vine" is?
I rejoice in my ability to tell you. It is the name
given by newspaper men to the jokes and squibs
and bits of information clipped by the busy ex
change reader, and put into type, making short
paragraphs of varying lengths, which are dropped
in at the bottom of a column to fill up the vacant
space when the need arises. This need most
often arises in preparing the first edition, the one
which catches the early trains for the country.

Erudition 109

By the time the city edition goes to press suffi
cient news of battles, carnage, and sudden death,
of politics and stock exchanges, has been prepared
to fill every inch of available space. The city
reader, therefore, sees little of this "grape-vine."
Thus we have a new argument for country life.

I am now a resident of the country, one hun
dred and fifty miles removed from New York
and as far from Boston; and I am by way of be
coming nearly as erudite as Ezra Barkley. I am,
indeed, almost bewildered with the mass of infor
mation I am acquiring. This morning I read a
column about the European war, all of which I
have now forgotten. But how can I ever forget
the two lines of "grape-vine" at the very bottom
which filled out an otherwise vacant quarter inch?
I am permanently a wiser man.

"Many Filipino women catch and sell fish
for a living."

Amid a world at war, too, how peaceful and
soothing is this tabloid idyl of piscatorial toil !

After the acquisition of this morsel of learning
I set diligently to work on the day's papers, both
the morning editions and those "evening" edi
tions which come to us here by a train leav
ing the city early in the afternoon, to see how
much erudition I could accumulate in one sun's
span. I think you of the cities will be aston
ished. I was myself. In a few weeks I shall read
the encyclopaedia advertisements with scorn in-

no " grapevine ' ' erudition

stead of longing. For instance, I have learned
that "A new tooth-brush is cylindrical and is
revolved against the teeth by a plunger working
through its spirally grooved handle/' Obviously,
just the implement for boys interested in motor
cars (as all boys are). They will play they are
grinding valves and run joyously to brush their
teeth.

I have learned that "In the last five years our
national and state lawmaking bodies have passed
62,550 laws." The surprising thing about this
information is that the number is so small !

I have learned that "Russia has ten thousand
lepers, taken care of by twenty-one institutions."

I have acquired these valuable bits of ornitho
logical lore: "The frigate-bird is capable of get
ting up a speed of ninety-six miles an hour with
hardly a movement of its wings. The greater
part of its life is spent in the air." "The swallow
has a larger mouth in proportion to its size than
any other bird."

I have, from the bottom of a single column,
gleaned these three items of incalculable value:
' ' By harnessing a fly to a tiny wagon an English sci
entist found it could draw one hundred and seventy
times its own weight over smooth surfaces."

"Missouri last year produced 195,634 tons of
lead, a fairly heavy output."

"The United States has five hundred and sev
enteen button-factories."

"(^rape-Vine" Erudition 1 1 1

The New York Times staggers me with this
statistical line: "One Paris motion-picture plant
produces an average of three million feet of
films weekly." (This strikes me as a kind of
"French frightfulness.")

The New York Evening Post contributes to
my welfare and domestic comfort this item:
"Both an electric range and a refrigerator are
included in a new kitchen cabinet, but are hid
den from view by doors when not in use."

I am certainly a wiser man for knowing that
"The Mexican seacoast on the Pacific and the
Gulf of California is 4,575 miles." And I am
at least interested in the fad: that "An English
man has invented a cover for hatchways on vessels
that operates on the principle of a roll-top desk."
If this hatchway operates on the principle of the
only roll-top desk I ever possessed, God help the
poor sailors when the storm breaks!

Such items as these disclose to me the extent
of my previous ignorance: —

"Bolivia is producing about one-third of the
world's output of tin."

* * Records disclose that for several centuries an
infusion of nutgalls treated with sulphate of iron
composed the only known ink."

"The first job held by William G. McAdoo,
Secretary of the Treasury, was that of a news
boy selling the Macon Morning Telegraph. His
next job was that of a farm laborer."

1 1 2 "^rape-Vine" erudition

"There are 2,500,000 freight-cars in the
country, and their average life is somewhere
about twenty years."

"Since gold was discovered in the Auckland
province, in 1852, there has been exported from
that district gold to the value of $i 16, 796,000."

I should, to be sure, be more completely ed
ucated if I could find somewhere, under the
sporting news, or at the base of the obituaries, a
statement of where Auckland is. But perhaps
that information will come to-morrow.

Well, I have presented here only a tithe of
the knowledge I have to-day gleaned from the
daily press, that hitherto (by me, at least) under
estimated institution. I haven't stated that I now
know who first used anthracite coal as a fuel, and
when. You don't know that, I am sure. Neither
do you know how many acres of corn were
planted in England and Wales in 1915 and 1916,
nor how many government employees there were
in France before the war, nor that "A bundle of
fine glass threads forms a new ink-eraser."

However, I must share with you my choicest
acquisition. It seems little less than a crime to
keep such knowledge from the world at large,
to bury it at the bottom of a column on the
ninth page of the first edition of the Springfield
Republican. So I rewrite it here. For oral de
livery, I shall save it till some caller comes
whom I particularly desire to impress. Then,

"^rape-Vine" Erudition 1 1 3

with all the Old -World courtesy of Mr. Ezra
Barkley, I shall offer this guest a chair, and as I
do so I shall remark, with the careless casualness
of the truly erudite: "Guatemala has only one
furniture factory. It employs a hundred and
fifty men."

'Business before Qrammar

HAVE just been perusing a copy of a certain
magazine which proclaims on its cover that it
has doubled its circulation in twenty months.
Within, the editor sets forth what he believes
to be the reasons for this gratifying growth.
"The magazine accepts man as he is — and
helps him/' says the editor. "The magazine
is edited to answer the questions that keep ris
ing and rising in the average man's head. It
is not edited with the idea of trying to force
into the average man's head a lot of informa
tion which he does not hanker for and cannot
make use of."

Having always considered ourself an average
man, we turned the pages hopefully, only to
find a considerable amount of information we
had never "hankered" for, and could not make
use of, as, for instance, how to become the big
gest "buyer" in the universe, or how a certain
theatrical manager wants you to think he thinks
he got on in the world (there is, to be sure, a
quite unintentional psychological interest here),
or how to remember the names of a hundred

^Business 'Before Grammar 1 1 c

«y \J J

thousand people — dreadful thought! So we de
cided we were not, after all, an average man,
and shifted to the fiction.

There were four short stories and a serial in
this issue, and not one of them concerned itself
with people who could speak correct English.
Some of the stories confined their assaults upon
our mother tongue to the dialogue, one was told
by a dog (which, of course, excuses much, in
prose as well as verse), and one was entirely
written in what we presume to be a sort of
literary Bowery dialed!:, which we have since
been informed by friends more extensively read
than ourself is now the necessary dialed: of
American magazine humor, as essential, almost,
as the bathing-girl on the August cover.

"'I think we got about everything. I'll see that the
things is packed in them wardrobe trunks an' sent to
your hotel to-morrow morning. An' believe me, it's
been some afternoon, Mr. Bentley!'"

— This, at random, from one of the two stories
which dealt with the "business woman/' whose
motto seems to be, "Business Before Grammar,"
even as it is the motto of the editor. The other
"business woman" was not quite so lax. She
tried as hard to speak correctly as the author
could let her, and won a certain amount of
sympathy for her efforts.

1 1 6 business 'Before Grammar

But the gem, of course, was the story told all
in the literary Boweryese. A lack of acquaint
ance with past performances by our author pre
vented us from feeling quite sure who the sup
posed narrator might be, without reading the
entire story, but we gathered from early para
graphs and from the illustrations that the guy
was a pug. (You see, it's contagious.) At any
rate, this is how the story began: —

"The average guy's opinion of himself reaches its
highest level about five minutes after the most wonder
ful girl in the world gasps 'Yes!' He always thought
he was a little better than the other voters, but now he
knows it! Of course, he figures, the girl couldn't very
well help fallin' for a handsome brute like him, who'd
have more money than Rockefeller if he only knew
somethin' about oil. He kids himself along like that,
thinkin' that it was his curly hair or his clever chatter
that turned the trick. Them guys gimme a laugh !

"When Mamie Mahoney or Gladys Van de Vere
decides to love, honor and annoy one of these birds,
she's got some little thing in view besides light house-
keepin'. Some dames marry for spite, some because
they prefer limousines to the subway, and others want
to make Joe stop playin' the races or the rye. But
there's always somethin' there — just like they have to
put alloy in gold to hold it together. Yes, gentle
reader, there's a reason!

"But if you're engaged, son, don't let this disturb
you. I've seen some dames that, believe me, I wouldn't
care what they married me for, as long as they did !"

Having proceeded thus far, we turned back to
the table of contents for affirmation of what we

'Business ^Before Grammar 117

vaguely remembered to have read there. Yes,
we had read it! The tale was labeled by the
editor, "A funny story."

So this is fi&ion for "the average man," and
on this spiritual fare his cravings for literature
are fed! So this is the sort of thing which
doubles the circulation of a popular magazine in
twenty months! Such melancholy reflections
crossed our mind, coupled with the thought that
with no speech at all in the movies, and such
speech as this in his magazines, the "average
man" will either have to read his Bible every day
or soon forget that there was once such a thing
as the beautiful English language. And alas, the
circulation of the Bible hasn't doubled in the
past twenty months! "This magazine accepts
man as he is — and helps him" — so reads the
editor's self-puffery. What an indictment of man
— and what an idea of help ! We would hate to
go to bed with his conscience, — if editors have
such old-fashioned impediments.

But suddenly we caught a ray of light amid
the encircling gloom. The editor hadn't stated
what his circulation was twenty months ago!
We recalled how Irvin Cobb once told us that
the attendance at his musical comedy had doubled
the previous evening — the usher had brought
his sister. Doubtless the new circulation isn't
more than a million, — and what is a mere mil
lion nowadays?

Wood ^Ashes and ^Pr ogress

"ONCE man defended his home and hearth;
now he defends his home and radiator." The
words stared out of the bulk of print on the page
with startling vividness, a gem of philosophy, a
"criticism of life/' in the waste of jokes which
the comic-paper editor had read and doubtless
paid for, and which the public was doubtless
expected to enjoy. The Man Above the Square
laid aside the paper, leaned toward his fire, took
up the poker (an old ebony cane adorned with a
heavy silver knob which bore the name of anja&or
once loved and admired) and rolled the top log
over slowly and meditatively. The end of the
cane was scarred and burned from many a contest
with stubborn logs, and the Man Above the
Square looked at the marks of service with a
smile before he stood the heavy stick again in its
place by the fireside.

"It isn't every walking-stick which comes to
such a good end/' he said aloud.

Then either because he was cold or in peni
tence for the pun, he walked over to the win
dows to pull down the shades. But before he

ypood tAshes and Progress 1 1 9

did so he looked out into the night, his breath
making a frosty vapor on the pane. Below him
the Square gleamed in white patches under the
arc-lamps, and across these white patches here
and there a belated pedestrian, coat collar turned
up, hurried, a black shadow. The cross on the
Memorial Church gleamed like a cluster of stars,
and deep in the cold sky the moon rode silently.
A chill wind was complaining in the bare tree-
tops beneath him and found its way to his face
and body through the window chinks. He drew
down the shades quickly and pulled the heavy
draperies together with a rattle of rings on the
rods. Then he turned and faced his room.

A scarf of Oriental silk veiled the light of the
single lamp, set low on his desk, and the fire
had its own way with the illumination. It sent
dancing shadows over the olive walls, it made
points of light of the picture-frames and a glowing
coal of the polished coffee-urn in the corner;
it pointed pleasantly out the numberless books,
but told nothing of their contents; it made dark
the spaces where the alcoves were, but suffused
the little radius of the hearth that was bounded
by an easy chair and a pipe-stand with a glow and
warmth and comfort which were irresistible.
The Man Above the Square came quickly into
this charmed radius and sank again into the
chair. "And some people insist on steam heat!"
he said.

120 "foood tAshes and Progress

Then he looked into the rosy pit of wallow
ing, good-natured flames, and fancied he was
meditating. But in reality he was going to sleep.
When he woke up the fire was out and he was
cramped and cold. He stumbled to a corner,
turned on the steam in a radiator, that the room
might be warm in the morning, and returned
to his chamber.

" After all, you have to build a fire; but the
steam just comes," he growled, as he crawled
sleepily into bed.

Toward morning the steam did come, but
some hours before he was ready to rise. It came
at intervals, forcing the water up ahead and
thumping it against the top of the radiator with
the force of a trip-hammer and the noise of a
cannon. The Man Above the Square woke up
and cursed. The intervals between thumps he
employed in wondering how soon the next re
port would come, which effectively prevented
his going to sleep again. Presently the thump
ing ceased, and he dozed off, to awake later in
ugly temper. He went out into the sitting room
and found it cold as an ice-box.

"Where in blazes is all that steam which
woke me up at daylight?" he shouted down the
speaking-tube to the janitor. The answer, as
usual, admitted of no reply, even as it offered
no satisfactory explanation. He dug into the
wood-box and on the heap of feathery white

'foood tAshes and "Progress 121

ashes which topped the pile in the fireplace like
snow — ''the fall of last night" he called it — he
laid a fire of pine and maple. In three minutes
he was toasting his toes in front of the blaze, and
good nature was spreading up his person like the
tide up a bay.

"Modern conveniences would be all right/'
he chuckled, looking from the merry fire to the
ugly radiator, "if they were ever convenient!"

Then he swung Indian clubs for a quarter of
an hour, jumped into a cold plunge, and went
rosy to his breakfast and the day's work, with
the cheeriness of the fire in his heart.

But while he was gone there entered the
chambermaid, and sad desecration was wrought.
Chambermaids are another modern inconve
nience. The Pilgrim Fathers got along without
chambermaids; and even at a much later period
chambermaids worked at least under the super
vision of a mistress of the household. But now
adays they have their own way, even in abodes
where there is one who could be a mistress if
she would, or time from social duties and the
improvement of her mind permitted. Of course,
in the abode of a bachelor the chambermaid is
supreme, for bachelors, at least in New York,
have of necessity to live in apartments, not pri
vate boarding houses presided over by a careful
mistress. Probably most of them prefer to; but
that does not prove progress, none the less. But

122 'foood *Ashes and Progress

the Man Above the Square was not of this class.
He had a sharp elbow bone, in the first place,
which is to signify that he was a "good house
keeper," as they say in New England. And in
the second place, he knew the value to the
aesthetic and moral sense of personality in living
rooms, of an orderly, tasteful arrangement of
inanimate objects, carpets, pictures, furniture,
which, through weeks of comparative change-
lessness, takes on the human aspect of a friend
and silently welcomes you when you return at
night, saying comfortably, "I am here, as you
left me; I am home/'

So when he entered his room again that even
ing and turned up the gas, his immediate utter
ance was not strictly the subject for reproduction.
To begin with, the chambermaid had, in diso
bedience to his strict orders, taken up the centre
rug and sent it up on the roof for the porter to
beat. Being an expensive rug, the Man Above
the Square did not particularly relish having it
frequently beaten. But still less did he relish the
way it had been replaced. It was not in the cen
tre of the room, so that two legs of the library
desk in the middle stood on the border and two
on the diamond centre. One end was too near
the piano, the other consequently too far from
the hearth. And in trying to tug it into position
fhe maid had managed to pull every edge out
of plumb with the lines of the floor. Of course,

IPPood <tAshes and Progress 123

the photographs on the piano had smooches on
the margins, where the maid's thumb had pressed
as she held them up to dust beneath. Pudd'n-
Head Wilson would alone have prized them in
their present state. On the mantel each objedt
was just far enough out of its proper place to
throw the whole decorative scheme into a line
of Puritanic primness. And the chairs, silent
friends that are so companionable when an un
derstanding hand places them in position, were
now facing at stiff angles of armed neutrality, as
if mutually suspicious. Not one of them said,
"Sit in me."

But the worst was yet to come. Walking over
to the fireplace, the Man Above the Square looked
in and groaned.

"She's done it again!" he cried. "I'd move
out of this flat to-night if I wasn't sure that any
other would be as bad, this side of the middle of
last century."

It was, indeed, a sorry piece of work. The
splendid pile of gray and white wood ashes
which that morning had been heaped high over
the arms of the firedogs, and which drifted high
into each corner and out upon the hearth, was
no more. A little pile remained, carefully swept
into the rear of the fireplace, but the bulk of the
ashes had been removed and the arms of the
firedogs stood inches above what was left.

1 24 Wood <^4shes and ^Progress

"I told her not to do it; confound it I I told
her not to do it!" he muttered aloud, storming
about the room. "Here I've been since Christ
mas collecting that pile of ashes, and it had just
reached the point where I could kindle a tire
with three sticks of kindling and burn only one
log if I wished. And then that confounded cham
bermaid disobeys me — distinctly disobeys me —
and shovels it all out!"

He rang angrily for the chambermaid, whose
name was Eliza, and who was tall and angular.

"Didn't I tell you under no consideration to
take away any of my ashes?" he demanded.

"But I swept the room into them, and they
got all dirty," she protested.

"Then don't sweep the room again!'* he
interposed. "I want the ashes left hereafter."

"But the fire will burn better without so many
ashes; they chokes it," said Eliza. "Most peo
ple like 'em cleaned out every week."

"Most people are fools," said the Man Above
the Square. "You may go now."

The loss of his ashes had so irritated him that
it was a long time before he could yield himself
to the influence of the blaze, which leapt merrily
enough, in spite of the too clear hearth. He
filled his pipe and smoked it out and filled it
again; he tried the latest autobiography and
Heine's prose and the current magazines; and
still his mind would not settle to restfulness and

IflPood zAshes and 'Progress 125

content. Then suddenly he remembered the
riate, the 2oth of January. He took down his
Keats. The owl, for all his feathers, might well
have been a-cold on that night, too, for a shrill
wind was up without. He glanced at his fire.
Already the kindlings were settling into glow
ing heaps beneath the logs, a good start on a
fresh pile of ashes. He snuggled more comfort
ably into his chair and began once more the
deathless poem.

The clock ticked steadily; the wind sent
crashing down the limb of an elm tree outside
and shrieked exultingly; a log settled into the
fire with a hiss and crackle of sparks. But he
heard nothing. Presently he laid the book aside,
for the poem was finished, and looked into the
fire. It was sometimes a favorite question of his
to inquire who ate Madeline's feast, a point
which Keats leaves in doubt; but he did not ask
it to-night.

"Yes, it was ages long ago/' he said at length.
"Ages long ago!"

Then he leaned forward, poking the fire
meditatively, 'and added: "Steam heat in Made
line's chamber? Impossible! But there might
have been just such another fire as this!"

And was it a sudden thought, "like a full
blown rose," making "purple riot" in his breast,
too, or was it simply the leap of the firelight,
which caused his face to flush?

126 Wood zAshes and ^Progress

"I wonder where they are now?" he whis
pered. 'They are together in the arms of
death/ a later poet says. But surely the world
has not so far 'progressed' that they do not live
somewhere still."

Then he recalled a visit he once made to a
young doctor in a fine old New-England village.
The doctor was not long out of college, and he
had brought his bride to this little town, to an
old house rich in tiny window panes, uneven
floors and memories. Great fireplaces supplied
the heat for the doctor and his wife, as it had
done for the occupants who looked forth from
the windows to see the soldiery go by on their
way to join Washington at the siege of Boston.
And when the Man Above the Square came on
his visit he found in the fireplace which warmed
the low-studded living room, that was library and
drawing room as well, a heap of ashes more than
a foot high, on which the great cordwood sticks
roared merrily.

The doctor and his wife, sitting down before
the blaze, pointed proudly to this heap of ashes,
and the do6tor said, "I brought Alice to this
house a year ago, on the day of our wedding,
and we kindled a fire here, on the bare hearth.
Since then not a speck of ashes has been re
moved, except little bits from the front when the
carpet was invaded. That pile of ashes is the
witness to our year-long honeymoon."

^ood zAshes and Progress 127

Then Alice smiled fondly into the rosy glow,
herself more rosy, and they kissed each other
quite unaffectedly.

The Man Above the Square, when his memory
reached this point, let the ebony poker slide from
his grasp. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "her name was
really Madeline!"

Again he looked into the fire. "Could the
ashes have been preserved if Madeline had not
given the matter her personal attention, but had
trusted to a housemaid?" he thought. What
further reflections this question inspired must be
left to conjecture. He did not speak again.

But presently he got up, went to his desk,
and wrote a letter. He was a long time about
it, consulting frequently with the fire and smil
ing now and then. When it was done he took
it at once to the elevator to be mailed. Perhaps
he thought it unsafe to wait the turning of the

T*he 'Vacant Ttyom in

I AM content to let Mr. John Corbin sing the
praises of the stage without scenery; I prefer to
sing the praises of the stage without actors. Ever
since I was a little boy, nothing in the world
has been for me so full of charm and suggestive-
ness as an empty room. I remember as vividly
as though it were week before last being brought
home from a visit somewhere, when I was four
years old, and arriving after dark. My mother
had difficulty in finding the latch-key in her bag
(I have since noted that this is a common trait
of women), and while the search was going on
I ran around the corner of the house and peered
in one of the low windows of the library. The
moonlight lay in two oblong patches on the
floor; and as I pressed my nose against the pane
and gazed, the familiar objects within gradually
emerged from the gloom, as if a faint, invisible
light were being turned slowly up by an invisi
ble hand. Nothing seemed, however, as it did
by day, but everything took on a new and mys
terious significance that bewildered me. I think
it must also have terrified me, for I recall my

The 'Vacant T^oom in 'Drama 1 29

father's carrying me suddenly into the glare of
the hall, and saying, "What's the matter with
the boy?" And to-day I cannot enter a theatre,
even at the prosaic hour of ten in the morning,
when the chairs are covered with cloths and
maids are dusting, when the house looks very
small and the unlit and unadorned stage very like
a barn, without a thrill of imaginative pleasure.
I have even mounted the stage of an empty
theatre and addressed with impassioned, sound
less words the deeply stirred, invisible, great audi
ence, rising row on row to the roof. At such
moments I have experienced the creative joy of
a mighty orator or a sublime adior; I have actu
ally felt my pulses leap. And then the entrance
of a stage-hand or a scrub-woman would shatter
the illusion!

But it is when I am one of a real audience,
and the stage is disclosed set with scenery but
barren of players, that I derive, perhaps, the
keenest pleasure. A few playwrights have rec
ognized the power of the vacant room in
drama, but on the whole the opportunities for
such enjoyment are far too rare. This is odd,
too, with such convincing examples at hand.
There is, for instance, the close of the second
act of T)ie <L%Ceister singer, when the watchman
passes through the sleepy town after the street
brawl is over, and then the empty, moon-bathed
street lies quiet for a time, before the curtain

10

13° The Vacant cl^oom in 'Drama

closes. Of course, here there is music to aid in
creating the poetic charm and soothing repose
of that moment. But at the end of Shore Acres
there was no such aid. Who that saw it, how
ever, can forget that final picture? After Nat
Berry — played by Mr. Herne, the author — had
scratched a bit of frost off the window-pane to
peer out into the night, locked the door, and
banked the fire, he climbed with slow, aged
footsteps up the stairs to bed. At the landing
he turned to survey the old kitchen below, that
lay so cozy and warm under the benediction of
his eye. Then he disappeared with his candle,
and the stage grew quite dim, save for the red
glow from the fire. Yet the curtain did not fall;
and through a mist of tears, tears it cleansed
one's soul to shed, the audience looked for a
long, hushed moment on the scene, on the now
familiar room where so much of joy and grief
had happened, — deserted, tranquil, but suddenly,
in this new light of emptiness, realized to be
how vital a part of the lives of those people who
had made the play! It used to seem, indeed,
as if the drama had not achieved full reality
until the old kitchen had thus had its say, thus
spoken the epilogue.

It is strange to me that more playwrights
have not profited by such examples. The cry
of the average playgoer is for " action," to be
sure; but even "action" may be heightened by

The 'Vacant T{oom in 'Drama 131

contrast, by peace and serenity. Certainly the
vitality, the illusion, of a scenic background on
the stage can be enhanced by drawing a certain
amount of attention to it alone; and something
as Mr. Hardy, in The Return of the Native,
paints Egdon Heath — "Haggard Egdon" — in
its shifting moods before he introduces a single
human being upon the scene of their coming
tragedy, it is quite possible for the modern play
wright, with an artist to aid him, to show the
audience the scene of his drama, to let its sug
gestive beauty, its emotional possibilities, charm
or fire their fancies before the speech and ac
tion begin. So also, as Wagner and Mr. Herne
have demonstrated, there can be a climax of the
vacant stage. I look to the new stage-craft to
develop such possibilities.

On Qiving an ^Author a "Plot

IHERE are two people who annoy an author
more than any others — the person who calmly
supposes that everything he writes is biographi
cal, or even autobiographical, and the person who
declares, "I've got a dandy plot for you" — and
proceeds to tell it.

The first person, of course, is annoying, be
cause an author's stories always are either bio
graphical or autobiographical, and he never cares
to admit, even to himself, how true this is. To
be sure, his characters are composites, and his
self-revelations are rather possibilities (or even,
alas, Freudian wishes!) than records of actuality.
But fancy trying to explain that to a gushing
female who has developed a sudden passion for
calling on your wife, and is heard to remark,
"Oh, is that where he writes ?" as you flee by a
back door, down the garden!

The second person is annoying not so much
because most of the "dandy plots" that he or she
tells are hoary with age, or even because most
writers don't start with a 'plot' at all, and couldn't
define a plot if they had to; but rather because a

On (jiving an ^Author a 'Plot 133

writer, however humble, has to feel the idea for
a story come glowing up over the horizon of his
brain out of the east of his own subconscious-
ness, or it is never his, it never acquires the nec
essary warmth to interest him, the color and
light to make it real. This is a curious fad:, and
one which your modest writer shrinks from try
ing to explain to his well-meaning friend, lest
he seem egotistical. Only the blessed publicity
of print could draw him out. Yet the psychol
ogy involved perhaps deserves some attention.

Suppose it is my common method, in writing
a story, to start from some social situation which
illumines a strata of life; suppose, let us assume,
that I am present at a dinner party where a rad
ical has got in by mistake and says something
which profoundly shocks some capitalistic pirate
who honestly feels himself a pillar of law and
order, and in this situation I see an irony which
gradually demands fictional expression, as im
agined characters and more extensive clashes be
gin to shape in my brain. There you have a not
at all impossible evolution of a story. But now
suppose that instead of my being present at this
party, a friend had been present, quite as alive as
I to the ironies of the situation, and suppose my
friend later repeated the incident to me — why
should it not serve me just as well, why should
it not start the fictional urge, the gestation of
character and incident?

134 On (jiving an ^Author a T*!ot

Generalizing is dangerous work. Of course,
there may be authors in whom it would start
the process. But I have never known one. Even
in so exceptional a case as this — of course, the
usual friendly suggestion has no real meat of
fiction in it at all — something is lacking to fire
the imagination. It is exactly as if your nose
were called upon to sense, or your retina to im
age, an odor or a scene described to you and not
directly experienced. Your brain accepts the de
scription, but there is no warmth in the reaction,
no tingle of life. Just so, it would almost seem,
the conception for a story, a poem, no doubt for
a picture, too, or a strain of music, is something
less, or more, than merely mental; it is in some
subtle way sensory, as if the brain had fingers
which must themselves touch the thing directly
to get the feel of it. Is it not, perhaps, this fact
which has caused so many artists, consciously or
unconsciously, to believe in "inspiration"?

The singing line walks from nowhere into
the poet's head, the perfect situation comes to
the writer of fiction when he is least expecting
it. To take a humble example, I was once sit
ting in an editor's office, listening while he ex
pounded to me a grand "plot" for a series of
stories. I looked across the street from his win
dow to avoid his eyes, lest I should show my
lack of appreciation, and there beheld a slight
incident which I instantly knew was a starting-

On (jiving an ^Author a "Plot 135

point. It turned out to be worth a year's income
to me. Yet, to a merely impersonal judgment,
the editor's idea was more interesting and worth
while than mine. Only it wasn't mine; that's
the point. It was foreign born, and could never
become a citizen of my mental commonwealth.
I have not quite reached the pitch of calling my
ideas inspirations, but I long ago recognized that
unless they were my ideas from the dim days
before their birth they could never be mine, and
it was only a waste of time to wrestle with them.
So when a friend declares he has a dandy plot
for me, I summon what patience I may and pre
tend to listen, while planning a better succession
of perennials for next year's garden, or mentally
reviewing the prospecl of cutting three strokes
off my golf score.

The Twilight Veil

NEW YORK! How few of us call it home! We
have been sucked into it, as into a whirlpool,
and as we spin round and round on its mighty
unrest our hearts and fancies find repose in
memory — the memory of an old New England
village, or a corn field and a split-rail fence and
then the level prairie, or cotton fields and the
red handkerchiefs of the negroes, or the vineyard
slopes of Sicily, or the great white surf beating up
the cliffs of Connemara. It may be that the second
and third generations of immigrants, born on the
East Side, are true New Yorkers, just as a van
ishing generation of elderly men and women on
Murray Hill and the Avenue are true New York
ers. But the great majority of New York's five
millions cherish in their hearts either the memory
or the hope of some spot far away to which they
give the allegiance of home love. Ours is a curi
ous city in that respe6t. Perhaps, indeed, it is a
fortunate one. Without such memory or such
hope, the flat-dwelling imposed on most New
Yorkers by economic necessity would be a deadly
thing — or shall we say, a more deadly thing?

The Twilight Veil 137

If you desire a curious experience, go into a
New York club like the Yale or Harvard or
Players' club, and colledt a dozen men at random,
asking each for a little word-sketch of his child
hood home. Seldom enough will the scene of
that sketch be in New York City, and you will
probably be surprised to find how infrequently
it will be in any city. A kind of urban con
sciousness gets complete possession of us after
we have lived long on Manhattan Island, and
we are prone to forget what a geographically
tiny spot it is. We forget the country. It comes
as a surprise when we discover how many of
our fellows were, like us, country bred. We are
still a nation, at bottom, of little white dwelling
houses, if not any longer of little white school
houses. (I know the phrase is little red school
houses, only they never were red, but white!)
This is probably one reason why our aesthetic
sense is not adjusted to find more beauties than
we do in the physical aspects of New York City.
Deep in our consciousness, if not rather our sub-
consciousness, lies the ache for green vistas and
gardens, for low sky lines and quiet streets.
When we speak of the pidiuresque in New
York, we most often refer (aside from the ob
viously striking aspe6t of the lower city from
the harbor) to the old brick houses on Washing
ton Square or the quaint streets of Greenwich
Village. Yet we do both the city and ourselves

138 The Tw ilig ht Ve il

an injustice by this more or less unconscious
attitude. Let us consider picturesque to mean
what is shaped by chance and the play of light
into a beautiful picture, and, if we but walk the
town with eyes upraised and open, we shall see
the picturesque on every side.

There is the Plaza Hotel, for example.
Every New Yorker and every visitor to New
York knows it, — a great, white, naked sky-scraper,
with a green hip-roof, rising close to the Park
and St. Gaudens' golden bronze of General
Sherman. But how many know that it is prob
ably the one sky-scraper in the world which
can gaze at its own reflection in still water, and
that to the spectator looking at it over this water-
mirror it becomes a gigantic but ethereal Jap
anese design, even to the pine limb flung across
the upper corner?

They say there is an hour at twilight when
all men appear noble, and all women beautiful.
Certainly there is such a twilight hour when
New York City is veiled, oftimes, in loveliness;
and most lovely at this hour is the Plaza mirrored
in the pool. The view is not easy to find, un
less you are one of those who know your Cen
tral Park. But a little searching will uncover
it. You will see in the southeast corner of the
Park a lake, and just beyond this lake you will
find a path turning west. That path leads to a
stone bridge over a northward-stretching inlet

The Twilight Veil 139

of the pond. Cross the bridge a few paces and
turn your face to the south. At your feet the
bank goes down sharply to the still, dark water.
Across the pond the bank rises steep and rocky,
covered with thick shrubbery and trees. Shoot
ing up apparently out of these trees is the white
wall of the Plaza, three hundred feet into the
air, and down into the water sinks its still reflec
tion, to an equal depth. It rises alone, open sky
to left and right, and there is just room in the
lake for its replica. The picture is impressive
by day, but as twilight begins to steal over the
scene, as the sky takes on a pearly softness, and
the shadows creep through the trees in the Park,
and the lights in half the windows up that white
cliff" wall begin to gleam in golden squares, the
great building becomes curiously ethereal, the
pine limb flung into the foreground of the de
sign catches the eye, the reflection in the water is
as real as the reality. The Plaza, monstrous tons
of steel and stone, floats between two elements.
Then darkness gathers, the reflected lights in the
blackening water grow more golden, and sud
denly, perhaps, a duck swims across a tenth story
window and sets it dancing in golden ripples.
You may fare far among the ancient and "pic
turesque" cities of the earth without finding a
rival for this strange bit of beauty in New York,
an ethereal sky-scraper in white and gold gazing
at its own reflection in the forest pool!

140 The Twilight Veil

Twilight in the Park, indeed, converts more
than one building into a thing of beauty, and
the Plaza into a thing of beauty from more than
one view. For instance, as you pass into the
Park, seeking the spot we have described, turn
back before you have advanced far, and see the
great cliff wall going up beyond the slender trac
ery of young trees, with the street lights, just
turned on, making a level strip of golden shim
mer at its base, curiously suggestive of crowds
and gaiety. There is at all hours a certain charm
to be found in the long line of high hotels and
apartment houses which line the Park to the
west, when you view them over treetops, rock
ledges, and running brooks, or over white fields
of snow. It is as if the city had crested in a great
wave along the green shore of the country, ready
to curl and fall and dash onward, but had been
suddenly arrested by some more potent King
Canute. Loveliness, however, is hardly a word
you would apply till twilight steals across the
scene. Down side streets into the west the gol
den sunset glows for a time, and the hadows on
the snow are amethyst. Then the glow fades.
The arc lamps come on with a splutter, and they,
too, at first are amethyst. But in the gathering
dark they change to blue. The sky changes to
the deep blue of approaching night. The dim
bulks of the buildings change to blue. The
shadows about you are but a deeper blue. Even

The Twilight Veil 141

the snow at your feet is blue. In the great apart
ments and hotels the golden window squares ap
pear, and the looming procession of blue shadow
bulks might be a fleet of giant liners going by
you in the night.

There is always a mystery and poignant charm
about our parks in New York, if you let them
have their way with your imagination, which
you do not find in other parks intrinsically, per
haps, more beautiful. No doubt this comes from
violent contrast between our city and the hush
and peace of trees. Our streets are all treeless,
and our great heave of masonry comes up to the
very edge of our green oases. Even the smaller
parks which fill but a block or two, when twi
light enfolds them, blurring the harsher outlines
and conjuring out the shadows, can captivate the
senses. If you chance to wander in Brooklyn —
which no self-respeding inhabitant of Manhat
tan permits himself to do except under compul-
sing! — you may come upon Fort Greene Park
when the evening shadows are stealing down the
streets to meet you, and the Martyrs' Monument
strangely converted into a pagan altar, silhouet
ted against the sky amid its guardian druid grove
wherein the lamps glow and twinkle and dark
figures move mysteriously.

But it is not even necessary to enter the parks
of New York to find the pi&uresque and lovely.
Such open areas as Washington and Madison

142 The Twilight Veil

Squares hold varying aspects of beauty and im
aginative suggestion, from sunrise to moonset.
Large enough to admit the play of light and to
blur a bit the building lines at their further side,
these squares reward the seeing eye with many
an unguessed delight.

For ten years my rooms were six stories up
on the east side of Washington Square, and for
ten years, at all seasons and all hours, I walked
daily up-town through Madison Square to the
Rialto, and back again. I have often regretted
that I kept no note-book of the changing aspects
of these two oases, as one keeps a note-book of
the seasons in the country. Spring comes in
Washington and Madison Squares with signs no
less unmistable than the hepaticas by the wood
land road. The western wall of the Flatiron
Building has its autumnal colorings; and though
the first snow fall may be black mud by noon, at
sun-up those brick-bounded areas laugh in white
and the aged trees arch their fantastic tracery.

Spring in the Square! The central fountain
is playing again its rainbow jet of spray, the tulips
are a jaunty ring about it, the benches have put
forth a strange, sad foliage of humanity (you
must not think too much of the benches nor
look at them too long!), the shrill children are
everywhere, the green 'busses are gay with sight
seers atop, and as you stand by the fountain and
look northward through the Washington Arch,

The Twilight Veil 143

you see that an amazing thing has come to pass.
The great arch spans the vista of the Avenue,
lined here with red brick dwellings and the
sunny white bulk of the old Brevoort House.
Far off, the sky-scrapers begin to loom, whip
ping out flags and steam plumes. It is a treeless
vista, yet it is hazed with spring! Imagination,
you scoff — and dust. Yet you look again, and
it is not imagination, and it is not dust. It is
the veil of spring, cast with delicate hand over
the city. These laughing sight-seers atop the
green 'bus now going under the arch feel it,
too. These children screaming round your feet,
as they dash through the wind-borne fountain
spray, are aware of it. There is an answering
benignity in the calm, red brick dwellings up
the vista of the Avenue. Wait for a few hours,
let the sun sink behind the heights of Hoboken,
and then wander once more into the Square.
Twilight, a warm, balmy twilight, is upon your
spirit. Look through the arch southward now.
There is still plenty of light left in the sky, but
the great, springing, Roman masonry is dusky.
It frames the sweeping curve of the asphalt
around the fountain, and beyond that the Judson
Memorial tower, graceful, Italian, bearing its
eledtric cross against the failing day like a cluster
of timid evening stars. It is a tower from the
plains of Lombardy, or from an island in the
Tiber, seen through an arch of ancient Rome.

144 T&e Twilight Veil

Do you objed: to that in an American city? I
cannot argue the point. I only know that when
I see them so, the one framing the other, in the
spring twilight, or in the early dusk of a winter
day, my heart is very glad, and my spirit feels
a touch of that peace and calm the poet felt
among the Roman ruins,

" Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles
Miles on miles "

How often in New York it is a tower which
gathers the picture together! Ours is a city of
towers. We hide Trinity spire in a well, and
Henry Arthur Jones, the playwright, once com
plained that the windows of his hotel room on
the Avenue looked down upon the pinnacle of
a church steeple. Yet our towers rise just the
same, new ones leaping up as far above the new
three-hundred-foot sky-line as Trinity steeple
once lifted above lower Broadway. We aspire
still. Nor is the old Judson tower on Washing
ton Square yet dwarfed. How many red sunsets
have I seen glow through its belfry windows,
while the tower itself was a black silhouette
against the sky, and down in the shadowy Square
the night lamps began to come out, or the as
phalt, drenched by a shower, shone as if molten
copper had been rained upon it! In how many
deep, starlit nights have I thrown open my win
dow for a fresher breath and a moment of medi-

The Twilight Veil 145

tation, to see the deserted Square below me, its
white arch faintly gleaming in the radiation of
the arc lamps, the long stretch of city roofs be
yond, the twinkling lamps on the far heights of
Hoboken, and there in the centre of the picture
the dark, silent tower, keeping quiet watch and
bearing its steady cross like a star-cluster in the
night! Many a time I have gone to bed with its
beautiful image behind my eyelids.

The Metropolitan tower in Madison Square
is less intimate. It has its moods, but they are
the moods of the mountain. It has dwarfed the
graceful, Spanish tower of the Madison Square
Garden, without a doubt, and taken the proud
Diana down a peg. But there are compensations
in its mightiness. Have you ever seen it on a
f°ggy ^ay &°'m& UP out °f signt into the driving
vapors? Have you stood in ancient Gramercy
Park — still a bit of the old, domestic New York
of the '/o's — and seen it booming up over the
red brick dwellings, white and confident into the
sun? Have you ever come down through Madi
son Square late at night, when the relic of a
moon was rising behind the tower, and the
ghostly shaft stood up tremendous against the
pale, racing cloud-rack? Have you seen it with
the last pink glow of sunset upon it,. and upon
the western wall of the Flatiron Building, and
upon nothing else, all lower buildings being in
shadows of obscuring twilight? That is one of

n

146 The Twilight Veil

its delicate mountian moods, when it seems to
lift above our earth-bound vision and look over
those western cloud ranges into the Land Be
yond the Sunset.

Have you seen it, too, down Madison Avenue
in the mysterious twilight hour of blue and gold
when all New York is beautiful? The street
lamps have come on; the dark figures of home-
going pedestrians hurry past you; there are lamps
in the windows of houses. A filmy blue veil of
twilight obscures the distances, so that they are
soft, alluring. The tower is pale, almost ethereal,
at the end of the vista. Its great clock, pricked
out with golden lamps, seems scarce a third of
the way up its side. The white walls rise on,
and on, with here and there a spot of gold, and
taper into nothing. They are lost in the gloom
of coming night. But still they must go on,
for far aloft you see the lantern glowing like
a star, hung between earth and heaven. In this
twilight hour of blue and gold the tower is the
mighty guardian spirit of the scene, sending
down sonorous word of the hours as they pass,
and lifting our eyes, like its steady lantern, to
ward the watch-towers of Eternity. Must we be
forever reminded that those glowing window
squares up its flanks denote lawyers toiling late
at their briefs, or mining stock promoters plan
ning a new cast of the net? Must we be forever
told that this is not a spire in praise of God but

The Twilight Veil 147

a monument in praise of Mammon? Aspiration
is in its lines, beauty in its sky-borne shaft of blue
and gold, wonder in its shrouded summit.

"They builded better than they knew —
The conscious stone to beauty grew."

It is enough. Let us wonder and be glad.

There are many odd views of the tower to be
had for a little searching, spots where its peak
appears in unexpected places, or with unusual
suggestion. There is just one point in Union
Square, for example, about halfway round "dead
man's curve/' where you see the tapering pyra
mid and the golden lantern overtopping the high
buildings between. You do not see it again, if
you are walking up Broadway, till you are close
to Madison Square. Then, if you lift your eyes,
you are suddenly aware of it looming far aloft
over the cornice-line to your right, shredding
the mists on a stormy day, or by night lifting
its latern up with the stars. There is always an
added impressiveness about a tower when we
cannot see the base. The sheer drop of its sides
is left to our imagination, and the human im
agination may generally be trusted to embroider
fad:. For that reason alone, the view of the
tower from a certain point on East Thirty-first
Street, between Madison and Fourth Avenues,
would be worth the searching out. But it has
another and unique charm. If you will walk

148 The Twilight Veil

along Thirtieth Street toward Fourth Avenue you
will see, tucked in between larger and more
modern buildings on the south side, a little two-
story-and-a-half wooden cottage, set back a few
feet behind an iron fence. It must have stood
there many years, for the wooden age in New
York was long, long ago. It is a quaint little
dwelling, with quaint pseudo-Gothic ornamen
tations, and until recently was used as an antique
shop. A large weather-stained Venus stood upon
the front porch, ironically beside a spinning-
wheel! Now the house is untenanted, so that
you lift your eyes the sooner to look above and
beyond it. It occupies, of course, a slit between
higher buildings. Through that slit, as you stand
on the opposite curb, you look over a few spindly
black chimney-stacks in the foreground directly
to the Metropolitan Tower, booming up sud
denly and unexpectedly. You see only that for
a moment, because of its Titanic size and white
impressiveness. Then you notice something out
lined against it, a lower tower, much more slender,
a mere tracery of delicate shafts and belfries, and
crowning it, her bow forever poised, the lovely
limbed Diana. Whence either of these towers
come, you see not. They merely spring up into
the vision over the roof of the little wooden house,
the darker one outlined against the other for com
parison. Between and around them steam plumes
from unseen buildings drift like clouds. Diana

The Twilight Veil 149

turns a little, and points her shaft into the wind
anew. The might of the new tower is mightier
for this close comparison. Yet the other tower, too,
does not suffer, its femininity is the more allur
ing. But lift your eyes as you walk through this
commonplace cross-street of New York, and you
may see as picturesque a vista, over the quaint
wooden cottage, as any city, anywhere, affords —
forty stories looking down on two and a half,
and between them, in intermediate flight, St.
Gaudens' bronze Diana.

Snow in the city! We in New York tjhink
of bespattered boots, of horses falling down, of
dirty piles, more black than white, lining the
streets like igloos till the tip-carts come and
carry them off. "The frolic architecture" of the
snow is a thing of memory, not of present fad:.
Like Whittier, we recall the hooded well-sweep
or fantastic pump, and the great drifts by the
pasture wall. Yet, once again, it is the seeing
eye we lack, nor do we need even to enter the
Park to discover the snow at its artistic handi
work. Let Sixty-fifth Street enter the Park for
you, from the east, and do you stand upon Fifth
Avenue and note the conversion from ugliness
to beauty of a paved road, dipping into a dug-
way between dirty stone walls. The soiled pave
ment is hidden now, each rough stone on the
bounding walls is softly outlined with white,
not far into the Park a graceful stone foot-bridge

150 The Twilight Veil

spans the sunken street, supporting a second and
more graceful arch of snow, and the street curves
alluringly into the trees which rise beyond, a
gray wall of misty shadow, the eye is satisfied
with a clean, well-composed, strongly lined
picture, and the imagination almost deluded into
a belief of its rusticity.

I remember once walking down Broadway
late at night, after an evening at some tiresome
play and supper at some yet more tiresome and
tawdry restaurant. I had been having what is
popularly supposed to be a "good time," and I
was bored. There had been a recent deep fall
of snow. The night was clear and cold. Below
Herald Square I met comparatively few pedes
trians, and those few were not of the sort to
dispel my despondent mood.

"Back home," I thought, "the moon should
be shining on the white, clean hills, and under
neath my boots the snow-crust would squeak.
Perhaps a screech-owl would whistle his plain
tive call in the ghostly orchard. How beautiful
there the night would be! But here — " and I
flung out my arm instinctively toward the walls
which hemmed me in.

But as I drew near Madison Square, and lifted
my eyes to the soaring ship's-prow of the Flat-
iron Building, I noted suddenly that its upper
stories were bathed in a pale, golden glow; and
coming full into the square, I saw the moon,

The Twilight Veil 151

riding small and high beyond the white tower.
The next strip of canon street shut it out once
more, but at Union Square it was waiting to
greet me, and as I entered the slit of Broadway
to the south and drew near Eleventh street, I was
aware of the snow-covered northward pitch of
Grace Church roof gleaming in its light, a great
rectangle of pale radiance at the bend of the
street. Above the roof the Gothic spire stood up
serenely. There were no passers at the moment,
not even a trolley-car. The greatest traffic artery
in town was hushed as death. The high build
ings about were dark and shadowy. At the angle
commanding the vista in either direction the
church slept in the moonlight.

"Deep on the convent roof the snows
Are sparking to the moon."

Tennyson's lines came to me instinctively, for
here in the heart of town was their very picture
and their simple magic. A little shamefaced for
my sceptic blindness, I passed on toward home.
Somebody, probably Emerson, said that we
bring from Europe only what we take to it. But
need one go to Europe to demonstrate the prin
ciple? We in New York, who are often our
city's harshest critics, find pretty much what we
look for. We do not look for beauty, and we
do not find it. Then, too, man is no less con
ventional about beauty than about other things.

152 The Twilight Veil

If he believes that the beauty of a city lies in a
level cornice-line, converging vistas, malls of
trees, "civic centres/' of what use to tell him
that there may be a beauty as well of non-con
formity, when the magic veil of twilight wraps
the city round, and twinkling lamps climb un
believable heights and all the town is a mighty
nocShirne in blue and gold? We would not be
thought to say that New York is always beauti
ful, or that a great deal of it is not much of the
time ugly beyond hope. But there is not a street
of it from end to end but has some point of pic
torial charm, whence one may see a span of the
Brooklyn Bridge leaping over the tenements, or
the scholastic Gothic spire of the City College
chapel crowning the rocks at the close of the
vista, or just a rosy sunset over the Hoboken
hills. And there are parks and squares of almost
constant charm, though it be a charm not of the
old world, but the new, of the uprearing steel
city of the twentieth century. And finally there
are certain hours when kindly Nature takes a
hand at coloring our drab mortar piles and
softening out distances and making our forests
of masonry no less wonderful to look upon than
her own forests of timber. Such an hour is the
blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet even
ing when the pavements shine with molten gold
and the eledric signs along upper Broadway,
like King Arthur's dragoned helmet, make "all

The Twilight Veil 153

the night a steam of fire," and round the tall
tower of the Times Building the vapour clouds
drift, now concealing, now revealing some beam
of light from a window high aloft. After all,
it is no great credit to any of us to find the
ugliness in New York. The ugliness is rather
obvious. To find the beauty is a worthier task,
and might make us more keen to cherish and
to expand it. It is there for the seeing eye.

Spring in the Qarden

No DAFFODILS "take the winds of March with
beauty" in our Berkshire gardens. What daffo
dils we have in that month of alternate slush and
blizzard bloom in pots, indoors. But one sign
of spring the gardens holds no less plain to read,
even if some people may not regard it as so po
etic — over across the late snow, close to the hot
bed frames, a great pile of fresh stable manure
is steaming like a miniature volcano. To the
true gardener, that sight is thrilling, nay, lyric! I
have always found that the measure of a man's
(and more especially a woman's) garden love was
to be found in his (or her) attitude toward the
manure pile. For that reason I put the manure
pile in the first paragraph of my praise of gardens
in the spring.

That yellowish-brown, steaming volcano above
the slushy snow of March promises so much ! I
will not offend sensitive garden owners who hire
others to do their dirty work5 by singing the joy
of turning it over with a fork, once, twice, per
haps three times, till it is "working" evenly all
through. Yet there is such joy, accentuated on

Spring in the (jar den 155

the second day by the facl that the thermometer
has taken a sudden jump upwards, the snow is
melting fast, and in the shrubs and evergreen
hedge the song-sparrows are singing, and the
robins. Last year, I remember, I paused with
the steaming pile half turned, first to roll up my
sleeves and feel the warm sun on my arms —
most delicious of early spring sensations — and
then to listen to the love-call of a chickadee,
over and over the three notes, one long and two
short a whole tone lower. I answered him, he
replied, and we played our little game for two
or three minutes, till he came close and detected
the fraud. Then a bluebird flashed through the
orchard, a jay screamed, as I bent to my toil
again. Beside me were the hotbed frames, the
glasses newly washed, the winter bedding of
leaves removed, and behind them last year's con
tents rotted into rich loam. Another day or two,
and they would be prepared for seeding — if I
only could bring myself to work hard enough
until then!

How much hope goes into a hotbed in late
March, or early April! How much warmth the
friendly manure down under the soil sends up by
night to germinate the seeds, though the weather
go back to winter outside — as it invariably does
in our mountains! Last year, for example, we
had snow on the nitnh of April, and again on the
twenty-third and twenty-ninth, while the year

156 Spring in the garden

before, on the ninth, six inches fell. In the low
land regions gardening is easier, perhaps, but yet
there is a certain joy in this fickle spring weather
of ours, — the joy of going out in the morning
across a white garden and sweeping the snow from
hotbed mats, lifting the moist, steaming glass,
and catching from within, strong against your
face, the pungent warmth and aroma of the
heated soil and the delicate fragrance of young
seedlings. How fast the seeds come — some of
them! Others come so slowly that the amateur
gardener is in despair, and angrily decides to try
a new seed house next year. The vegetable
frames are sown in rows — celery, tomatoes, cauli
flowers, lettuce, radishes, peppers, coming up in
tiny green ribbons, the radishes racing ahead.
The flower frames, however, are sown in squares,
each about a foot across, and each labeled and
marked off* with a thin strip of wood. These
are the early plantings of the annuals, for we
cannot sow out-of-doors till the first or even the
second week in May in our climate. Sometimes,
indeed, we do not dare to sow even in the frames
till well into April. The asters are usually up first,
racing the weeds. The little squares make, in a
week or so, a green checker-board, each promis
ing its quota of color to the garden, and very
soon the early cosmos, thinned to the strongest
plants, has shot up like a miniature forest, tower
ing over the lowlier seedlings, sometimes bump-

Spring in the (garden 157

ing its head against the glass before it can be
transplanted to the open ground in May. But
most prolific, most promising, and most bother
some, are the squares labeled "antirrhinum/'
coral red, salmon pink, white, dark maroon, and
so on; tiny seeds scattered on the ground and
sprinkled with a little sand, they come up by
the hundred, and each seedling has to go into
a pot before it goes into the ground.

There is work for an April day! I sit on a
board by the hotbed, cross-legged like a Turk,
while the sun is warm on my neck and I feel
my arms tanning, and removing a mass of the
seedlings on a flat mason's trowel, I lift each
strong plant between thumb and .finger, its long,
delicate white root dangling like a needle, and
pot it in a small paper pot. When two score pots
are ready, I set them in a cold-frame, sprinkle
them, stretch the kink out of my back, listen to
the wood- thrush a moment (he came on the
fourteenth and is evidently planning to nest in
our pines), and then return to my job. Patience
is required to pot four or five hundred snap
dragons; but patience is required, after all, in
most things that are rightly performed. I think
as I work of the glory around my sundial in
July, I arrange and rearrange the colors in my
mind — and presently the job is done.

But the steaming manure pile is not the only
sign of spring, nor the hotbeds the only things

158 Spring in the Cjarden

to be attended to. If they only were, how much
easier gardening would be — and how much less
exciting! There is always work to be done in
the orchard, for instance, some pruning and
scraping. I always go into the orchard on the
first really warm, spring-like March day, with a
common hoe, and scrape a little, not so much
for the good of the trees as for the good of my
soul. The real scraping for the scale spray was,
of course, done earlier. There is a curious, faintly
putrid smell to old or bruised apple wood, which
is stirred by my scraping, and that smell sweeps
over me a wave of memories, memories of child
hood in a great yellow house that stood back
from the road almost in its orchard, and boasted
a cupola with panes of colored glass which made
the familiar landscape strange; memories of youth
in that same house, too, dim memories " of sweet,
forgotten, wistful things. " My early spring af
ternoons in the orchard are very precious to me
now, and when the weather permits I always
try to burn the rubbish and dead prunings on
Good Friday, the incense of the apple wood float
ing across the brown garden like a prayer, the
precious ashes sinking down to enrich the soil.
The bees, too, are always a welcome sign of
the returning season, hardly less than the birds,
though the advent of the white-throated sparrow
(who delayed till April twenty-first last year) is
always a great event. He is first heard most often

Spring in the (garden 159

before breakfast, in an apple tree close to the
sleeping-porch, his flute-like triplets sweetly
penetrating my dreams and bringing me gladly
out of bed — something he alone can do, by the
way, and not even he after the first morning!
But the bees come long before. The earliest
record I have is March thirty-first, but there
must be dates before that which I have negle&ed
to put down. Some house plant, a hyacinth pos
sibly, is used as bait, and when the ground is
thawing out beneath a warm spring sun we put
the plant on the southern veranda and watch.
Day after day nothing happens, then suddenly,
some noon, it has scarcely been set on the ground
when its blossoms stir, and it is murmurous with
bees. Then we know that spring indeed has
come, and we begin to rake the lawns, wherever
the frost is out, wheeling great crate loads of
leaves and rubbish upon the garden, and filling
our neighbors' houses with pungent smoke.

There is a certain spot between the thumb and
first finger which neither axe nor golf-club nor
saw handle seems to callous. The spring raking
finds it out, and gleefully starts to raise a blister.
My hands are perpetually those of a day-laborer,
yet I expect that blister every spring. Indeed,
I am rather disappointed now if I don't get it,
I feel as if I weren't doing my share of work.
The work is worth the blister. I know of few
sensations more delightful than that of seeing

160 Spring in the Cjarden

the lawn emerging green and clean beneath your
rake, the damp mould baring itself under the
shrubbery, the paths, freshly edged, nicely scar-
rowed with tooth marks; then of feeling the
tug of the barrow handles in your shoulder
sockets; and finally, as the sun is sending long
shadows over the ground, of standing beside the
rubbish pile with your rake as a poker and
hearing the red flames crackle and roar through
the heap, while great puffs of beautiful brown
smoke go rolling away across the garden and
the warmth is good to your tired body. Clear
ing up is such a delight, indeed, that I cannot
now comprehend why I so intensely disliked
to do it when I was half my present age. Per
haps it was because at that time clearing up was
put to me in the light of a duty, not a pleasure.
There is alas, too often a tempering of sadness
in the joy of taking the covers off the garden.
One removes them, especially after a cold open
winter, with much the same anxious excitement
that one opens a long-delayed letter from a dear
friend who has been in danger. What signs of
life will the peonies show under their four inches
of rotted manure, and the Japanese irises by the
pool, and the beds of Darwins, so confidently
relied upon to ring the sundial in late May and
early June, before the succeeding annuals are
ready? How will the hollyhocks, so stately in
midsummer all down the garden wall, have with-

Spring in the (garden 161

stood the alternate thaws and freezes which char
acterized our abominable January and February?
Then there are those two long rows of foxgloves
and Canterbury bells, across the rear of the vege
table garden, where they were set in the fall to
make strong plants before being put in their
permanent places — or rather their season's places,
for these lovely flowers are perversely biennials,
and at least seven times every spring I vow I
will never bother with them again, and then
make an even larger sowing when their stately
stalks and sky-blue bells are abloom in summer!
Tenderly you lift the pine boughs from them
on a balmy April day (it was not until almost
mid-April last year), when snow still lingers,
perhaps, in dirty patches on the north side of
the evergreens. Will they show frozen, flabby,
withered leaves, or will their centers be bright
with new promise? It is a moment to try the
soul of the gardener, and no joy is quite like
that of finding them all alive, nor any sorrow
like that of finding them dead. At first I used
to give up gardening forever when the perennials
and biennials were winter-killed, just as a be
ginner at golf gives up the game forever each
time he makes a vile score. Then I began to com
promise on a garden of annuals. Now I have
learned philosophy — and also better methods
of winter protection. Likewise, I have learned
that a good many of the perennials which were

162 Spring in the (garden

stone-dead when the covers were removed have
a trick of coming to life under the kiss of May,
and struggling up to some sort of bloom, even
if heroically spindly like lean soldiers after a
hard campaign. The hollyhocks, especially, have
a way of seeding themselves undetected, and pre
senting you in spring with a whole unsuspected
family of children, some of whom wander far
from the parent stem and suddenly begin to shoot
up in the most unexpected places. An exquisite
yellow hollyhock last summer sprouted unnoted
beneath our dinning-room window, and we
were not aware of it till one July morning when
it poked up above the sill. A few days later,
when we came down to breakfast, there it was
abloom, nodding in at the open window.

Another spring excitement in the garden is
the pea planting, both the sweet peas and what
our country folk sometimes call "eatin' peas."
No rivalry is so keen as that between pea-
growers. My neighbors and I struggle for su
premacy in sweet peas at the flower show in
July, and great glory goes to him who gets the
first mess of green peas on his table. We have
tried sweet-pea sowing in the fall, and it does
not work. So now I prepare a trench in Octo
ber, partially fill it with manure, and cover it
with leaves, which I remove at the first hint of
warm weather in March. The earth-piles on
either side thaw out quickly, and I get an early

Spring in the (jar den 163

sowing, putting in as many varieties as I can af
ford (my wife says twice as many as I can afford),
jealously guarding the secret of their number.
The vegetable peas are planted later, usually
about the first or second day of April, as soon as
the top soil of the garden can be worked with
a fork, and long before the plowing. We put
in first a row of Daniel O'Rourke's, not because
they are good for much, but because they will
beat any other variety we have discovered by two
days at least. Then we put in a row of a better
standard early variety. How we watch those
rows for the first sprouts! How we coddle and
cultivate them! How eagerly we insped: our
neighbors' rows, trying to appear nonchalant!
And doubtless how silly this sounds to anyone
who is not a gardener. Last summer we got
our first mess of peas on June twenty-first, and
after eating a spoonful, we rushed to the tele
phone, and were about to ring, when somebody
called us. "Hello/' we said into the transmitter.
A voice on the other end of the wire, curiously
choked and munchy, cried, "We are eating our
first peas! My mouth's full of 'em now!"

"That's nothing," we answered, "we've got
our first mouthful all swallowed."

"Well, anyhow," said our disappointed neigh
bor, "I called up first! Good-bye."

How is that for a neck-and-neck finish at
the tape?

164 Spring in the (garden

As April waxes into May, the garden beds are
a perpetual adventure in the expected, each morn
ing bringing some new revelation of old friends
come back, and as you dig deep and prepare the
beds for the annuals, or spade manure around the
perennials, or set your last year's plantings of
hollyhocks, larkspur, foxgloves and campanulas
into their places, you move tenderly amid the
aspiring red stalks of the peonies, the Jason's
crop of green iris spears, the leaves of tulips and
narcissuses and daffodils, the fresh green of tiny
sweet William plants clustered 'round the mother
plant like a brood of chicks around the hen.
You must be at setting them into borders, too,
or putting the surplus into flats and then tele
phoning your less fortunate friends. One of the
joys of a garden is in giving away your extra
plants and seedlings.

One morning the asparagus bed, already
brown again after the April showers have driven
the salt into the ground, is pricked with short
tips. That is a luscious sight! Inch by inch they
push up, and thick and fast they come at last,
and more and more and more. My diary shows
me that we ate our first bunch last year on May
ninth. On that day, also, I learn from the same
source, the daffodils were out, the Darwin tu
lips were budding, and we spent the afternoon
burning caterpillars' nests in the orchard — one
spring crop which is never welcome, and never

Spring in the Gfarden 165

winter-killed. At this date, too, we are hard at
work spraying, and sowing the annuals out-of-
doors in the seed beds, and planting corn (the
potatoes are all in by now), immediately follow
ing the plowing, which was delayed till the first
of May by a belated snowstorm. Winter with us
is like a clumsy person who tries over and over
to make his exit from a room but does not know
how to accomplish it. It is a busy time, for
no sooner are the annuals planted, and the vege
tables, than some of the seedlings from the hot
beds have to be set out (such as early cosmos),
and the perennial beds already have begun to
bloom, and require cultivation and admiration,
and the flowers in the wild garden — hepaticas
and trilliums and bloodroot and violets — are cry
ing to be noticed, and, confound it all, here is
the lawn getting rank under the influence of its
spring dressing, and demands to be mowed! Yes,
and we forget to get the mower sharpened be
fore we put it away in the fall.

"May fifteen" — it is my diary for last year —
"apple blossoms showing pink, and the rhubarb
leaves peeping over the tops of their barrels this
morning, like Ali Baba and the forty thieves."

Well, well; straight, juicy red stalks the length
of a barrel, fit for a pie and the market! It is
our second commercial product, the asparagus
slightly preceding it. The garden is getting into
shape now, indeed; the wheel-hoe is traveling up

1 66 Spring in the Qarden

and down the green rows; the hotbed glasses are
entirely removed by day; and the early cauli
flower plants are put into the open ground at
the first promise of a shower. The annuals are
up in the seed beds; the pool has been cleaned
and filled, the goldfish are once more swimming
in it, the Cape Cod water-lily, brought from its
winter quarters in the dark cellar, has begun to
make a leaf, and we have begun to hope that
maybe this year it will also make a blossom, for
we are nothing in mid-May if not optimistic.

The earlier Darwins are already in bloom.
The German irises follow rapidly. June comes,
and we work amid the splendors of the Japanese
irises and the flame-line of Oriental poppies, set
ting the annuals into their beds, from the tender,
droopy schyzanthus plants to the various asters
and the now sturdy snapdragons. The color
scheme had been carefully planned last winter,
and is as cheerfully disregarded now, as some
new inspiration strikes us, such as a border of
purple asters against salvia, with white dahlias
behind — a strip of daring fall color which would
delight the soul of Gari Melcher, which de
lighted me — and which my wife said was
horrible.

So spring comes and goes in the garden, busy
and beautiful, ceaseless work and ceaseless won
der. But there is a moment in its passage, as
yet unmentioned, which I have kept for the

Spring in the (garden 167

close because to me it is the subtle climax of
the resurrection season. It usually comes in
April for us, though sometimes earlier. The
time is evening, always evening, just after sup
per, when a frail memory of sunset still lingers
in the west and the air is warm. I go out hat-
less upon the veranda, thinking of other things,
and suddenly I am aware of the song of the
frogs ! There are laughing voices in the street,
the tinkle of a far-off piano, the pleasant sounds
of village life come outdoors with the return
of spring; and buoying up, permeating these
other sounds comes the ceaseless, shrill chorus
of the frogs, seemingly from out of the air and
distance, beating in waves on the ear. Why this
first frog chorus so thrills me I cannot explain,
nor what dim memories it wakes. But the
peace of it steals over all my senses, and I walk
down into the dusk and seclusion of my gar
den, amid the sweet odors of new earth and
growing things, where the song comes up to me
from the distant meadow making the garden-
close sweeter still, the air yet more warm and
fragrant, the promise of spring more magical.
The garden then is very intimate and dear, it
brings me into closer touch with the awakening
earth about me, and all the years I dwelt a pris
oner in cities are but as the shadow of a dream.

The ^Bubble, "Deputation

A GREAT dramatist is authority for the state
ment that —

The evil that men do lives after them ;
The good is oft interred with their bones.

That is no doubt in a measure true; yet it would
be grossly unfair to blame personally certain
great ones of the past for the evil that has lived
after them and borne their names. For instance,
it may be doubted whether Louis XIV of France
was all that he should have been. His private
life would hardly have escaped censure in Upper
Montclair, N. J., or West Newton, Mass., and
his public a6ts were not always calculated to
promote social justice and universal brotherhood.
But to blame him for all the gilt furniture which
has ever since stood around the walls of hotel
ballrooms and borne his name is a libel even on
that lax and luxurious monarch. Yet such is his
fate. You who are familiar with history, I who
know next to nothing about it, are alike in this —
when we hear the words Louis XIV we do not
think of a great monarch with a powdered wig

The 'Bubble, Tt^putation 169

and a powdered mistress, of magnificent fountains
and courtiers and ladies dancing the gavotte, of
a brilliant court and striking epoch. Not at all.
We think, both of us, of a gilt chair with a
brocaded seat (slightly worn), and maybe a sofa
to match. If you say that you don't, I must po
litely but firmly — well, differ with you.

Alas! poor Louis XIV was not the only worthy
(or unworthy) of the past who has come down
to the present, not as a personality but as a piece
of furniture, a dog, a boot, or some other equally
ignominious thing. Speaking of furniture, there's
the Morris chair. The man who made the Mor
ris chair was a great and good man — not because
he made the Morris chair, but in spite of it!
He composed haunting poems, he wrote lovely
prose romances of the far-off days of knights
and ladyes and magic spells, such as that hight
The Water of the Wondrous Istes, a right brave
book mayhap you have not perused, to your ex
ceeding great loss, for beautiful it is and fair to
read and full of the mighty desire of a man for
a maid. Beside all this, he printed lovely books
by other writers, and designed wall-paper, and
painted pidhires, and thundered against the dead
ening effed: on men of mechanical toil, and in
social theories was far in advance of his age. Such
a man was William Morris — known to-day to
the mass of mankind for one of the most accursed

170 The ^Bubble, Imputation

articles of furnitur e ever devised by human inge
nuity gone astray! Every day, in a million homes,
men and women sit in Morris chairs (made by
machinery) and read Robert W. Chambers and
Florence Barclay. Such, alas, is fame!

Then there was Queen Anne — in many re-
spefts an estimable woman, though leaving
much to be desired as a monarch. She had her
Rooseveltian virtues, being the mother of seven
teen children (none of whom lived to grow be
yond infancy, to be sure) ; and she had what the
world just now has come to regard as the monar
chical vice of autocracy. In her reign science
and literature flourished, though without much
aid from her, and the English court buzzed with
intrigue and politics. But speak the name 0%ueen
Anne aloud, and then tell me the picture you
get. Is it a picture of the lady or her period? Is
it a picture of Pope and Dryden sitting in a
London coffee-house? No, it is not — that is,
unless you are a very learned, or a very young,
person. It is a picture of a horrible architectural
monstrosity built about thirty or forty years ago
in any American city or suburb, and bearing
certain vague resemblances to a home for human
beings. Whatever else Queen Ann'e was, she
was not an architect, and she wasn't to blame for
those houses, any more than she was to blame
for Pope's "Essay on Man." But that doesn't

The ^Bubble, Imputation 171

count. She gets the blame, just the same. She
is known forever now by those gables and that
gingerbread, those shingles and stains.

She had a predecessor on the English throne
by the name of Charles. Like Louis in France,
he wasn't all he should have been, and there
were those in his own day who didn't entirely
approve of him. But it wasn't because of his
dogs. However, if you mention King Charles
now, it is a dog you think of — a small, eary
dog, with somewhat splay feet and a seventeenth-
century monarchical preference for the society
of ladies and the softest cushion. Maybe the royal
gentleman didn't deserve anything better of pos
terity; but, anyhow, that's what he got.

St. Bernhard fared better. If one had to be
remembered by a dog, what better dog could
he sele6t, save possibly an Airedale ? Big, strong,
faithful, wise, true to type for centuries, the most
reliable of God's creatures (including Man by
courtesy in that category), the St. Bernhard is a
monument for — well, not for a king, and a king
didn't get him; for a saint, rather. It is doubt
ful if the old monk is playing any lamentations
on his harp.

But I'm not so sure about that peerless mili
tary leader, General A. E. Burnside. When you
have risen to lead an army corps against your
country's foes, when you have commanded men
and sat your bourse for a statue on the grounds

172 The ^Bubble, "Deputation

of the state capitol or the intersection of Main
and State Streets, it really is rather rough to be
remembered for your whiskers. Of course, as a
wit remarked of Shaw, no man is responsible for
his relatives, but his whiskers are his own fault.
Nevertheless, how is a great general to know
that his military exploits will be forgotten, while
his whiskers thunder down the ages, as it were,
progressing in the coures of time with the chang
ing fashions from bank presidents to Presbyte
rian elders, and finally to stage butlers? At last
even the stage butlers are shaving clean, and a
stroke of the razor wipes out a military reputa
tion, blasts a general's immortality! Fame is a
fickle jade.

An artistic reputation lasts longer, and resists
the barber, proving the superiority of the arts
to militarism. "Van Dyke" is still a generally
familiar appellation and sounds the same, no
matter which way you spell it. Of course, there's
no rhyme nor reason in it — artist and whiskers
should be spelled the same way. Only they're
not. " Something ought to be done about it."

However, to resume If you tell me John

Jones has a Vandyke, I don't visualize John as
an art-collector standing in his gallery in rapt
contemplation of a masterpiece by the great
Flemish painter. I visualize him as a man with
a certain type of beard. I may later think of the
master who put these beards upon his portraits.

The 'Bubble, "Deputation 173

Then again, I may not. Exa&ly the same would
be true if I told you John Jones had a Vandyke,
instead of the other way about. Don't contra
dict me — you know it's so. It is nearly as dif
ficult to-day to own a Van Dyke canvas as it is
to paint one, but anybody can raise a Vandyke
beard. In fact, many still do, and thus keep the
master's memory green. "By their whiskers ye
shall know them."

A military reputation, as we have already
proved by the case of General Burnside, is a pre
carious thing. How many patrons of Atlantic
City, I wonder, know the hero of the wars in the
Low Countries and his greatest triumph by a cer
tain hotel on the Board Walk, and would be hard
put to say which half of the hyphenated name was
the general and which the battle? Then there
was Wellington, who at one time threatened to
be remembered for his boots, and Blucher who
still is remembered for his. A certain Massachu
setts statesman (anybody elected to the Mas
sachusetts House of Representatives is a states
man) once said that the greatest triumph of Na
poleon was when Theodore Roosevelt stood silent
at his tomb. This is witty, but like most witty
sayings, not quite true. It was a great triumph,
of course, but rather spectacular. The greatest
triumphs are not showy. What actually proves
Napoleon's greatness is the fad: that he is still
remembered as a commander after generations

1/4 The Bubble, Imputation

have selected from the tray of French pastry
the detectable and indigestible morsal of sugar,
flour and lard that bears his name. To have
a toothsome article of food named after you,
and then to be still remembered for your ac
tual achievements, is the ultimate test of human
greatness. Only a Napoleon can meet it. Even
Washington might not now be known as the
father of his country if his pie had been a bet
ter one.

Who was King, for instance? Was he the cook,
or the man cooked for? I fancy I knew once,
but I have forgotten. But chicken-a-la-king will
live to perpetuate his name as long as there are
chickens to be eaten and men to eat them. Even
Sardou, spectacular dramatist, for all his Toscas
and Fedoras (and ten to one you think of Fedora
as a hat!), lives for me, a dramatic critic, by vir
tue of eggs Vidtorien Sardou, a never-to-be-too-
much-enjoyed concoction secured at the old
Brevoort House in New York. He may a£tu-
ally have invented this recipe himself, for he
was a great lover of the pleasures of the table.
If so, it was his masterpiece. An egg is poached
on the tender heart of an artichoke, and gar
nished with a peculiar yellow sauce, topped with
a truffle. Around all four sides are laid little
bunches of fresh asparagus tips. What is Tosca
compared to this?

The 'Bubble, Imputation 175

Then, of course, there was Mr. Baldwin. Who
was Mr. Baldwin? The people of Wilmington,
Mass., know, because there is a monument to the
original tree in that town. But we don't know,
any more than we know who Mr. Bartlett was,
when we eat one of his pears, or Mr. Logan,
father of the wine-red berry. In this case the
Scripture is indeed verified, that by their fruits
shall ye know them.

Two or three times a year my wife gets cer
tain clothes of mine from the closet and combs
them for moths, hangs them flapping in the breeze
for a while, and puts them back. Among the
lot is a garment once much worn by congressmen,
church ushers and wedding guests, known to the
fashion editors as "frock coats", and to normal
human beings as Prince Alberts. Doubtless, in
the flux of styles ( like a pendulum, styles swing
forth and back again), the Prince Albert will
once more be correct, and my wife's labor will
not have been in vain, while the estimable con
sort of England's haircloth sofa and black-walnut
bureau queen will continue to be remembered
of posterity by this outlandish garment. Poor
man, after all, he achieved little else to be re
membered by!

And as for the queen herself, she will be re
membered by a state of mind. Already "mid-Vic
torian" has little or nothing to do with Victoria,
and is losing its suggestion, even, of a time-peri-

176 'The ^Bubble, Imputation

od. It is coming to stand for a mental and moral
attitude — in fa6t, for priggishness and moral
timidity. Queen Victoria was a great and good
lady, and her home life was, as the two women
so clearly pointed out when they left the theatre,
totally different from that of Cleopatra. But
she is going to give her name to a mental atti
tude, just the same, even as the Philistines and
the Puritans. It pays to pick the period you
queen it over rather carefully. Elizabeth had
better luck. To be Elizabethan is to be every
thing gay and dashing and out-doory and ad
venturesome, with insatiable curiosity and the
gift of song. Of course, Shakespeare, Drake,
Raleigh, ought to have the credit — but they don't
get it, any more than Tennyson comes in on the
Victorian discredit. The head that wears a crown
may well lie uneasy.

The memory of many a man has been per
petuated, all unwittingly, by the manufacturers
and advertising agencies. Here I tread on dan
gerous ground, but surely I shall not be accused
of commerical collusion if I point out that so
" generously good" a philanthropist as George
W. Childs became a name literally in the mouth
of thousands. He became a cigar. Then there
was Lord Lister. He, too, has become a name
in the mouths of thousands — as a mouth wash.
And how about the only daughter of the Prophet?
Fatima was her name.

The 'Bubble, Imputation 177

Who was Lord Raglan, or was he a lord? He
is a kind of overcoat sleeve now. Who was Mr.
Mackintosh? Was it Lord Brougham, too? Gas
olene has extinguished his immortality. Gladstone
has become a bag, Gainsborough is a hat. The
beautiful Madame Pompadour, beloved of kings,
is a kind of hair-cut now. The Mikado of Japan
is a joke, set to music, heavenly music, to be
sure, but with its tongue in its angelic cheek.
An operetta did that. You cannot think of the
Mikado of Japan in terms of royal dignity. I
defy you to try. Ko-ko and Katisha keep get
ting in the way, and you hear the pitty-pat
of Yum-Yum's little feet, and the bounce of
those elliptical billiard balls. Gilbert and Sulli
van's operetta is perhaps the most potent doc
ument for democracy since the Communist
Manifesto !

The other day I heard a woman say that she
had got to begin banting. A nice verb, to bant,
though not approved of by the dictionary, which
scornfully terms it "humorous and colloquial".
The humor, to be sure, is usually for other peo
ple, not for the person banting. Do you know,
I wonder, the derivation of this word? It means,
of course, to induce this too, too solid flesh to
melt, by the careful avoidance of farinaceous,
saccharine and oily foods, and occasionally its
meaning is stretched by the careless to include
also rolling on the bedroom floor fifteen times

'3

178 The 'Bubble, Imputation

before breakfast, and standing up twenty minutes
after meals. Yet the word is derived from the
name of William Banting, who was a London
cabinet-maker. Cabinet-making is a worthy trade;
indeed, it is one of the most appealing of all
trades; in fact, it's not a trade, it's an art. I
haven't a doubt that William made splendid fur
niture, especially chairs, for nobody appreciates
a nice, roomy, strong chair like a fat man. I
haven't a doubt that it was his ambition in life
to be remembered for his furniture, even as the
brothers Adam, as Chippendale and Sheraton. But
it was not to be. In an unfortunate moment,
William discovered that by eating fewer potatoes
and cutting out two lumps of sugar from his tea
he could take off some of the corpulence that
troubled him. He told of his discovery — and the
world knows him now as a method of getting
number 44 ladies into a perfect 38. I have al
ways felt sorry for William Banting. He is one
of the tragic figures of history.

Of course, there are many more, if none other
quite so poignant, but you must recall them for
yourself. For some paragraphs now I have been
working up to a climax of prophecy. I have
been planning to predicl: what Kaiser William II
will be noted for in the days that are to come. It
seemed to me that would ma.)^ rather a neat con
clusion for this little essay. But, Gentle Reader.
I've got to turn that job over to you, also.

The 'Bubble, Imputation

179

Not that the space is lacking, but after long and
painful concentration I have been unable to think
of anything bad enough. It may turn out that
he will be known simply by the meek and nourish
ing kaiser roll on the breakfast table — the only
surviving relic of a monarchical vocabulary in a
peaceful and democratic universe. Perhaps, for
him, that would be the bitterest fate of all, the
ultimate irony.

The Old House on the

I WONDER if other wayfarers through New En
gland greet, as I do, with special affection the
old house on the bend of the road? It is so
characteristic of an earlier civilization, so sug
gestive of a vanished epoch — and withal so pic
turesque! Even if you are unfortunate enough
to "tour" in a motor-car, which of course is far
from the ideal way to savor the countryside, still
you cannot miss the old house on the bend, even
though you do miss the feel of the land, the rise
and dip of the road, the fragrance of the clematis
by the wall, the already fading gold of the evening
primroses when you start off after breakfast.

Even for a motorist, however, the old house
on the bend stands up to view, especially if you
are on the front seat with the driver. The car
swings into a straightaway, lined, perhaps, with
sugar-maples and gray stone walls. Between the
trunks are vistas of the green fields and far hills.
But the chief vista is up the white perspective
of the road, which seems to vanish dire6Uy into
the front door of the solid, mouse- gray house
on the bend.

The Old House on the 'Bend 1 8 1

The ribbon of road rushes toward you, as if
a great spool under your wheels were winding it
up. The house rushes on with it; grows nearer;
details emerge. You see the great square chim
ney; the tiny window-panes, six to a sash, some
of them turned by time, not into the purple of
Beacon Hill but into a kind of prismatic sheen
like oil on water; the bit of classic egg-and-dart
border on the door-cap; the aged texture of the
weathered clapboard; the graceful arch of the
wide woodshed entrance, on the kitchen side;
the giant elm rising far above the roof. You
rush on so near to the house, indeed, that the
car seems in imminent danger of colliding with
the front door, when suddenly the wheels bite
the road, you feel the pull of centrifugul force,
and the car swings away at right angles, leaving
an end view of the ancient dwelling behind you,
so that when you turn for a final glance you see
the long slant of the roof at the rear, going down
within six or eight feet of the ground.

Such is the view from the motor-car. If you
are traveling on foot, however, there is much
more to be observed, such as the great doorstep
made from a broken millstone, the gigantic ram
bler by the kitchen window, the tiger-lilies gone
wild in the dooryard, and above all, the view
from the front windows. Since the house was
visible far up the road, conversely a long stretch
of the road is visible from the house. Standing

1 82 The Old House on the *Bend

in front of it, you can see a motor or wagon
approaching a mile away, and from the end
windows, too, can be seen all approaching vehi
cles from the other angle. Moreover, if you lived
within, you could not only see who was coming,
but you could step out of your door a pace or
two and converse with him as he passed. The
old house is strategically placed.

When it was built, a century or even a cen
tury and a half ago, no motors went by on that
road, and not enough of any kind of traffic to
raise a dust. The busy town to the south, the
summer resort to the north, were alike small
villages, given over to agriculture. There were
no telephones, no newspapers even. Fortunate
indeed was the man whose farm abutted on a
bend, for there he could set his house, close to
the road, viewing the approaches in either direc
tion, and no traveler could get by him, or at any
rate by his wife, without yielding the latest gos
sip from the town above or below, perhaps from
the greater world beyond. The highroad was
then the sole artery of commerce, of communi
cation, of intercourse of man with man.

How neighborly was the house on the bend,
shedding its parlor-candle rays like a beacon by
night down the mile of straightaway, or flapping
its chintz curtains in the June sunshine! What a
testimony it is, in its present gray ruin, to the hu
man hunger for news and gossip and friendliness!

The Old House on the ^end 183

The old order has changed, indeed. We no
longer build on the bend. We don't have bends
if we can help it. They are dangerous and hard
to maintain. A house on one would be uninhab
itable with the dust. We do not seek the neigh-
borliness of the road, but retire as far as we can
to the back of our lot, with our telephone and
newspaper. The old house on the bend now
stands deserted. From country estates dimly seen
in their remote privacy of trees and gardens, the
stone highway leads to other estates equally re
mote and scornful of publicity. Between them
the motors rush. The old house is dusty and
falling into ruin, and every passing car kicks up
some bit of crushed stone into its tangled door-
yard. It looks pathetically down the road with
unseeing eyes, the last relic of a vanishing order.

Concerning Hat-trees

IT is well sometimes, when we are puffed up
with our achievements as a race, — our conquest
of the elements, our building of mighty bridges
and lofty sky-scrapers, our invention of wireless
telegraphy and horseless carriages and aeroplanes
and machine guns and secret diplomacy and
wage slavery and war, — it is well to indulge in
the chastening reflection that there are still some
things we cannot achieve. We may reflect that
the appleless Eden has not yet been discovered,
or that the adtor without vanity is yet unborn,
or the "treasonless" Senate yet unassembled.
My own method is to reflect that the ideal hat-
tree has never been constructed.

At present I have no hat-tree, because I live in
an old farm house where there is a square piano
and a hall closet, and we don't need one. In New
York I never had one, either, because there is
never room in the hall-way of a modern appart-
ment both for a hat-tree and a passage-way. But
occasionally I visit at the homes of friends who
boast one of these arboreal adornments, and re-

Concerning Hat-trees 185

new my acquaintance with the species. I was
to take a walk with one of these friends the
other day.

"Wait/' he said, pausing in the hall, "till I
get a pair of gloves/ ' Stooping over, he pulled
at the hat-tree drawer. First is stuck on one
side; then it stuck on the other side; then it
yielded altogether, without warning. My friend
sat down on the floor, the ridiculously shallow
drawer in his hand, between his feet a sorry
array of the odds and ends of the outside toilet,
— broken hat pins, old veils, buttons, winter
gloves rolled into wads, old gloves, new gloves,
gloves pulled off in a hurry with the fingers in
side out, dirty white gloves belonging to his
charming sister. I turned away, feeling that I
gazed on a domestic exposure. My friend spoke
softly to the drawer.

"Sh!" said I, "your family! Put the drawer
back."

"I will not put it back," he said. "We would
never get started. Let the — "

Again I cautioned him, and we set out on
our walk leaving the litter on the floor; and as
we tramped through the marvelous sky-scraper
wilderness which is Manhattan, we talked of
hat-trees, and the futility of human effort, and
sighed for a new Carlyle to write the philosophy
of the hat-tree drawer.

1 86 Concerning Hat-trees

How well I remembered the hat-tree that
sheltered my caps in youth, beneath the pro
tecting foliage of the paternal greatcoat and the
maternal bonnet! I did not always use it; the
piano was more convenient, or the floor. But
there it stood in the hall in all its black-walnut
impressive ugliness, with side racks for um
brellas, and square, metal drip-pans always full
of the family rubbers. There was a mirror in the
centre, so high I had to climb three stairs to see
how uncle's hat fitted my small head. There
were pegs up both sides; but, as is the way with
hat-trees, only the top ones were useful; what
ever was hung on them buried everything be
low. The only really safe place was the peak
on top, just above the carved face of Minerva.
Sometimes the paternal greatcoat lovingly carried
off the maternal shawl of a morning, which
would be found later somewhere between the
door and the station. And this hat-tree also had
a drawer, of course. There was the rub, indeed!

Summer or winter, wet or dry, that drawer
always stuck. It had but one handle, — a ring
in the middle. First one side would come out
too far, and you would knock it back and pull
again. Then the other side would come out
too far, and you would knock that back. Then
both sides, by diabolical agreement, would sud
denly work as on greased ways, and you stood
with an astonishingly shallow drawer dangling

Concerning Hat-trees 187

from your finger, its long-accumulated contents
spread on the floor. The shock usually sent
down two derbies and a bonnet to add to the con
fusion. When you had gathered up the litter and
stuffed it back, wondering how so small a space
ever held so much, the still harder task con
fronted you of putting the drawer in its grooves
again. Sometimes you succeeded; more often
you left it "for mother to do" — that depended
on your temper and the time of your train. The
drawer was a charnel-house of gloves and mittens
and veils. When you cut your finger you were
sent to it to get a "cot", and it had a peculiar
smell of its own, the smell of the hat-tree
drawer. A whiff of old gloves still brings that
odor back to me, out of childhood, stirring
memories of little garments worn long ago, of
a great blue cape that was a pride to my father's
heart and a wound to my mother's pride, — but
most of all of lost temper and incipient profanity
caused by the baulky drawer.

My friend's recollections but supplemented
and reinforced my own. We called to mind
other hat-trees in houses where we had visited,
and one and all they were alike perverse, ridicu
lous, ill-adapted for their mission in life. We
thought of various substitutes for the hat-tree,
such as a pole with pegs in it, which tips over
when the preponderance of weight is hung on
one side; the cluster of pegs on a frame sus-

1 88 Concerning Hat-trees

pended from the wall like a picture, while a
painted drain-pipe courts umbrellas in a corner;
a long, low table (only possible in a palatial hall)
on which the garments are placed by the butler
in assorted piles, so that you feel like asking him
for a check; the settle, often disastrous to hats.
We found none of them satisfactory, though they
eliminate the perils of the drawer.

Only the wooden pegs which were driven in
a horizontal row into the board walls of grand
father's back entry ever approximated the ideal.
But such a reversion to primitive principles
would now be considered out of the question,
even in my farm house — by the farmer's wife, at
least. The problem of a satisfactory hat-tree,
which baffled the genius of Chippendale, is still
unsolved in Grand Rapids, and it probably will
remain unsolved to the end of time, unless Eden
should be found again, where the hat-tree is the
least of the arboreal troubles.

"The Shrinking oflQngmaris Field

"Ir WAS rats," said I.

"It was warts," said Old Hundred.

"I know it was rats, I tell you," I continued,
"because my uncle Eben knew a man who did
it. His house was full of rats, so he wrote a
very polite note to them, setting forth that,
much as he enjoyed their excellent society, the
house was too crowded for comfort, and telling
them to go over to the house of a certain neigh
bor, who had more room and no children nor
cats. And the rats all went."

Old Hundred listened patiently. "That's
precisely right," said he, "except it must have
been warts. You have to be polite, and also tell
them where to go. You rub the warts with a
bean, wrap the bean up in the note, and burn
both, or 'else throw them in the well. In a few
days the warts will leave you and appear on the
other fellow. My grandfather, when he was
a boy, got warts that way, so he licked the
other boy."

"Rats!" said I.

"No, warts," persisted Old Hundred.

190 The Shrinking of Kingmari s Field

So that was how we two aging and urbanized
codgers came to leave the comfortable club for
the Grand Central Station, whence we sent
telegrams to our families and took train for the
rural regions north-eastward. The point had to
be settled. Besides, I stumped Old Hundred to
go, and he never could refuse a stump.
, But Old Hundred was fretful on the journey.
We called him Old Hundred years ago, because
he always proposed that tune at Sunday evening
meetings, when the leader "called for hymns."
I address him as Old Hundred still, though he
is a learned lawyer in line for a judgeship. He
was fretful, he said, because we were sure to be
terribly disillusioned. But he is not a man ac
customed in these later years to a 61 on impulse,
and the prospect of a night on a sleeping car,
without pajamas, did not, I fancy, appeal to him,
now that he faced it from the badly ventilated
car aisle, instead of the club easy-chair. Yet per
haps he did dread the disillusionment, too. It
was always I, even when we were boys, who
loved an adventure for its own sake, quite apart
from the pleasure or pain of it — taking a su
preme delight, in fact, in melancholy. I have
still a copy of Moore's poems, stained with tears
and gingerbread. Some of the happiest hours of
my childhood were spent in weeping over this
book, especially over "Go Where Glory Waits
Thee," which affected me with an incompre-

The Shrining of Kingmarf s Field 191

hensible but poignant woe. Accordingly it was I
who rose cheerful in the morning and piloted a
gloomy companion to breakfast and a barber,
and so across Boston to the dingy station where
dingy, dirty cars of ancient vintage awaited, and
in one of which we rode, with innumerble stops,
to a spot off the beaten tracks of travel, but
which bore a name that thrilled us.

When we alighted from the train, a large
factory greeted our vision, across the road from
the railway station. We walked up a faintly fa
miliar street to the village square. There we
paused, with wry faces. Six trolley lines con
verged in its centre, and out of the surrounding
country were rolling in great cars, as big almost
as Pullmans. All the magnificent horse-chestnut
trees that once lined the walks were down, to
expose more brazenly to view the rows of taw
dry little shops. These trees had once furnished
shade and ammunition. I had to smile at the
sign above the new fish-market —

IF IT SWIMS WE HAVE IT.

But there was no smile on Old Hundred's face.
Here and there, rising behind the little stores
and lunch rooms, we could detect the tops of the
old houses, pushed back by commerce. But most
of the houses had disappeared altogether. Only
the old white meeting-house at the head of the
common looked down benignly, unchanged.

192 The Shrinking of Kingmarf s Field

"The trail of the trolley is over it all!" Old
Hundred murmured, as we hastened northward,
out of the village.

After we had walked some distance, Old Hun
dred said, "It ought to be arouud here soriie-
where, to the right of the road. I can't make
anything out, for these new houses."

"There was a lane down to it," said I, "and
woods beyond."

"Sure," he cried, "Kingman's woods; and it
was called Kingman's field."

I sighted the ruins of a lane, between two
houses. " Come on down to Kingman's, fellers,"
I shouted, "an' choose up sides!"

Old Hundred followed my lead. We were in
the middle of a potato patch, in somebody's back
yard. It was very small.

"This ain't Kingman's," wailed Old Hundred,
lasping into bad grammer in his grief. "Why,
it took an awful paste to land a home run over
right field into the woods! And there ain't no
woods!"

There weren't. Nevertheless, this was King
man's field. "See," said I, trying to be cheerful,
"here's where home was." And I rooted up a
potato sprout viciously. "You and Bill Nichols
always chose up. You each put a hand round
a bat, alternating up the stick, for the first choice.
The one who could get his hand over the top
enough to swing the bat round his head three

The Shrining ofKingmarfs Field 193

times, won, and chose Goodknocker Pratt. First
was over there where the wall isn't any more."

"Remember the time we couldn't find my
'Junior League '/'said Old Hundred, "and Good-
knocker dreamed it was in a tree, and the next
day we looked in the trees, and there it was? I
wonder what ever became of old Goodknocker?"

He moved toward first base. The woods had
been ruthlessly cut down, and the wall dragged
away in the process. We climbed a knoll, through
the stumps and dead stuff. At the top was a
snake bush.

"Here's something, anyhow," said Old Hun
dred. "You were Uncas and I was Hawk Eye,
and we defended this snake bush from Bill's
crowd of Iroquois. We made shields out of bar
rel heads, and spears out of young pine-tree tops.
Wow, how they hurt!"

"About half a mile over is the swamp where
the traps were," said I. "Let's go. Maybe there's
something in one of 'em."

"Then times would be changed," said he,
smiling a little.

We walked a few hundred feet, and there was
the swamp, quite dried up without the protection
of the woods, a tangle of dead stuff, and in plain
view of half a dozen houses. "Why " cried Old
Hundred, "it was miles away from anything!"

I looked at him, a woeful figure, clad in im
maculate clothes, with gray gloves, a cane in his

14

194 The Shrinking of Kingman's Field

hand. "'You ought to be wearing red mittens,"
said I, "and carrying that old shot-gun, with the
ramrod bent."

"The ramrod was always bent," said he. "It
kept getting caught in twigs, or falling out. Gee,
how she kicked! Remember the day I got the
rabbit down there on the edge of the swamp?
It made the snow all red, poor little thing. I
guess I wasn't so pleased as I expected to be."

"I remember the day you didn't get the wood
pussy — soon enough," I answered.

Just then a whistle shrieked. "Good Lord,"
said Old Hundred," there's one of those infer
nal trolleys! It must go right up the turnpike,
past Sandy."

"Let's take it!" I cried.

He looked at me savagely. "We'll walk!"
he said.

"But it's miles and miles," I remonstrated.

"Nevertheless," said he, "we'll walk."

It was difficult to find the short cut in this
tangle of slaughtered forest, but we got back to
the road finally, coming out by the school-house.
At least, we came out by a little shallow hole in
the ground, half filled with poison-ivy and fire-
weed, and ringed by a few stones. We paused
sadly by the ruins.

"I suppose the trolly takes the kids into the
village now," said I. "Centralization, you know."

The Shrinking of Kingmarf s Field 195

"There used to be a great stove in one corner,
and the pipe went all across the room," Old
Hundred was saying, as if to himself. "If you
sat near it, you baked; if you didn't, you froze.
Do you remember Miss Campbell? What was it
we used to sing about her? Oh, yes —

Three little mice ran up the stairs
To hear Biddy Campbell say her prayers ;
And when they heard her say Amen,
The three little mice ran down again.

And, gee but you were the punk speller! Re
member how there was always a spelling match
Friday afternoons? I'll never forget the day you
fell down on 'nausea/ You'd lasted pretty well
that day, for you; everybody 'd gone down but
you and Myrtie Swett and me and one or two
more. But when Biddy CampbeU put that word
up to you, you looked it, if you couldn't spell it!"

"Hum," said I, "I wouldn't rub it in, if I
were you. I seem to recall a public day when
old Gilman Temple, the committee man, asked
you what was the largest bird that flies, and you
said, 'The Kangaroo.'"

Old Hundred grinned. " That's the day the
new boy laughed," said he. "Remember the
new boy? I mean the one that wore the derby
which we used to push down over his eyes?
Sometimes in the yard one of us would squat

196 The Shrinking of King man's Field

behind him, and then somebody else would push
him over backward. We made him walk Span
ish, too. But after that public day he and I went
way down to the horse-sheds behind the meeting
house in the village, and had it out. I wonder
why we always fought in the holy horse-sheds?
The ones behind the town hall were never used
for that purpose/'

This was true, but I couldn't explain it. "We
couldn't always wait to get to the horse-sheds,
as I remember it," said I. "Sometimes we couldn't
wait to get out of sight of school."

I began hunting the neighborhood for the hide-
and-seek spots. The barn and the carriage-shed
across the road were still there, with cracks yawn
ing between the mouse-gray boards. The shed
was also ideal for "Anthony over." And in the
pasture behind the school stood the great boul
der, by the sassafras tree. "I'll bet you can't
count out," said I.

"Pooh!" said Old Hundred. He raised his
finger, pointed it at an imaginary line of boys
and girls, and chanted —

"Acker, backer, soda cracker,

Acker, backer, boo!
If yer father chews terbacker,
Out goes you.

And now you're it," he finished pointing at me.

The Shrinking ofKingmarfs Field 197

I was not to be outdone. "Ten, twenty, thirty,
forty, — " I began to mumble. Then, "One
thousand!" I shouted.

"Bushel o' wheat and a bushel o' rye,
All 't 'aint hid, holler knee high!"

I looked for a stick, stood it on end, and let it
fall. It fell toward the boulder. "You're up in
the sassafras tree," I said.

"No," said Old Hundred, "that's Benny."

Then we looked at each other and laughed.

"You poor old idiot," said Old Hundred.

"You doddering imbecile," said I, "come on
up to Sandy."

Somehow, it wasn't far to Sandy. It used to
be miles. We passed by Myrtie Swett's house
on the way. It stood back from the turnpike
just as ever, with its ample doorway, its great
shadowing elms, its air of haughty well-being.
Myrtie, besides a prize speller, was something
of a social queen. She was very beautiful and
she affefted ennui.

"Oh, dear, bread and beer,
If I was home I shouldn't be here!"

she used to say at parties, with a tired air that
was the secret envy of the other little girls, who
were unable to conceal their pleasure at being
"here." However, Myrtie never went home,
we noticed. Rather did she take a leading part

198 The Shrinking of Kingman s Field

in every game of Drop- the -hankerchief, Post
Office, or Copenhagen — tinglingly thrilling
games, with unknown possibilities of a senti
mental nature.

"If I thought she still lived in the old place,
I'd go up and tell her I had a letter for her,"
said Old Hundred.

"She'd probably give you a stamp," I replied.

"Not unless she's changed!" he grinned.

But we saw no signs of Myrtie. Several chil
dren played in the yard. There was the face of
a strange woman at the window, a very plain
woman, who looked old, as she peered keenly
at the two urban passers.

"It cant be Myrtie!" I heard Old Hundred
mutter, as he hastened on.

Sandy was almost the most wonderful spot in
the world. It was, as most swimming holes are,
on the down-stream side of a bridge. The little
river widened out, on its way through the mead
ows, here and there into swimming holes of
greater or less desirability. There was Lob's
Pond, by the mill, and Deep Pool, and Musk
Rat, and Little Sandy. But Sandy was the best
of them all. It was shaded on one side by great
trees, and the banks were hidden from the road
by alder screens. At one end there was a shelv
ing bottom, of clean sand, where the "little kids"
who couldn't swim sported in safety. Under the
opposite bank the water ran deep for diving. And

"The Shrinking of Kingmans Field 1 99

in mid-stream the pool was so very deep that no
body had ever been able to find bottom there.
In the other holes, you could hold your hands
over your head and go down till your feet touched,
without wetting your fingers. But not the long
est fish-line had ever been long enough to plumb
Sandy's depths. Indeed, it was popularly believed
that there was no bottom in Sandy, and a myth
ical horn pout, of gigantic proportions, was sup
posed to inhabit its dark, watery abysses.

Old Hundred and I stood on the bridge and
looked down on a little pool. "I could jump
across it now," he sighed. "But I wish it were
a warmer day. I'd go in, just the same.''

There was a honk up the road, and a touring
car jolted over the boards behind us, with a load
of veils and goggles. The dust sifted through
the bridge, and we heard it patter on the water
below.

"I fancy there's more travel now," said I.
"And the alder screen seems to be gone. Per
haps we'd better not go in."

Old Hundred leaned pensively over the white
rail — the sign of a State highway; for the dusty
old Turnpike was now converted into a gray
strip of macadam road, torn by the automobiles,
with a trolley track at one side.

"There's a lucky bug on the water," he said
presently. "If we were in now, we might catch
him, and make our fortunes."

2OO The Shrinking of Kingman's Field

"And get our clothes tied up," said I.

"As I recall it, you were the prize beef
chawer," he remarked. "I never could see why
you didn't go into vaudeville, in a Houdini acl:.
I used to soak the knots in your shirt and dry
'em, and soak 'em again; but you always untied
'em, often without using your teeth, either."

"You couldn't, though," I grinned.

"Charlo beef,
The beef was tough,
Poor Old Hundred
Couldn't get enough!

"How many times have you gone home bare
foot, with your stockings and your undershirt,
in a wet knot, tied to your fish-pole?"

"Not many," said he.

"What?" said I.

"It wasn't often that I wore stockings and
an undershirt in swimming season," he an
swered. "Don't you remember being made to
soak your feet in a tub on the back porch be
fore going to bed, and going fast asleep in the
process?"

"If you put a horse hair in water, it will turn
to a snake," I replied, irrelevantly.

"Anybody knows that," said Old Hundred.
"If you toss a fish back in the water before
you're done fishing, you won't get any more
bites, because he'll go tell all the other fish. Bet

The Shrinking of Kingman's Field 201

yer I can swim farther under the water 'n you
can. Come on, it isn't very cold."

I looked hesitantly at the pool.

"Stump yer!" he taunted.

I started for the bank. But just then the
trolley wire, which we had quite forgotten, be
gan to buzz. We paused. Up the pike came
the car. It stopped just short of the bridge, by
a cross-road, and an old man alighted. Then it
moved on, shaking more dust down upon the
brown water. The old man regarded us a mo
ment, and instead of turning up the cross-road,
came over to us.

!"Know him?" I whispered.)
"Is it Hen Flint, that used to drive the meat
wagon with the white top?" said Old Hundred*
"Lord, is it so many years ago!")

"How are you, Mr. Flint?" said I.

"Thot I didn't mistake ye," said the old man,
putting out a large, thin, but powerful hand.
"Whar be ye now, Noo York? Come back to
look over the old place, eh? I reckon ye find it
some changed. Don't know it myself, hardly.
You look like yer ma; sorter got her peak face."

"Where's the swimming hole now?" asked
Old Hundred.

"I don't calc'late thar be any," said the old
man. "The gol durn trolley an' the automobiles
spiled the pool here, an' the mill-pond's no good
since they tore down the mill, an' bust the dam.

202 The Shrinking of Kingman s Field

Maybe the little fellers git their toes wet down
back o' Bill Flint's; I see 'em splashin' round
thar hot days. But the old fellers have to wash
in the kitchen, same's in winter."

"But the boys must swim somewhere/' said I.

"I presume likely they go to the beaches/'
said Henry Flint. "I see 'em ridin' off in the
trolley."

"Yes," said I, "it must be easy to get any
where now, with the trolleys so thick."

"It's too durn easy," he commented. "Thar
hain't a place ye can't git to, though why ye
should want to git thar beats me. Mostly puts
high-flown notions in the women-folks' heads,
and vegetable gardens on 'em."

He shook hands again, lingeringly. "Yer fa
ther wus a fine man," he said to Old Hundred
— "a fine man. I sold yer ma meat before you
wus born."

Then he moved rather feebly away, down the
cross-road. Presently a return trolley approached.

"Curse the trolleys!" exclaimed Old Hun
dred. 'They go everywhere and carry every
body. They spoil the country roads and ruin
the country houses and villages. Where they go,
cheap loafing places, called waiting-rooms, spring
up, haunted by flies, rotten bananas and village
muckers. They trail peanut shells, dust and
vulgarity; and they make all the country-side a
back yard of the city. Let's take this one."

The Shrinking of Kingmarf s Field 203

We passed once more the hole where the
school had been, and drew near a cross-road.
I looked at Old Hundred, he at me. He nodded,
and we signalled the conductor. The car stopped.
We alighted and turned silently west, pursued
by peering eyes. After a few hundred feet the
cross-road went up a rise and round a bend, and
the new frame houses along the Turnpike were
shut from view. Over the brambled wall we saw
cows lying down in a pasture.

"It's going to rain/' said I.

"No," said Old Hundred, "that's only a sign
when they lie down first thing in the morn-
ing."

Then we were silent once more. Into the west
the land, the rocky, rolling, stubborn, beautiful
New England country-side, lay familiar — how fa
miliar! — to our eyes. To the left, back among the
oaks and hickories, stood a solid, simple house,
painted yellow with green blinds. To the right al
most opposite was a smaller house of white, with
an orchard straggling up to the back door. And
in one of them I was born, and in the other Old
Hundred. Down the road was another house,
a deep red, half hidden in the trees. Smoke
was rising from the chimney now, and drifting
rosily against the first flush of sunset.

"Betsy's getting Cap'n Charles's supper," said
Old Hundred.

204 The Shrining ofKlngmans Field

"Then Betsy's about one hundred and six,"
said I, "and the Cap'n one hundred and ten.
Oh, John, it was a long, long time ago!"

"It doesn't seem so," he answered. "It seems
only yesterday that we met up there in your
grove on Hallow-e'en to light our jack-lanterns,
and crept down the road in the cold white moon
light to poke them up at Betsy's window. Re
member when she caught us with the pail of
water?"

"I remember," said I, "the time you put a
tack in the seat of Cap'n Charles's stool, in his
little shoemaker's shop out behind the house, and
he gave you five cents, to return good for evil;
so the next day you did it again, in the hope of
a quarter, but he decided there were times when
the Golden Rule is best honored in the breach,
and gave you a walloping."

"It was some walloping, too," said Old Hun
dred, with a reminiscent grin. "It would be a
good time now," he added, "to swipe melons, if
Betsy's getting supper. Though I believe she had
all those melon stems connected with an auto
matic burglar-alarm in the kitchen. She ought
to have taken out a patent on that invention!"

He looked about him, first at his house, then
at mine. "How small the orchard is now," he
mused. "The trees are like little old women.
And look at Crow's Nest — it used to be a hun
dred feet high."

The Shrinking of Kingman's Field 205

The oak he pointed at still bore in its upper
branches the remains of our tree-top retreat, a
rotted beam or two straddling a crotch. " Peter
Pan should rebuild it," said I. "I shall drop a
line to Wendy. Do you still hesitate to turn
over in bed?"

"Always," Old Hundred confessed. "I do turn
over now, but it was years before I could bring
myself to do it. I wonder where we got that su
perstition that it brought bad luck? If we woke
in the night, up in Crow's Nest, and wanted
to shift our positions, we got up and walked
around the foot of the mattress, so we could
lie on the other side without turning over. Re
member?"

I nodded. Then the well-curb caught my eye.
It was over the well we dug where old Solon
Perkins told us to. Solon charged three dollars
for the advice. He came with a forked elm
twig, cut green, and holding the prongs tightly
wrapped round his hands so that the base of the
twig stuck out straight, walked back and fourth
over the place, followed by my father and mother,
and Old Hundred's father and mother, and Cap'n
Charles and Betsy, and all the boys for a mile
around, silently watching for the miracle. Fi
nally the base of the twig bent sharply down.
"Dig there," said Solon. He examined the twig
to see if the bark was twisted. It was, so he
added, "Bent hard. Won't have ter dig more'n

206 The Shrining of Kingmarf s Field

ten foot." We dug twenty-six, but water came.
And such water!

"I want some of that water," said I. "I
don't want to go into the house; I don't even
know who lives in it now. But I must have
some of that water."

We went up to the well and lowered the
bucket, which slid bounding down against the
cool stones till it hit the depths with a dull
splash. As we were drinking, an old man came
peering out of the house. Old Hundred recog
nized him first.

"Well, Clarkie Poor, by all that's holy!" he
cried. "We've come to get our hair cut."

Clarkson Poor blinked a bit before recogni
tion came. "Yes," he said, "I bought the old
place a couple o' year back, arter them city folks
you sold it to got sick on it. Too fer off the trol
ley line for them. John's house over yon some
noo comers 'a' got. They ain't changed it none.
This is about the only part o' town that ain't
changed, though. Most o' the old folks is gone,
too, and the young uns, like you chaps, all git
ambitious fer the cities. I give up cuttin' hair
'bout three year back — got kinder onsteady an'
cut too many ears."

A sudden smile broke over Old Hundred's
face. "Clarkie," he said, "you were always up
on such things — is it rats or warts that you write
a note to when you want 'em to go away?"

The Sbrinfyng ofKingmarfs Field 207

"Yes, it's rats, isn't it?" I cried, also reminded,
for the first time, of our real quest.

"Why," said Clarkie, "you must be sure to
make the note very particular perlite, and tell
'em whar to go. Don't fergit that."

"Yes, yes," said we, "but is it warts or rats?"

"Well," said Clarkie, "it's both."

We looked one at the other, and grinned rather
sheepishly.

"Only thar's a better way fer warts," Clarkie
went on. "I knew a boy once who sold his.
That's the best way. Yer don't have actually
to sell 'em. Just git another feller to say, 'I'll
give yer five cents fer yer warts,' and you say,
'All right, they're yourn/ and then they go.
Fad."

We thanked him, and moved down to the
road, declining his invitation to come into the
house. Westward, the sun had gone down and
left the sky a glowing amber and rose. The fields
rolled their young green like a checkered carpet
over the low hills — the sweet, familiar hills. For
an instant, in the hush of gathering twilight,
we stood there silent and bridged the years;
wiping out the strife, the toil, the ambitions, we
were boys again.

"Hark!" said Old Hundred, softly. Down
through the orchard we heard the thin, sweet
tinkle of a cow-bell. "There's a boy behind,
with the peeled switch," he added, "looking

208 The Shrinking ofKingman s Field

dreamily up at the first star, and wishing on it —
wishing for a lot of things he'll never get. But
Fm sure he isn't barefoot. Let's go."

As we passed down the turnpike, between the
rows of cheap frame houses, we saw, in the in
creasing dusk, the ruins of a lane, and the corner
of a small, back-yard potato patch, that had been
Kingman's field. We hastened through the noisy,
treeless village, and boarded the Boston train,
rather cross for want of supper.

"I wonder," said Old Hundred, as we moved
out of the station, "whether we'd better go to
Young's or the Parker House?"

*%Cumblety-peg and^Ciddk

OLD HUNDRED and I were taking our Saturday
afternoon walk in the country — that is, in such
suburbanized country as we could achieve in the
neighborhood of New York. We had passed in
numerable small boys and not a few small girls,
but save for an occasional noisy group on a base
ball diamond none of them seemed to be playing
any definite games.

"Did we use to wander aimlessly round that
way?" asked Old Hundred.

"We did not," said I. "If it wasn't marbles
in spring or tops in autumn it was duck-on-the-
rock or stick-knife or "

"Only we didn't call it stick-knife," said Old
Hundred, "we called it mumblety-peg."

"We called it stick-knife," said I.

"Your memory is curiously bad," said Old
Hundred. "You are always forgetting about these
important matters. It was mumblety-peg."

"My memory bad!" I sniffed. "I suppose
you think I've forgotten how I always licked
you at stick-knife?"

15

2 1 o *%Cuinblety-p€g and <3&iddle

Old Hundred grinned. Old Hundred's grin,
to-day as much as thirty years ago, is a mask
for some coming trouble. He always grinned
before he sailed into the other fellow, which
was an effective way to catch the other fellow
off his guard. I presume he grins now before
he cross-questions a witness. 'Til play you a
game right now," he said softly.

"You're on," said I.

We selected a spot of clean, thin turf behind a
roadside fence. It was in reality a part of some
body's yard, but it was the best we could do. I still
carry a pocket-knife of generous proportions, to
whittle with when we go for a walk, and this I pro
duced and opened, handing it to Old Hundred.
"Now begin," said I, as we squatted down.

He held the knife somewhat gingerly, first by
the blade, then by the handle. "Wha — what do
you do first?" he finally asked.

"Do?" said I. "Don't you remember?"

"No," he replied, "and neither do you."

"Give me the knife," I cried. I relied on the
feel of it in my hand to awaken a dormant mus
cular memory to help me out. But no muscular
memory was stirred. Old Hundred watched me
with a smile. "Begin, begin!" he urged.

"Let's see," said I, "I think you took it first
by the tip of the blade, this way, and made it
stick up." I threw the knife. It stuck, but al
most lay upon the ground.

*J£umblety-peg and zJ&iddle *Age 2 1 1

"You've got to get two fingers under it," said
Old Hundred. He tried, but there wasn't room.
"You fail," he cried. "There's a point for me."

"Not till you've made it stick," said I.

We grew interested in our game. We threw
the knife from our nose and chin, we dropped
it from our forehead, we jumped it over our
hand, we half-closed the blade and tossed it
that way, and finally, when the talley was reck
oned up in my favor, I began to look about for a
stick to whittle into the peg.

Old Hundred rose and dusted his clothes.
"Here," I cried. "You're not done yet!"

"Oh, yes I am!" he answered.

"Quitter, quitter, quitter!" I taunted.

"That may be," said he, "but a learned lawyer
of forty-five with a dirty mug is rather more
self-conscious than a boy of ten. I'll buy you
a dinner when we get to town."

"Oh, very well," said I, peevishly, "but I
didn't think you'd so degenerated. I'll let you
off if you'll admit it was stick-knife."

"I'll admit it," said Old Hundred. "I sup
pose in a minute you'll ask me to admit that
prisoners' -base was relievo."

"What 'was relievo, by the way?" I asked.

"Relievo — relievo?" said Old Hundred.
"Why that was a game we played mostly on
the ice, up on Birch Meadow, don't you re
member? When we got tired of hockey, we

212 *%Cumblety-ptg an

all put our coats and hockey sticks in a pile, one
man was It, and the rest tried to skate from a
distant line around the pile and back. If the
chap who was It tagged anybody before he got
around, that chap had to be It with him, and so
on till everybody was caught. Then the first one
tagged had to be It for a new start. "

"I remember that game," said I. "I remem
ber how Frank White, who could skate like a
fiend, used to be the last one caught. Sometimes
he'd get around a hundred boys, ducking and
dodging and taking half a mile of ice to do it,
but escaping untouched. Sometimes, if there
weren't many playing, he'd go around backwards,
just to taunt us. But I don't think that game
was relievo. That doesn't sound like the name
to me."

"What was it, then?" said Old Hundred.

"I don't know," I answered. "It's funny how
you forget things."

By this time we were strolling along the road
again. "Speaking of Birch Meadow," said Old
Hundred, "what glorious skating we kids used
to have there! I never go by Central Park in
winter without pitying the poor New York young
sters, just hobbling round and round on a half-
acre pond where the surface is cut up into pow
der an inch thick, and the crowd is so dense
you can scarcely see the ice. Shall you ever
forget that mile-long pond in the woods, not

<J£umblety-p€g and ^Middle ^4ge 2 1 3

deep enough to drown in anywhere, and frozen
over with smooth black ice as early as Thanks
giving Day? How we used to rush to it, up Love
Lane, as soon as school was out!"

"Do you remember," said I, "how we passed
it last year, and found the woods all cut and the
water drained off?"

"Don't be a wet blanket," said Old Hundred,
crossly. "The country has to grow."

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye.
The mood of memory was on him. I repented
of my speech. "Yes," I answered. "No doubt
the country has to grow. The colleges now play
hockey on ponds made by the fire department.
But there isn't that thrilling ring to your runners
nor that long-drawn echo from the wooded
shores when a crack crosses the ice."

"I can see it all this minute," said Old Hun
dred. "I can see my little self like a different
person [which, indeed, he was!] as one of the
crowd. We had chosen up sides — ten, twenty,
thirty on a side. Stones, dragged from the shores,
were put down for goals. Most of us had hockey
sticks we had cut ourselves in the woods, hickory,
with a bit of the curved root for the blade. You
were one of the few boys who could afford a
store stick. We had a hard rubber ball. Bob
bie Pratt was always one goal because he had
big feet. And over the black ice, against the
sombre background of those cathedral aisles of

214 <3&umblety-peg an

white pine, we chased that ball, charging in solid
ranks so that the ice sagged and protested under
the rush of our runners, wheeling suddenly, dart
ing in pursuit of one boy who had snaked the
ball out from the maze of feet and was flying with
it toward the goal, all rapid a&ion, panting
breath, superb life. It really must have been a
beautiful sight, one of those hockey games. I
can still hear the ring and roar of the runners
as the crowd swept down in a charge!"

I smiled. "And I can still feel the ice when
somebody's stick got caught between my legs.
'Hi, fellers, come look at the star Willie made!'
I can hear you shouting, as you examined the spot
where my anatomy had been violently super
imposed on the skating surface."

Old Hundred smiled too. "Fine little animals
we were!" he said. "I suppose one reason why
we don't see more games nowdays is because we
live in the city. Even this suburbanized region
is really city, dirtied all over with its spawn.
Lord, Bill, think if we'd been cramped up in an
East Side street, or reduced to Central Park for
a skating pond! A precious lot of reminiscences
we'd have to-day, wouldn't we? They build the
kids what they call public play-grounds, and
then they have to hire teachers to teach 'em
how to play. Poor beggars, think of having to
be taught by a grown-up how to play a game!
They all have a rudimentary idea of base-ball;

*%Cumblety-peg and <3&iddle tAge 215

the American spirit and the sporting extras see
to that. But I never see 'em playing anything
else much, not even out here where the suburbs
smut an otherwise attractive landscape."

"Perhaps," I ventured, "not only the lack of
space and free open in the city has something
to do with it, but the fa6t that the seasons there
grow and change so unperceived. Games, you
remember, go by a kind of immutable rotation —
as much a law of childhood as gravitation of the
universe. Marbles belong to spring, to the first
weeks after the frost is out of the ground. They
are a kind of celebration of the season, of the
return to bare earth. Tops belong to autumn,
hockey to the ice, base-ball to the spring and
summer, foot-ball to the cold, snappy fall, and
I seem to remember that even such games as
hide-and-seek or puss-in-the-corner were played
constantly at one period, not at all at another.
If you played 'em out of time, they didn't seem
right; there was no zest to them. Now, most
of these game periods were determined long ago
by physical conditions of ground and climate.
They stem us back to nature. Cramp the young
sters in the artificial life of a city, and you snap
this stem. My theory may be wild, all wrong.
Yet I can't help feeling that our games, which
we accepted and absorbed as a part of the uni
verse, as much as our parents or the woods and
fields, were a part of that nature which sur-

2 1 6 *y£umbltty-peg

rounded us, linking us with the beginnings of
the race. Most kids' games are centuries upon
centuries old, they say. I can't help believing
that for every sky-scraper we erecl: we end the
life, for thousands of children, of one more game."

Old Hundred had listened attentively to my
long discourse, nodding his head approvingly.
"No doubt, no doubt/' he said. "I shall here
after regard the Metropolitan Tower as a me
morial shaft, which ought to bear an inscrip
tion, 'Hie jacet, Puss-in-the-corner.' Yet I saw
some poor little duffers on the East Side the
other day trying to play soak with a tattered old
ball, which kept getting lost under the push
carts."

"They die hard," said I.

We had by this time come on our walk into
a group of houses, the outskirts of a town.
Several small boys were, apparently, aimlessly
walking about.

"Why don't they do something," Old Hun
dred exclaimed, half to himself. "Don't they
know how, even out here?"

"Suppose you teach 'em," I suggested.

Again Old Hundred grinned. He walked over
among the small boys, who stopped their talk
and regarded him silently. " Ever play duck-on-
the-rock?" he asked, with that curiously embar
rassed friendliness of the middle-aged man trying
to make up to boyhood. After a certain period,

tMumblety-peg and ^Middle *Age 2 1 7

most of us unconsciously regard a small boy as a
kind of buzz-saw, to be handled with extreme
care.

The boys looked at one another, as if picking
a spokesman. Finally one of them, a freckle-
faced, stocky youngster who looked more like a
country lad than the rest, replied. "They dunno
how," he said. "They're afraid the stones'll hurt
'em. We used to play it up State all the time."

"There's your theory," said Old Hundred in
an aside to me.

"You're a liar," said one of the other boys.
"We ain't afraid, are we Bill?"

"Naw," said Bill.

"Who's a liar?" said the first speaker, doubling
his fists. " I'll knock your block off in about a
minute."

"Ah, come on an' do it, Rube!" taunted the
other.

Old Hundred hereupon interfered. "Let's not
fight, let's play," he said. "If they don't know
how, we'll teach 'em, eh Rube? Want to learn,
boys?"

They looked at him for a moment with the
instinctive suspicion of their class, decided in
his favor, and assented. Like all men, Old Hun
dred was flattered by this mark of confidence
from the severest critics in the world. He and
Rube hunted out a large rock, and placed it on
the curb. Each boy found his individual duck,

2 1 8 <^fumblety-peg and ^fiddle

Old Hundred tried to count out for It, couldn't
remember the rhyme, and had to turn the job
over to Rube, who delivered himself of the fol
lowing:

"As I went up to Salt Lake
I met a little rattlesnake,
He'd e't so much of jelly cake,
It made his little belly ache."

When It was thus sele&ed, automatically and
poetically, Old Hundred drew a line in the road,
parallel to the curb, It put his duck on the
rock, and the rest started to pitch. Suddenly one
demon spotted me, a smiling by-stander. "Hi,"
he called, "Old Coattails ain't playin'."

"Quitter, quitter, quitter!" taunted Old Hun
dred.

I started to make some remark about the self-
consciousness of a learned litterateur of forty-five,
but my speech was drowned in a derisive howl
from the buzz-saws. I meekly accepted the in
evitable, and hunted myself out a duck.

After ten minutes of madly dashing back to
the line pursued by those supernaturally active
young cubs, after stooping again and again to
pick up my duck, after dodging flying stones and
sometimes not succeeding, I was quite ready to
quit. Old Hundred, flushed and perspiring, was
playing as if his life depended on it. When he
was tagged, he took his turn as It without a

and <3fCiddle *Age 219

murmur. He was one of the kids, and they
knew it. But finally he, too, felt the pace in
his bones. We left the boys still playing, quite
careless of whether we went or stayed. We were
dusty and hot; our hands were scratched and
grimed. " Ah ! " said Old Hundred, looking back,
"I've accomplished something to-day and had a
good time doing it! The ungrateful little sav
ages; they might have said good-bye."

"Yet you wouldn't pull up the mumblety-peg
for me," I said.

"My dear fellow," he replied, "that is quite
different. To take a dare from a man is childish.
Not to take a dare from a child is unmanly."

"You talk like G. K. Chesterton," said I.

"Which shows that occasionally Chesterton
is right," said he. "Speaking of dares, I'd like
to see a gang of kids playing dares or follow-
your-leader right now. Remember how we used
to play follow-your-leader by the hour? You
had to do just what he did, like a row of sheep.
When there were girls in the game, you always
ended up by turning a somersault, which was a
subtle jest never to be too much enjoyed."

"And Alice Perkins used to take that dare,
too, I remember," said I.

"Alice never could bear to be stumped," he
mused. "She's either become a mighty fine
woman or a bad one. She was the only girl
we ever allowed to perform in the circuses up

22O ^hCumblet-e and <3xCiddle

in your backyard. Often we wouldn't even ad
mit girls as spectators. Remember the sign you
painted to that effect? She was the lady trapeze
artist and bareback rider. You were the bare
back, as I recall it — or was it Fatty Newell?
Anyhow, one of her stunts was to hang by her
legs and drink a tumbler of water."

I felt my muscles. "I wonder," said I, "if
I could still skin the cat?"

"I'll bet I can chin myself ten times," said
Old Hundred.

We cast about for a convenient limb. There
was an apple-tree beside the road, with a hori
zontal limb some eight feet above the ground.
I tried first. I got myself over all right, till I
hung inverted, my fountain-pen, pencil, and eye
glass case falling out of my pocket. But there
I stuck. There was no strength in my arms to
pull me up. So I curled clean over and dropped
to the ground, very red in the face, my clothes
covered with the powdered apple-tree bark. Old
Hundred grasped the limb to chin himself. He
got up once easily, he got up a second time with dif
ficulty, he got up a third time by an heroic effort,
the veins standing out on his forehead. The fourth
time he stuck two inches off the ground.

"'You are old, Father William/" I quoted.

He rubbed his biceps sadly. "I'm out of prac
tice!" he said with some asperity. But we tried
no more stunts on the apple-tree.

221

Beyond the orchard was a piece of split-rail
fence, gray and old, with brambles growing at
the intersections — one of the relics of an elder
day in Westchester County. Old Hundred looked
at it as he put on his coat.

" There ought to be a bumblebees' nest in that
fence," he said. "If we should poke the bees
out we'd find honey, nice gritty honey, all over
rotted wood from our fingers."

"Are you looking for trouble?" I asked.
"However, if you hold your breath, a bee can't
sting you."

"I recall that ancient superstition — with pain,"
he smiled. "Why does a bee have such a fasci
nation for a boy? Is it because he makes honey?"

"Not at all; that's a secondary issue. It's be
cause he's a bee," I answered. "Don't you re
member the fun of stoning those gray hornets'
nests which used to be built under the school-
house eaves in summer? We waited till the first
recess to plug a stone through 'em, and nobody
could get back in the door without being stung.
It was against the unwritten law to stone the
school-house nests in vacation time!"

"Recess!" mused Old Hundred. "Do you
know, sometimes in court when the judge an
nounces a recess (which he pronounces with the
accent on the second syllable, a manifest error),
those old school-days come back to me, and my
case drops clean out of my head for the moment."

222 *%Cumbkty-peg

"I should think that would be embarrassing,"
said I.

"It isn't," he said, "it's restful. Besides, it
often restores my mislaid sense of humor. I
picture the judge out in a school-yard playing
leap-frog with the learned counsel for the prose
cution and the foreman of the jury. It makes
'em more human to see 'em so."

"A Gilbertian idea, to say the least," I smiled.
"Why not set the whole court to playing squat-
tag?"'

"There was step-tag, too," said Old Hundred.
"Remember that? The boy or girl who was It
shut his eyes and counted ten. Then he opened
his eyes suddenly, and if he saw any part of you
moving you became It. On 'ten' you tried to
freeze into stiffness. We must have struck some
funny attitudes."

"Attitudes," said I, "that was another game.
Somebody said 'fear' or 'cat' or 'geography,' and
you had to assume an attitude expressive of the
word. The girls liked that game."

"Oh, the girls always liked games where they
could show off or get personal attention," replied
Old Hundred. "They liked hide-and-seek be
cause you came after them, or because you took
one of 'em and went off with her alone to hide
behind the wood-shed. They liked kissing games
best, though — drop -the -handkerchief and post-
office."

223

"Those weren't recess games," I amended.
"Those were party games. You played them
when you had your best clothes on, which
entirely changed your mental attitude, anyhow.
When a girl dropped the handkerchief behind
you, you had to chase her and kiss her if you
could, and when you got a letter in post-office
you had to go into the next room and be
kissed. Everybody tittered at you when you
came back."

"Well, soak and scrub were recess games, any
how. I can hear that glad yell, 'Scrub one!'
rising from the first boy who burst out of the
school-house door. Then there were dare-base,
and foot-ball, which we used to play with an
old bladder, or at best a round, black rubber ball,
not one of these modern leather lemons. We
used to kick it, too. I don't remember tackling
and rushing, till we got older and went to prep
school — or you and I went to prep school."

"I'd hate to have been tackled on the old
school playground," said I. "It was hard as
rocks."

"It was rocks," said Old Hundred. "You
could spin a top on it anywhere."

"Could you spin a top now?" I asked.

"Sure!" said Old Hundred. "And pop at a
snapper, too."

"It's wicked to play marbles for keeps," said
I impressively. "Only the bad boys do that."

224 <3xCumblety-peg

''Poor mother!" said Old Hundred. "Re
member the marble rakes we used to make? We
cut a series of little arches in a board, numbered
'em one, two, three, and so on, and stood the
board up across the concrete sidewalk down by
Lyceum Hall. The other kids rolled their mar
bles from the curb. If a marble went through
an arch, the owner of the rake had to give the
boy as many marbles as the number over the
arch. If the boy missed, the owner took his
marble. It was very profitable for the owner.
And my mother found out I had a rake. That
night it went into the kitchen fire, while I
was lectured on the awful consequences of gam
bling.5'

"I know," said I. "It was almost as terrible
as sending 'comic valentines/ Remember the
'comics'? They were horribly colored litho
graphs of teachers, old maids, dudes, and the
like, with equally horrible verses under them.
They cost a penny apiece, and you bought 'em
at Damon's drug store. They were so wicked
that Emily Ruggles wouldn't sell 'em."

" Emily Ruggles's!" exclaimed Old Hundred.
"Shall you ever forget Emily Ruggles's? It was
in Lyceum Hall building, a little dark store up
a flight of steps — a notion store, I guess they
called it. To us kids it was just Emily Ruggles's.
It was full of marbles, tops, 'scholars' compan
ions,' air-guns, sheets of paper soldiers, valentines,

*3&umblety-peg and Middle *Age 225

fire-crackers before the Fourth, elastic for sling
shots, spools, needles and yards of blue calico
with white dots, which hung over strings above
the counters. Emily was a dark, heavy-browed
spinster with a booming bass voice and a stern
manner, and when you crept, awed and timid,
into the store she glared at you and boomed out,
* Which side, young man?' Yet her store was a
kid's paradise. I have often wondered since
whether she didn't, in her heart, really love us
youngsters, for all her forbidding manner."

"Of course she loved us," said I. "She loved
her country, too. Don't you remember the story
of how she paid for a substitute in the Civil War,
because she couldn't go to the front and fight
herself? Poor woman, she took the only way she
knew to show her affection for us. She stocked
her little shop with a deledtable array which
kept a procession of children pushing open the
door and timidly yet joyfully entering its dark
recesses, where bags of marbles and bundles of
pencils gleamed beneath the canopies of calico.
Nowadays I never see such shops anymore. I
don't know whether there are any tops and mar
bles on the market. One never sees them. Cer
tainly one never sees nice little shops devoted
to their sale. Children are not important any
longer."

Old Hundred sighed. We walked on in si
lence, toward the brow of a hill, and presently

16

226 *J£umblety-peg and Middle

the Hudson gleamed below us, while across its
misty expanse the hills of New Jersey huddled
into the sinking sun. Old Hundred sat down on
a stone.

"I'm weary," he said, "and my muscles ache,
and I'm stiff and sore and forty-five. Bill, you're
getting bald. Wipe your shiny high-brow. You
look ridiculous."

"Shut up," said I, "and don't get maudlin
just because you can't chin yourself ten times.
Remember, it's because you're out of practice!"

"Out of practice, out of practice!" he said
viciously. "A year at Muldoon's wouldn't bring
me back the thoughtless joy of a hockey game,
would it? No, nor the delight of playing puss-
in-the-corner, or following a paper trail through
the October woods, or yelling 'Daddy on the
castle, Daddy on the castle!' while we jumped
on Frank Swain's veranda and off again into his
mother's flower-bed!"

"I trust not," said I. "Just what are you get
ting at?"

"This," answered Old Hundred: "that I, you,
none of us, go into things now for the sheer ex
uberance of our bodies and the sheer delight of
playing a game. We must have some ulterior
motive — usually a sordid one, getting money or
downing the other fellow; and most of the time
we have to drive our poor, old rackety bodies
with a whip. About the time a man begins to

*%Mmblety-peg and ^Middle *Age 227

vote, he begins to disintegrate. The rest of life
is gradual running down, or breaking up. The
Hindoos were right/'

"Old Hundred/' said I, "you are something
of an idiot. Those games of ours were nature's
school; nature takes that way to teach us how to
behave ourselves socially, how to conquer others,
but mostly how to conquer ourselves. We were
men-pups, that's all. For Heaven's sake, can't
you have a pleasant afternoon thinking of your
boyhood without becoming maudlin?"

"You talk like a book by G. Stanley Hall,"
retorted Old Hundred. "No doubt our games
were nature's way of teaching us how to be men,
but that doesn't alter the fadl that the process of
being taught was better than the process of put
ting the knowledge into practice. I hate these
folks who rhapsodize sentimentally over children
as ' potential little men.' Potential fiddle-sticks!
Their charm is because they airit men yet, be
cause they are still trailing clouds of glory, be
cause they are nice, mysterious, imaginative,
sensitive, nasty little beasts. You! All you are
thinking of is that dinner I owe you ! Well,
come on, then, we'll go back into that monstrous
heap of mortar down there to the south, where
there are no children who know how to play,
no tops, no marbles, no woods and ponds and
bees' nests in the fences, no Emily Ruggleses;
where every building is, as you say, the grave-

228 *%Cumblety-peg and twiddle

stone of a game, and the only sport left is the
playing of the market for keeps !"

He got up painfully. I got up painfully. We
both limped. Down the hill in silence we went.
On the train Old Hundred lighted a cigar. "What
do you say to the club for dinner?" he asked. "I
ought to go across to the Bar Association after
ward and look up some cases on that rebate suit.
By Jove, but it's going to be a pretty trial!"

"That pleases me all right," I answered. " I've
got to meet Ainsley after the theatre and go
over our new third aft. I think you are going
to like it better than the old."

At the next station Old Hundred went out
on the platform and hailed a newsboy. "I want
to see how the market closed," he explained,
as he buried himself in his paper.

^Barber Shops of Yesterday

I HAVE just been to a barber shop, — not a city
barber shop, where you exped: tiled floors and
polished mirrors and a haughty Venus by a table
in the corner, who glances scornfully at your
hands as you give your hat, coat, and collar to
a boy, as much as to say, "Manicures himself!"
— but a country barber shop, in a New England
small town. I rather expe&ed that the experience
would repay me, in awakened pleasant memories,
for a very poor hair-cut. Instead, I got a very
good hair-cut, and no pleasant memories were
awakened at all; not, that is, by the dired: pro
cess of suggestion. I was only led to muse on
barber shops of my boyhood because this one
was so different. Even the barber was different.
He chewed gum, he worked quickly, he used
shaving powder and took his cloths from a ster
ilizer, and finally he held a hand-glass behind
my head for me to see the result, quite like his
city cousins. (By the way, was ever a man so
brave as to say the cut <wasrit all right, when the
barber held that hand-glass behind his head? And

230 barber Shops of Tester day

what would the barber say if he did?) No, this
shop was antiseptic, and uninteresting. There
was not even a picture on the walls !

But, to the barber's soothing snip, snip, snip,
and the gentle tug of the comb, I dreamed of
the barber shops of my boyhood, and of Clarkie
Parker's in particular. Clarkie's shop was in Ly
ceum Hall block, one flight up — a huge room,
with a single green upholstered barber's chair be
tween the windows, where one could sit and watch
the town go by below you. The room smelled
pungently of bay rum. Barber shops don't smell
of bay rum any more. Around two sides were
ranged many chairs and an old leather couch.
The chair-arms were smooth and black with the
rubbing of innumerable hands and elbows, and
behind them, making a dark line along the wall,
were the marks where the heads of the sitters
rubbed as they tilted back. Nor can I forget the
spittoons, — large shallow boxes, two feet square,
— four of them, full of sand. On a third side of
the room stood the basin and water-taps, and
beside them a large black-walnut cabinet, full
of shelves. The shelves were full of mugs, and
on every mug was a name, in gilt letters, gen
erally Old English. Those mugs were a town
directory of our leading citizens. My father's
mug was on the next to the top shelf, third

barber Shops of Tester day 231

from the end on the right. The sight of it used
to thrill me, and at twelve I began surreptitiously
to feel my chin, to see if there were any hope
of my achieving a mug in the not -too -distant
future.

Above the chairs, the basin, the cabinet, hung
pictures. Several of those pictures I have never
seen since, but the other day in New York I
came upon one of them in a print-shop on Fourth
Avenue, and was restrained from buying it only
by the, to me, prohibitive price. Fve been ashamed
ever since, too, that I allowed it to be prohibi
tive. I feel traitorous to a memory. It was a lu
rid lithograph of a burning building upon which
brave firemen in red shirts were pouring copious
streams of water, while other brave firemen
worked the pump-handles of the engine. The
flames were leaping out in orange tongues from
every window of the doomed structure (which
was a fine business block three stories high), but
you felt sure that the heroes would save all ad
joining property, in spite of the evident high wind.
Another picture in Clarkie's shop showed these
same firemen (at least, they, too, wore red shirts)
hauling their engine out of its abode; and still
another displayed them hauling it back again.
On this latter occasion it was coated with ice,
and I used to wonder if all these pictures depicted

232 ^Barber Shops of Tester day

the same fire, because the trees were in full leaf
in the others. There also hung on the walls a
truly suberb engraving of the loss of the Ardlic.
Her bow (or was it her stern?) was high in air,
and figures were dropping off it into the sea,
like nuts from a shaken hickory. This was a
very terrible pidture, and one turned with relief
to Maude S. standing before a bright green hedge
and looking every inch a gentle champion, or
the stuffed pickerel, twenty-four inches long,
framed under glass, with his weight — a ponder
ous figure — printed on the frame.

Clarkie Parker was in reality a barber by avo
cation. The art he loved was angling. Patience
with a rod and line, the slow contemplation of
rivers, was in his blood, and in his fingers. It
took him a long time to cut your hair, even
when, on the first hot day of June, you bade
him, "take it all off with the lawn-mower." (Do
any boys have their heads clean-clipped in sum
mer any more?) But while he cut, he talked
of fishing. You listened as to one having authority.
He knew every brook, every pool, every pond,
for miles around. You went next day where
Clarkie advised. And there was no use expect
ing a hair-cut or a shave on the first of April,
when "the law went off on trout/' Clarkie's
shop was shut. If the day happened to be Satur-

^Barber Shops of Yesterday 233

day, many a pious man in our village had to go
to church upon the morrow unshaven or un-
trimmed.

I know not what has become now of Clarkie
or his shop. Doubtless they have gone the way
of so many pleasantly flavored things of our van
ished New England. I only know that I still
possess a razor he sold me when my downy face
had begun to arouse public derision. I shall al
ways cherish that razor, though I never shave
with it. I never could shave with it! But I love
Clarkie just the same. He only proved himself
thereby the ultimate Yankee.

The "Button

you/' said I, "anything like the ones
left?" — and I held out to my wife a shirt just
back from the laundry, and minus a strategic
button.

"I'll look in my button box and see," she
answered, taking the shirt.

Her button box! I did not know she had one,
and followed her into her retreat to see it. But
alas! it was a griveous disappointment, being
nothing but a drawer set in some sort of a fancy
contraption of chintz-covered pasteboard, like a
toy bureau, which stood on her work table. No
doubt it contained buttons, and was serviceable.
But a button box! To call it that were to libel
a noble institution of an elder day.

As I waited for the restoration of my shirt
I thought tenderly of the button box of my child
hood. It was no dinky six- by -four- inch paste
board drawer, not two inches deep — no, sir! It
was a cylindrical wooden box of the substantial
and finished workmanship which went into even
such humble things as a butter box a century
ago, for mother had inherited it from her mother.

The "Button "Box 235

It must once have contained ten pounds of
butter, but all traces of its original service had
long disappeared. The drum, of very thin, tough
wood, which had kept its shape uncracked, had
been polished a dark nut brown by countless
hands. The bottom and cover, of pine, were
darkened, too, but without polish. This box
dwelt on the second shelf of the old what-not,
which, in turn, stood in the closet passage under
neath the stairs. When any accident befell our
garment fastenings, "Go and get the button
box/' mother said, as she reached for her needle.
Or, on rainy days, when we grew more and
more restless and all other devices failed, "You
may go and get the button box," mother would
say, and we were solaced till supper time.

No modern patent sewing- table receptacle
could possible hold one quarter of the contents
of that button box, the accumulation of at least
three generations. It was heavy, and having no
handles, you had to grasp it with open palms on
either side — hence the polish. It rattled when
taken down from its shelf, and the very first
thing you did when the lid was off was to plunge
your two hands down into the mass, and let fist-
fuls of buttons trickle through your fingers.

Sometimes we played it was a treasure chest,
and these buttons were Spanish doubloons. Some
times we trickled them just for the cool feel of
it, the sound of the rattle, the sensation of plung-

236 The 'Button <Box

ing fingers into the oddly liquid mass. There
were great steel buttons, little pearl bottons,
white bone buttons, black suspender buttons,
cloth buttons, silk buttons, crocheted buttons,
elongated crystal buttons (which we held to the
light "to make prisms"), lovely agate buttons,
brass military buttons with the U. S. eagle upon
them, wooden buttons, either once covered or
yet to be covered, shoe buttons (which invariably
were in practical demand and invariably had sunk
to the bottom of the box), strange great buttons
from some long-forgotten garment of grand
mother's, familiar buttons from some newly re
membered garment of our own.

It seems odd, when I think of it now, the end
less delight we children got just from the contem
plation and discussion of those buttons. Some
times, of course, we picked out the suitable ones,
and strung them in long chains. Sometimes we
used them for counters in games. But often we
just turned them over and over, or tipped them
out on a paper spread on the floor, and from the
hints they gave us reconstructed ancient garments
or recalled forgotten clothes of our own.

" Oh, that one used to be on my winter jacket!'
"Look, here's one of papa's pants buttons —
it says 'Macullar and Parker' on it!"
"Hi, there's my old brown overcoat!"
"Oh, dear, I wish I still had that pretty gray
suit, with those steel buttons on it!"

The 'Button ftox 237

The silly talk of children — and how like some
conversations the propinquity of piazzas has since
forced me to listen to!

To find just the button she wanted was some
times a long task for mother, and father, it must
be admitted, had varied the proverbial needle
simile for our domestic establishment, to read,
"like hunting for a button in your mother's but
ton box." But still the odd buttons continued
to go in, and only the ones needed came perma
nently out. You never could tell, to be sure,
when the most unlikely button would come in
handy. Sometimes there were days when the
village dress-maker arrived after breakfast and
remained till almost supper time, converting the
upstairs front chamber into a maze of threads
and snippings, and requisitioning the button box
in long searches for "a set of six". That was a
fine game! Sometimes it was easy. Sometimes
only five could be found of the type she particu
larly desired. But never did the box fail com
pletely; always there were enough of some button
that, she said, without dropping the pins from
her mouth, would do, "though it ain't quite what
I wanted."

All this flashed through my memory as I
waited for my wife to reestablish connections on
my shirt. As she finally finished, and pushed in
her silly little drawer, I said:

238 The ^Button 'Sox

"Do you call that thing a button box? Why
don't you have a real one?"

"That's quite large enough when you have
to find a match," said she, "and too large when
you drop it."

Women are practical creatures; there is no
sentiment in them. Their alleged possession of
it is the most spurious of all the arguments against
equal suffrage.

Peppermints

I HAVE just purchased a little bag of pepper
mints, and returned with them to my rooms
above the Square. I did not purchase them at
the promptings of a sweet tooth, but of a hungry
heart. They take me back into the forgotten
Aprils of my life, where I often love to loiter,
not from any resentment that I have been un
able to emulate Peter Pan and remain a boy for
ever, but because this great town is drab and
dusty and imprisoning, and it is sweet to escape
down the green lanes of April, even if only in
a memory. A physical sensation — the sound of
a voice, a hand patting us to the rythm of "Tell
Aunt Rhody", an odor — can plunge us deeper
and swifter down to the buried places of our
memory than any process of deliberate recollec
tion. No robin sings against my window of a
morning here — only the noisy sparrows twitter
and quarrel, reminding me of the curb market.
No lilac sheds its perfume on the still air. I am
perforce reduced to peppermints. The taste of
peppermints on my tongue, the pungent fra
grance of them in my nostrils, have the power,

240 'Peppermints

however, to transport me far from this maze of
mortared canons, back across the years, to a land
where the robins sang against the spacious sky
and a little boy dreamed great dreams.

So now I am sitting high up above the Square,
with my little bag of peppermints before me
(somewhat diminished in quantity already), and
think, between slow, sipping nibbles, of that lit
tle boy.

In his day, in the land where he came from,
peppermints were almost a symbol of life's best
things — of grandmothers and other dear old ladies
who kept cookies in cool stone crocks in sweet-
smelling "butt'ries" (sometimes foolishly called
pantries by those who put on airs); of Christ-
mastides when to the joy of peppermint sticks
was added the unspeakable delight of sucking
barley toys, — red dogs, golden camels that lost
their humps and elephants that lost their trunks
as the tongue went succulently 'round and 'round
them; of the wonderful village "notion" store,
presided over by a terrible female person with a
deep bass voice, who asked you over the counter
as you entered, "Which side, young man?" It
was bad enough to be called "Bubble", but to
be called "young man" in this ironic bass was
almost insufferable. Yet you bore it nobly, for
the sake of the pound of shot for your air-
gun or the blood-alley or the great pink and
white peppermints, two for a cent, that reposed

^Peppermints 241

in a glass jar on the left side of the shop. Was
Miss Emily so terrible a person, I wonder now?
She was always looked upon a little askance by
the ladies of our village because she was "so mas
culine". But if she did not conceal a softness
for children under her stern exterior why did
she keep a stock of so many things dear to the
childish heart, from paper soldiers (purchased by
the yard) to sleds and shot? Perhaps that fan
tastic stock of hers was her curious expression
of the Eternal Motherly. After she died, every
year on the 3oth of May the "Vet'rans," as they
marched two by two in annually dwindling lines
about the cemetery, placed a fresh print flag and a
basket of geraniums on her grave, because she had
sent a substitute to the War. To us youngsters
this substitute used to explain why she kept shot
for sale; she was by nature a bellicose person, and,
we were sure, her great grief was her sex.

In my own family peppermints were directly
connected, by legend, with feminine attractive
ness. A great grandmother on my mother's side
had been in her day a famous beauty. And when
asked the secret of her charm, as she frequently
was (to my infant imagination she appeared as
a superhumanly radiant vision who walked about
the streets in a hoop-skirt with an admiring
throng in her wake, constantly being forced to
explain why she was beautiful), she did not utter
testimonials for anybody's soap, nor for a pat-
17

242 'Peppermints

ent dietary system, nor even for outdoor exer
cise. She replied simply, "Peppermints". Great
grandmamma died when my mother was
a girl, and to mother fell the task of going
through the old lady's possessions. She says it
was a task; probably it was a privilege. At any
rate, my mother records that she found pepper
mints everywhere, in every kind of wrapper,
stowed in the different receptacles, in boxes,
bags, trunks, in bureau drawers and writing desks
and "secretaries". They were among letters and
laces, in the folds of silk gowns and even the
table linen. Some of the peppermints had
crumbled and almost evaporated. Some had "os
sified", as mother says. "And," she used to add,
telling the tale to large-eyed, hungry-mouthed
little me, "I have not seen so many peppermints
outside a candy shop since that day."

"But did the peppermints really make great
grandmamma beautiful?" I would ask.

"She always said so," my mother would reply,
"and she was certainly very beautiful."

"Is that why you eat peppermints?" I then
inquired, on a day when I had detected her
with a bag of the confeclion.

At this point there was a masculine chuckle
from the armchair by the bookcase. Also, a
peppermint was promptly produced for my per
sonal consumption. I had a great fondness for
the memory of my beautiful ancestor.

^Peppermints 243

Peppermints, too, are intimately connected
with the religious experiences of my childhood;
or, perhaps I should say, with the religious ob
servances of my childhood. Our minister's whisk
ers always interested me more than his discourses.
As I nibble a peppermint from the bag before
me — lingeringly, for the supply is being fast de
pleted — and the frail yet pungent odor fills my
nostrils, I am once more in that half-filled church,
on a Sabbath morning in early Spring, dozing
through the sermon, with my head tumbling
sleepily now and then against my father's shoul
der. Slowly the scene comes back, in every least
detail, the smallest sights and sounds of that
morning all here, but all thin and faint and frail,
spun of the gossamer web of memory. Can I
hold them till they are set down? I shall have to
eat another precious white lozenge from my bag.

My cheek had bumped my father's shoulder
again when I caught a sudden whiff of peppermint
drops and raised my head just in time to see an
old lady across the aisle whisk her dress down
over her petticoat pocket. For a few moments
I watched her in envy, for her mouth was mov
ing ever so little and I could fancy the delicious
tarte. But how could she enjoy the candy and
not make her mouth go more than that, I won
dered. I did not shut my eyes again, but sat
very still against my father's arm and let my
eyes wander around the church.

244 ^Peppermints

Ours was one of the "new" churches. The
beautiful old "meeting house" at the head of the
village green, with its exquisite white spire and
its pillard pulpit and windows of "common"
glass, purpling with age, was the property of the
Methodists — which in some manner I could not
then understand (and do not clearly yet) was al
ways a source of resentment in our congregation.
Our church had stained windows, a chocolate
brown field with white stars in the centre and
around the edges tiny squares of many colors, atro
cious reds, blues and yellows. These windows were
opened a little at the top, and through the openings
came soft sounds of Spring, the wind racing among
the budding branches, the sudden call of a bird,
and occasionally the crooning, sleepy cackle of
hens from a distance. Now and then a cloud
drifted by, across the sun, dimming the interrior
for a moment, so that the minister's voice seemed
to come from farther off. The sunlight through
the stained glass projected colored splotches here
and there. I wondered if the people knew how
homely they looked with those splotches on
their faces, like great birth-marks. That suggested
a pastime to relieve the monotony.

Starting with the choir (which consisted of
four people, boxed in before the organ at the
right of the pulpit) I began to count people
with colored spots. First there was the tenor
with a purple spot on his left cheek and on his

Peppermints 245

sandy hair and beard. But the organist and so
prano were splashed with scarlet. Then I forget
to count, because I noticed that the 'alto had a
new violet hat, which eclipsed the soprano's old
green one. I wondered whether she had gone
to Boston to buy it, or had "patronized home
industries" — a phrase I had just discovered with
pride in our local paper. The bass was nodding
and letting his hymn book slip toward a fall. I
hoped slily that it would fall, and braced my
nerves for the crash. But he woke with a funny
jerk, like my jack-in-the-box, just in time to
catch it, and began listening intently to the ser
mon as if he had been awake all the while. The
soprano smiled at someone in the congregation,
whispered to the tenor, and then sat silent again.
My gaze wandered to the minister's pleasant
face, with its great square-cut gray beard, which
always suggested to me — why, I don't know —
one of the minor prophets; and then past him
to the gilded cross that was painted on the apsi-
dal wall behind him. I knew that if I looked
at this cross, with its gilded rays spreading out
in all directions, long enough the rays would
begin to melt together and then to turn 'round
and 'round in a kind of dizzy dance. So I looked
steadily, till I had to shake the sleep out of my
eyes with a great effort. Then I fell to specu
lating on the tablets painted at the left of the
pulpit, to balance the organ. These tablets were

246 ^Peppermints

encased in a design that suggested a twin tomb
stone. On one of them were the words, "God
is a spirit, and they that worship Him must
worship Him in spirit and in truth," a sentence
which had always given me great difficulty. But
this morning I interpreted it at last to my satis
faction. It meant, I decided, that a man must
first die and become a ghost, a spirit, before he
could tell what church he really ought to go to.
I wondered if, in that spirit region, there would
be any Methodists.

Directly below the tablets, in a front pew, sat
Miss Emily, she of a bass voice and the "notion"
store. Her Paisley shawl was folded tightly
around her broad, bony shoulders, and made the
lower half of a diamond down her back, the pat
tern exactly in the middle. If the pattern had not
been exactly in the middle I am sure the service
would have stopped automatically, till it was ad
justed. She sat very straight and looked with
partly turned head, showing her masculine pro
file, sternly at the minister, as if defying him to
be unothordox. I tried to picture her asking
him, as he entered her shop, "Which side, old
man?" Would she dare, I wondered? And what
would he reply? A few pews behind Miss Emily
sat "the spilled-over old lady". My sister had
first called her the spilled-over old lady, because
she seemed to have been crowded out by the six
old ladies in the pew behind, and to have been

^Peppermints 247

permanently soured by the slight. Her hair was
done up in a tight, emphatic pug, her profile
suggested vinegar — or perhaps it was her com
plexion. At any rate, when I looked at her I
thought of vinegar. I wondered if she ever ate
peppermints, and if they tasted the same to her
as to other people.

Presently I leaned forward and extracted a
hymn book from the rack attached to the back
of the pew in front. This rack contained, be
sides hymn books, a pair of old gloves done into
a wad wrong side out, two fans, "leaflets" of all
sorts, and little envelopes for the collection. Most
of the "leaflets" were appeals for charity, I fancy.
At any rate, many of them were full of pictures
of poor little city children suffering from all
sorts of diseases, and oppressed me horribly. But
I could always rely on the hymn book. My first
consciousness that there is any difference between
prose and poetry except in the matter of rhyme
came from reading the hymn book, from Whit-
tier's, —

I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air ;

I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care.

I had no idea what kind of a palm a fronded
palm is, but I fancied it something much grander
and taller than other palms; and the whole hymn
filled my mind with a large, expansive imagry,

248 Peppermints

breathed over my little spirit an ineffable serenity.
This hymn I now read while the minister talked
away behind his minor-prophet whiskers; — this,
and Wesley's, —

A charge to keep I have,

A God to glorify;
A never-dying soul to save,

And fit it for the sky.

This stanza always made me want to get up and
shout. I read and re-read it, repeating it, with
noiseless lips. The tune it went to seemed inade
quate, the more so as in our church tunes were
always dragged to the limit of non-conformist
dolorousness. The stanza seemed to me, even
then, happy, hopeful, staccato, jubilant. I won
der what I should have thought had I known
its author was a Methodist? Could good come
out of Nazareth, after all? Instead, I fell to won
dering about the after life in the sky. Heaven
I pictured as a city builded on a cloud. If, on
a very clear day, the cloud should dry up what,
I speculated, would the angels walk on? Then
it occurred to me that they do not walk, they fly.
So they would go flying about streets out of which
the bottoms had dropped, and look right through
far down to the earth, which to their sight would
doubtless resemble the raised map of America in
our school, that stood on a table in the corner
and always had chalk dust, like snow, in the inch-

'Peppermints 249

deep ravines of the Rocky Mountains. I won
dered if the lower stories of the houses would
have any floors. The cellars wouldn't, anyway.
What kept the furnaces in position? Perhaps they
didn't need furnaces in heaven; it was the other
place where the furnaces were. Then I dozed.
In our church Sunday School began at noon,
immediately following the church service, in a
large room at the rear, known as the vestry. The
first small boy on his way to school stamped by
on the walk outside, with what sounded like
defiant aggressiveness. I roused from my doze in
time to see the old man in front of me wake up
with a start at the sound and reach quickly for
his hymn book, as if he supposed the sermon
were over. Then the stamping of other children
was heard on the walk. The scholars passed in
groups, talking shrilly. I knew it must be nearly
twelve o'clock. In the congregation there was
a rustle of gathering restlessness; women put on
their gloves, tried to glance back at the clock
without seeming to do so, stirred in their seats.
The last vestige of sleep mysteriously yielded to
this influence and left me. At last the minister
came to the conclusion of his discourse, and in
stantly there was a sound all over the church as
of waters released and hurrying over dead leaves.
It was the congregation shifting their positions,
expelling their breaths, and turning the pages of
their hymn books. I listened curiously for the

250 ^Peppermints

next sound. It was the clearing of a hundred
throats, getting ready to sing. I too arose and in
my tuneless treble made a joyful noise unto the
Lord. Then church was over.

And my peppermints are all eaten, too, and
the gossamer web of memory dissolves, the pic
ture fades, and I see before me this room of mine,
littered with some learned literature but more
pipes and prints and miscellaneous rubbish, and
I hear outside in the Square, not the spring wind
racing among the budding branches, but the
coughing of a consumptive motor car, the pene
trating squeak of a trolley rounding a curve on
a dry track, the irritating jolt of heavy drays,
and a great, subdued, never-ceasing rumble and
roar, the key-note of the giant city. Only the
little bag remains. Shall I blow it up and "bust"
it? That act, with a final pop, will bring back
a flash of my childhood. Here goes ....

It didn't pop nicely at all. It exploded in a
kind of a spudgy collapse, with very little noise.
Ah, well, you cannot eat your peppermints and
have them too — nor the bag! But it has been
very pleasant to eat them, to wake up with a
whiff and a nibble the memory of those van
ished days, those voices and peaceful paths of
life very far from here and now. It may be true
that we mount on our dead selves to higher things,
but it is well to hold little Memorial Days now
and then, and on the graves of our dead, espe-

'Peppermints 251

cially of those who died young in the flower of
innocence, to leave a. peppermint, as the soldiers
leave on the grave of Miss Emily a print flag
and a basket of geraniums. A cemetery need
not be a mournful place. Maids were wooed
and won in our cemetery, and the high school
pupils ate their lunches out of collapsable tin
boxes every noon on the tomb of Major Barton,
he of Revolutionary fame, who horse-whipped
the British captive when he refused to eat beans.
Noble New Englander! And perhaps my own
peppermint feasts are not so much memorial
banquet, after all, as ceremonial rites in honor
of my native land. For I cannot think of this
great city of New York as my home, I cannot
fit into the rushing, roaring cogs and grooves of
its machinery without a protest, without a hope
that some day I may hear the wheels no longer
roar at their cruel revolutions. Thus my pep
permints speak to me of home, of quiet, of
certain green places and a lilac hedge; there is
about them the taste and odor of the ideal. They
are for the future as well as for the past. Per
haps in some subtle way they do after all have
potency for beauty. I fancy that some day I too
shall stow away bags of them amid my worthless
precious junk, and when prying hands disturb the
dust the nostrils of a youngster now unborn will
be greeted by a frail yet pungent aroma. I can
only trust that he will know well what it is.

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