THAT MOTOR-BOAT OF ALGIE'S

His name really isn't Algie. It wouldn't do to use his real name—he has a very nice wife, you know. So we shall call him Algie, partly as a disguise, and partly because we wish to be offensive. We want to hurt his feelings. It is our earnest desire that he should read this account and writhe painfully. We claim to be as patient and forgiving as the next one, but there are some subjects—and that motor-boat picnic is one of them. When, in addition to being made sea-sick, being scared into acute heart-disease, and being banged about in a locoed launch like a bean in a coal-scuttle, a gentleman is forced to ruin his second-best pair of—but we anticipate.

For two or three weeks prior to the fatal invitation and the fatal day on which he perpetrated the picnic, Algie had been coming down to the office late every morning—so late in fact that his coming amounted to an afternoon call. Furthermore, his face and shirt bore mysterious smudges of train-oil. And though Algie was never what is known as a "swell dresser," he was always a very neat sort of chap in the matter of his personal adornment.

As soon as he arrived he would immediately begin calling up all sorts of mechanics, plumbers, boiler-makers, painters, boat-builders, and electricians. Lengthy conferences would ensue in which frequent references would be made to cylinders and hulls and carburetors and propellers, and the time when certain jobs should have been done, and what a helluva nerve they had to ask any such price. The language was usually very technical. But it was occasionally quite lucid and human, though not of a nature to bear repetition in print which is intended to go into Christian homes.

During the two or three hours in the afternoon when Algie was with us, he would run out every few minutes and come back with a coil of lead pipe, or a dry battery, or a can of gasoline. And then he would slip away at about four o'clock with an intensely preoccupied air.

We all knew where he was going and what he was going to do. He had bought a motor-boat from a friend, and he was trying to put it in such condition that he could go out in it without having to wear a life-belt. Of course, the friend had guaranteed it as the safest, speediest, staunchest, and trimmest little craft that ever got in front of a ferry-boat on the Bay. But one should never buy a motor-boat from a friend. Better buy it from a deadly enemy. Then you may discover a big hole in the bottom of it, or a dynamite bomb stowed away forward with a clock attachment. But that is all. Once you have patched up the hole or thrown the bomb overboard, you are all right. But when you buy a motor-boat from a friend you are never done with trouble.

After Algie had had the Gladiolus—his wife christened it—for about a week, he realized that he had to put a new engine in it. He put the engine in, got the thing started, and headed for the Island. He got there just in time—to save his life, that is. The Gladiolus sank gently to rest on a sand-bar in three feet of water. The liquid composing the Bay is admittedly rather thick, but it managed to ooze into that boat in about four hundred and forty different places. Algie said afterwards that it had looked to him as though the boat were being invaded by an army of angle-worms.

With a marine derrick they enticed the Gladiolus out of the bosom of the sand-bar, and got her back to dry-dock. Then Algie started in to put a new hull around the engine. It amounted to that by the time he got all the repairs made. Then she had to be painted. Also she had to have a new propeller, ditto some chairs, ditto lanterns and a search-light, ditto a set of cushions. But at last the work was done. Algie was tired but happy; and he wanted to share his bliss.

"You simply got to come, old man," he said in a spirit of exuberant hospitality, "won't take no for an answer. Ten sharp, Sunday morning, at Sunnyside—the Missus and I will be right there as you get off the car. We'll run up beyond Port Credit and have lunch by the lakeside. Sharp at ten, mind!"

In a moment of weakness we consented. Nay, more, we looked forward to it. We had visions of ourself leaning back in one of the sumptuous deck-chairs of the Gladiolus, as that beauteous speed-devil ate up the watery miles on old Ontario. We could imagine the shores whizzing by, and the Hamilton boats being left hopelessly behind. So we prayed for fine weather. And when we say we prayed we don't mean that we issued an order to Divine Providence like a parson, but we made a timid and tentative appeal. It was answered. It was one of the finest Sundays we have ever seen. We don't suppose we were really the cause of it, you know, but we felt gratified. When a chap doesn't pray to excess, he naturally is surprised and delighted to get what he asks for. But, alas, we knew not what we did.

When we got off the car at Sunnyside—a popular local beach—there was Algie, sure enough, in white ducks and a stern expression of countenance. Just imagine the face of Admiral Sir David Beatty as he prepared to take the battle-cruisers into action off Jutland, and you will have a faint notion of the concentrated solemnity and sense of responsibility which sat upon Algie's features as he shook our hand in an absent-minded manner and told us to hustle aboard. We did hustle. We don't mind admitting that we were impressed. We felt that here was a seaman who entered upon the grave duties of his position in no frivolous spirit—a true sailor who loved and yet feared the mighty deep.

When we got to the wharf where the gasoline wonder reposed her graceful length, we found Mrs. Algie and two other guests. They were very nice people, very nice indeed. The husband was a clerical-looking chap—his facial make-up suggested a curate in an ineffectual disguise. But his conversation was at times decidedly unclerical—at least, it wasn't the sort of thing one gets from clergymen in their more professional moments. When that big wave came over and sloshed down his neck, he said—but again we anticipate.

Algie and his wife were in nautical costume as befitted the skipper and skipperess. Algie wore a nice pair of white ducks and a white shirt very open at the throat. Mrs. Algie was also in ducks—cut on a different pattern, of course. It was a very fetching little costume. We say "little" advisedly. The skirt had been made remarkably short, or it had grown that way from too long and too intimate association with steam-laundries. The effect, in any case, was to keep it hovering about midway between the nautical and the naughty.

The rest of us were in the ordinary Sunday garb of churchgoers who happen to be going somewhere else. Our clothes were sober and restrained, but natty. They expressed the sombre atmosphere of the Sabbath, with a dash of outing flavor. Personally, we wore that grey suit with the black-line pattern which everyone admired so much. You may have noticed it—two-button coat and cuff-bottom trousers. Really a very pretty thing. We don't mention this from any feeling of childish vanity, but merely because it has a bearing on later developments.

When we saw the Gladiolus we must confess we were disappointed. We had been hearing so much about it, and Algie had spoken with such enthusiasm, that we had formed an idea of a vessel combining the luxury and grace of the Astor family yacht with the rakishness and speed of a torpedo-destroyer. Instead of that gorgeous conception, here was a boat which looked like a very long and narrow packing-case, pointed at one end. It contained an engine that suggested a coffee-mill with a very chunky fly-wheel. Abaft—that, we believe is the technical term—abaft the engine were a couple of cane-chairs.

The Gladiolus, however, was very strong in the matter of decoration. There were stencilled flower-designs in every possible place, and a huge flag drooped over the stern. The cushions presented florid designs of young ladies in sailor-blouses. A large and highly polished search-light glared over the bow like the eye of an enraged Cyclops. There was no acetylene for the light, but it looked well, and it made one feel so much safer.

The party fitted itself into the boat as best it could. It was a very tight fit. Two people seated themselves on the little bench in the stern. They were jammed in so tight that when one was pulled out it made a noise like drawing an obstinate cork. And two sat on the cane-chairs, when they weren't sitting on the bottom of the boat to keep her steady. The skipper had a bench all to himself, so that he could get up and wrestle with the fly-wheel every time the engine paused to think.

When we were all in the boat, she settled down to within three inches of the water—or so it seemed to us personally. We made a hesitating comment on the subject to Algie. He smiled a wintry smile.

"Guess you don't know much about motor-boats, old man," he said in a glacial tone. "You can't have speed unless you have narrow lines and a low free-board. Of course, if you want something built like a grain-barge——"

Hastily we disclaimed any desire for a grain-barge. We stated our entire agreement with him on the subject of low free-boards. Our concurrence was all the more enthusiastic that we didn't know the difference between a low free-board and a loose plank in the fence.

Soothed by our submission, Algie stepped gingerly forward, taking great care not to kick the engine over. He gazed sternly about. We watched anxiously. Algie bent down with dignity, grasped the fly-wheel with both hands, and gave a mighty heave. The engine coughed asthmatically and relapsed into silence. Algie heaved again. The engine cleared its throat—only that and nothing more. Algie smiled a sickly smile, muttered something about the sparker, toyed with a few cocks and levers—that engine seemed to possess more of them than any piece of mechanism we have ever seen—and then heaved that blessed wheel for fifteen minutes without stopping. Nothing doing! Algie was red in the face, his lovely ducks were all smudged with oil, and still the engine preserved the meditative silence of a paralyzed yogi.

It was very trying, very. We all started in to make suggestions, and Algie was so much at a loss that he even tried to carry some of them out, thus losing caste terribly in our eyes. No skipper should ever treat a suggestion with anything but withering contempt. At last he lost his temper and gave the engine a kick. We don't know what he struck, but he certainly struck something. The result was miraculous. The engine started with a roar like an express-train on a bridge, and before we knew we were shooting out into the Lake, just missing a canoe in which a young man sprawled with a double-bladed paddle and beamed at his "ladifren." As we whizzed by, nearly knocking the paddle out of his hand, that young man sat straight up, and while we were within range his conversation was of a character not countenanced by the Lord's Day Alliance.

Thus we started. Of course we didn't keep it up long. After about a hundred yards or so, the Gladiolus settled down to a steady clip of about three miles an hour—when she was going. There were frequent intervals when the engine stopped to get its breath. But we didn't mind. It was a lovely bright day, and there was very little wind. So with our one-lung engine we gayly coughed our way over the glassy waters. We made many jokes, and occasionally burst into song—all except Algie, of course. Algie insisted on preserving the best traditions of British seamanship. On shore he might relax, but while he was at sea and our lives depended on him, he stayed right there on the bridge, and his stern eyes swept the waste of waters and the rock-bound coast lest danger should lurk there. He must have seen a lot of dangers that no one else saw, for he kept zigzagging and tacking about in the most extraordinary manner.

Pleasantly the hours passed and the landmarks on shore—summer hotels, gaudy villas smirking coquettishly through the trees, boating establishments where gentlemen hire canoes for their ladies, or perhaps ladies for their canoes. Slowly we drew near to Mimico. There is an asylum at Mimico. We have heard friends of ours account for its presence there on the ground that one must be out of one's mind to live at Mimico; but as they had been fined for speeding through the village, it is possible that their opinion was not entirely unbiased.

Inch by inch Mimico slipped past the beautiful low free-board of the Gladiolus. And incidentally, that famous free-board began to seem lower than ever. For some little time the wind had been rising, and the waves kept growing bigger—"quite a sea kicking up," as Algie said—and now and then there was an unmistakeable slap of spray over the side. The original intention had been to go some miles further along the shore for lunch, but Algie finally decided to turn back to Mimico—not that he distrusted the seaworthy qualities of the Gladiolus or himself, but merely as a concession to the fears of the ladies in the party. He announced his intention of landing at the Asylum. He had been a visitor or a guest or something there, and professed to know the doctor quite well. Besides they had a good wharf, he said.

Algie managed to warp in the Gladiolus, after several determined efforts to knock the end off the concrete pier. Then we landed the grub. Each of the three gentlemen—we include Algie—assumed the white man's burden, while the ladies tripped on gracefully ahead. We advanced into the grounds of the Asylum. There were a number of the inmates strolling about, but they made no attempt to accost us. Evidently they thought we were new and more than usually weak-minded arrivals. There was much to support such a view.

We found a nice spot for picnicking. It was on a low bluff overlooking the Lake. Sombre pines cast romantic shadows about us. And the lunch was excellent—just such a lunch as marooned sailors might dream to find awaiting them in heaven. We even had initialed napkins. And as the food went down our spirits rose. We felt that the perils of the deep were a myth, and we said ha-ha in our hearts and asked for another piece of pie. Then, having eaten and the chicken bones having been thrown over the cliff, we lay about in graceful postures, listening to what the wild waves were saying and quoting such verse as we remembered out of the fifth reader.

Suddenly it occurred to someone that the wild waves were saying a good deal and that they were talking in a big bass voice. We woke up to the fact that the wind had wakened up some time previously.

"Lord, but it's going to be rough!" said Algie:

But none of us realized just how rough it was going to be, or we would have all walked to town. Seen from above, waves are very different from what they are when seen from below—a truth which no member of that party will ever doubt again. We hastily packed up and made a run for the wharf and the boat. When we got there we found that another boat had also sought its shelter. Two sun-burned youths in extremely primitive costumes brooded in it and smoked cigarettes and cursed their engine. They had tried everything they could think of, including a lot of language they had never thought of before, and the darn thing wouldn't go. Thereupon Algie climbed into their boat and worked like an African slave for half an hour, in spite of our appeals and unveiled hints that he was an ass.

At last even Algie gave the task up and consented to get back into his own boat and begin a little Græco-Roman with his own engine. Strangely enough, that temperamental machine was quite amenable this time. It took only twelve minutes and a few damns to start it. Promptly we backed into the other fellow's anchor rope and put several fancy stitches into it with our propeller. Naturally our propeller became somewhat involved in the process. The other gentlemen—and when we say "gentlemen!"—refused to let us cut the rope, so there was nothing for it but to land the ladies once more, shoo them away from the wharf, undress Algie, and put him into the water. We kept him there till he had untied the propeller, and then we dragged him in, half-frozen. When he recovered sufficiently to be able to speak, he used some expressions which we are personally treasuring up for an occasion of great mental stress.

We rounded the break-water, incidentally scraping all the paint off one side of the boat, and then everything happened at once. A great big wave with a white head saw us coming, gave a glad, wild shout, and jumped aboard. The Gladiolus shuddered and groaned, and we all shuddered and groaned. But it was only the beginning. The big wave was followed by a bigger, which also climbed playfully aboard and coiled up in our laps. And then all Lake Ontario seemed to crowd in on us at once. We were breathing, drinking, and absorbing water which we had intended using solely for purposes of navigation.

The way the Gladiolus acted would have been a revelation to a builder of submarines. That rakish craft, with the long, narrow lines and the lovely low freeboard, dived into every wave and shipped it gracefully all over the passengers. With a very little coaxing, she would have plunged down and run along the bottom. Now and then she came up to breathe, and then we all looked a mute farewell at one another and disappeared once more beneath the foam. None of us ever expected to see Yonge Street and the department-stores again.

The most extraordinary thing about the whole damp business was the way the engine kept going. A real engine would have stopped dead the first time a wave came in and lay down beside it. But this rheumatic and asthmatic old bunch of junk, which some heartless pirate had sold to Algie for an engine, kept coughing and sputtering through it all. There was no spray-hood, and the water was about a foot deep all around the machine, but it hammered away with a steadiness it would never have displayed in happier circumstances.

We would have turned back if we could, but we couldn't. Algie was in no condition of mind to steer, and the boat wouldn't answer the rudder anyway. So we just chug-chugged through the welter, holding our breaths when we were under water, and gasping for air when we could get any. Now and then we caught sight of Algie hanging on to the wheel, evidently prepared to go to his God like a sailor. It was noble but it wasn't seamanship.

For years and years we kept plunging into huge waves that rose up from the nether abyss, towered over our heads, and then crashed down upon us like the side of the Woolworth Building. Once or twice we caught a fleeting glimpse of the shore, with peaceful cottages upon it, and we remembered that somewhere the sun was shining and somewhere hearts were light. But we had little time for reflection.

Suddenly, after a century or two of submarine existence, we found that we were at Sunnyside once more. We were very much at Sunnyside. We were on the beach, with huge waves breaking over us, and three hundred people yelling directions at us. Some noble life-savers stood on the end of a wharf and threw us a rope. Algie grabbed it and performed prodigies of pulling. But it was no use. There we stuck, and a lot more waves came tumbling in to play with us. That is where we personally saw our duty, and we did it. We got out and pushed. It sounds simple. Most heroic things do. But it took the eye that saw and the legs that dared. We clambered out in the bosom of a wave, got a firm toe-hold on the submerged soil of Sunnyside, laid our head lovingly against the polished side of the Gladiolus, and shoved her out into the Lake. Then we held her there and got in again, carrying about a barrel of water with us, like a Newfoundland dog coming back with a stick he has retrieved.

Far be it from us to dwell upon this part of the adventure, though we know men who have got their pictures into the paper and the pictures of their entire families for deeds no braver. And these men have been sailors, hardened to the perils of the splashy deep, while we are a raw amateur whose favorite exercise is running a typewriter. But let us pass on.

Little remains to be told. Algie finally managed to blunder into the shelter of the Humber River. There we fished the ladies out of the boat, wrung them out, and we all walked rapidly home. We walked to keep from being chilled to death—also because there wasn't the slightest chance of them letting us board a street-car in that condition. Fortunately, home wasn't more than a mile or so away—Algie's home. But it seemed farther. Our clothes stuck lovingly to our personalities, and passers-by made unfeeling remarks.

Algie and Mrs. Algie did their very best for us. They fed us, gave us old clothes while ours were drying, made us take a little something with hot water and lemon in it, and rendered all the first aids usual in such circumstances. When we came away we told them we had had a lovely time.

"You must come out again in her," said Algie, "when I have had her decked in, and a new four-cylinder engine...."

But that was a long time ago, and we are still resisting the temptation—tactfully, we trust, but firmly.

AESTHETICS AND SOME TEA

Why anyone should invite us to an æsthetic tea is one of those insoluble mysteries which Heaven alone can penetrate—supposing that Heaven would so far condescend as to notice the matter at all. We are not æsthetic, and we don't care a darn about tea.

What's more, we hate dressing up for it. There might be some sense in dressing up for a case of beer or a couple of bottles of Scotch. But why people should get into afternoon gowns and morning-coats for tea and postage-stamp sandwiches—well, it beats us, dear reader, it beats us.

Of course, nothing was stated in the invitation about it being an æsthetic tea. But we were asked to meet Mrs. De Frizac-Jones, and we knew what that meant. The reader may not know Mrs. De Frizac-Jones—at least, not by that name—but she is a very real person. She is the arch-priestess of the higher cultchaw in our town. And she makes it pay—about five thousand a year and unlimited kudos! But more of her anon.

So we shook the camphor out of our morning-coat, and put a little indelible ink on the places where the lining showed through the more recent moth-holes in the vest. We sewed a button or two on our striped trousers, took a spot off one leg, rectified the line of our shirt-bosom and cuffs by clipping the feathers off the edges, read a couple of chapters of a book of etiquette—all about leaving your hat and stick in the hall without fear, and making a bright, spontaneous remark to your hostess on entering and leaving (a different remark each time, we presume)—and we felt prepared for the massed attacks of the enemy, including gas.

When we arrived there was already a goodly company assembled—thirty-seven ladies and three men. The ladies were bubbling over with unsuppressed excitement, and the air was filled with extremely cultured badinage involving the frequent mention of Mæterlinck and Mrs. Inez Haynes Gilmore. The three men didn't seem excited. They weren't saying a word. Till we were introduced to them, we thought they were the hired help.

The expression of intense eagerness with which every lady's face was turned to the door as we stepped in, caused a flush of pride and modest confusion to mantle our Grecian features. Not that we are entirely unused to such manifestations of feminine approval—but thirty-seven all at once!

When they saw it was only us—that is, when they saw it was only we—O Lord, we mean when they saw who it was, thirty-six of the ladies turned around again and began talking to the nearest person in loud, casual tones, with a unanimity that we can only describe as unpleasantly marked. The thirty-seventh was our hostess. She, poor woman, had to look at us, and she came forward with a wan smile and her hand stretched out.

"Oh, I'm so glad you have come," she assured us without conviction. "You will adore Mrs. De Frizac-Jones—her influence makes so powerfully for sweetness and light, as dear Matthew Arnold would say. And you newspapermen—you are so dreadfully cynical, so tout à fait cynique! She will be here any moment now. We are all longing for her. She is wonderful—so psychic, you know."

So that was why they all looked at the door when we first came in—they thought we were the priestess herself. And we were going to be uplifted. Also we were to be psyched—a hilarious prospect for a healthy, single man! We told our hostess, however, that we were sure we would adore Mrs. De Hyphen-Jones, as we always liked 'em psychic. We were about to explain that as a rule we preferred psychic blondes, but that a good psychic brunette with a neat ankle—our hostess, however, turned and addressed the company at large.

"Just to show you how wonderful she is," she warbled ecstatically, "the very first time she honored our little home with her presence, she simply telephoned to say she was coming, and when I began to tell her the address and how to get here, she stopped me at once. 'Don't tell me,' she said, 'don't even tell me the number. For when I come down the street, I will know at once the house where you dwell by its emanation of your personality, its you-ness, so to speak.' And she did! She came straight to the door."

On every side were heard gurgles of wonder and delight—"Marvellous!" "Isn't she just too wonderful?" "Extraordinary creature of genius!" And right in the midst of that liquid chorus of enthusiasm, we had to break in with one of those inept and devastating remarks which have time and again blasted our hopes of social preferment.

"But if she telephoned to you," we said in a loud voice like the imbecile we are, "she must have seen your address in the telephone book."

There was a chilling pause of indignation and a universal glassy stare. We felt the finger of scorn burning a hole in our shirt-bosom just above our heart. It was a hideous situation for us. We glanced about anxiously for a nice, low sofa to crawl under, when there was a sudden diversion to the right.

Mrs. De Frizac-Jones!—we were a lot gladder to see her than we had ever expected to be. She stood in the doorway, a middle-aged vision in powder-blue (or so we heard one lady describe the color). She carried her head slightly on one side, and a pensive smile lit up the shadows under her blue hat with a blue-and-black ostrich-mount (more eavesdropping on our part). She held out her hand to the hostess as though it were an orchid.

"So sorry to be late," we heard her say. And then the phalanx of ladies charged as one woman, leaving us four men stranded in the middle of the floor. We looked furtively at one another, but no one winked. We were all gentlemen. Besides, we were all badly scared.

"I am so utterly exhausted," Mrs. De Frizac-Jones explained languidly, when the first wild enthusiasm of welcome had somewhat subsided. "I have been lecturing to a class of dear girls on rhythm and deportment, you know, and it takes so much out of one. But their sweet sympathy and intelligence are very reviving. I was teaching them how they must walk—stooping slightly forward, with the face gracefully uptilted. The mannish swagger of most girls nowadays is so very frightful. I told them that when they glide across a room, they must say to themselves, 'I am a lily swaying in the breeze.' And they understood at once—they are so exquisitely plastic."

All the ladies, talking together, said it was really miraculous how she thought of such lovely metaphors. And it brought the idea home to one so beautifully—a lily swaying in the breeze! Personally, we recalled that the last time we saw anyone trying to walk like a lily swaying in the breeze, was about 1.35 a.m. on a down-town thoroughfare. The person in question was trying to carry a most splendiferous slosh past a watchful guardian of the law without affording an excuse for police intervention. The result was something like a lily, and also something like a wrecking-crane that had got out of control. But we didn't tell the company this bright thought of ours. We didn't tell anybody—we had had enough of telling.

A few minutes later we were presented to the great woman. Our hostess did it with the air of one consciously heaping coals of fire on our head. She murmured something about our being a literary critic—as a matter of fact, the Managing-Editor makes us review such books as come in, because the stenographer has too much other work to do, and the last office-boy he tried it on quit.

"Ah-h-h!" said the prophetess giving us her hand, and promptly dismissing that limb from her thoughts—we nearly put it in our vest-pocket we were so embarrassed. "Ah-h-h! And where is your centre?"

Just casually like that—just as though she were asking us where was our favorite hotel. In fact, for a wild moment we did think she might mean where did we usually hang out socially, and we almost said that we could generally be found after office-hours in the Press Club playing poker or waiting for a friendly boot-legger. But the slight vestige of sanity remaining to us prevented this final catastrophe, and we managed to stammer out that we were not aware of possessing any centre at all—none to speak of.

"Oh, but you must have a centre," she persisted brightly. "We who are engaged in the sacred service of the arts and muses must have a centre, a guiding beacon leading us ever onward and upward to the stars. Have you no star?"

We hadn't the heart to tell the dear lady that the star to which we generally turned our longing eyes in the service of the arts and muses was the hope that the Business Office of the journal on which we work would increase the weight and thickness of our weekly envelope—(the printer will please not spell this "weakly," however appropriate and true the epithet may be). We did not care to introduce these mercenary considerations, so we said nothing and blushed. We may be a benighted newspaperman, but we retain certain rudiments of delicacy. She smiled on us in imitation of a Pre-Raphaelite madonna, and floated away.

Then we had tea—not right away, but after half an hour or so of pained wonder whether or not we were going to get anything at all, and where the dickens the people were all drifting away to. They disappeared, two or three at a time, and none of them came back. We began to suspect that we were being ostracized, when our hostess came up and collected us.

"Oh, you naughty, naughty man," she said in that mischievous and knowing tone which some married ladies love to adopt towards bachelors, "you don't deserve that I should bother about you at all, but you really must have something to eat. Come out to the dining-room."

We went out to the dining-room, disguising as well as we could our extreme eagerness for vittles of some sort or other; and there we found that assemblage of giant intellects wandering about picking sandwiches and little cakes and cups of tea off the mantel, off the side-board, off the window-sill, off chairs, and even off the stairs in the hall. They were taking their food the way the Twentieth Century Limited takes water, scooping it up on the run. We must have looked a little amazed, for our hostess deigned to explain.

"That is the way we eat now," she said. "We do it spontaneously and almost unconsciously. Mrs. De Frizac-Jones suggested it. She said there was something so gross and premeditated about sitting down deliberately to food. One should eat as the bees sip honey, flitting about from flower to flower."

We said we thought it a very delightful idea—no doubt, the cook does, too. Then we walked six miles and a half around the place trying to get enough to sustain the vital forces till supper-time. We finished up by nearly sitting in a plate of angel-cake. And we were still hungry. It may be a good system for humming-birds, but it has its drawbacks for people gifted with the usual thirty-two feet of internal equipment.

When the sandwiches had at last been all tracked down and destroyed spontaneously and unconsciously, there was a general demand that Mrs. De Frizac-Jones should read something to us. After the usual amount of ah-do-pleasing on our part and no-I-rully-can'ting on hers, she suddenly remembered that she had Mæterlinck's "Death of Tintagiles" with her, and if they rully insisted—and, of course, they rully did.

The company draped itself in attitudes more or less graceful all over the furniture and the window-ledges, and assumed expressions of gloomy concentration. Mrs. De Frizac-Jones cleared her throat two or three times in a silvery way, and then began to read in a deadly monotone of the soul-freezing sort which villains used to employ in the "ten-twenty-thirt's" before the movies killed the spoken drama.

Personally, we feared the worst from the very moment that the name of Mæterlinck was mentioned. It acts like a spell. We have seen big, bouncing matrons, accustomed to bully their husbands and run large families, turn pale and tremble at the sound of it. We have known it to reduce to silence even the sort of prosperous business person who talks continually in a loud voice about his new car, and the cost of its tires, and the number of its cylinders, and the oceans of gasoline it consumes every time it runs around the block. The word makes them feel like a greenhorn at a Spiritist sceance watching a visitor from another plane materialize in the corner of the room.

The only people who seem to thrive on a diet of Mæterlinck are the æsthetes like Mrs. De Frizac-Jones. The gloomier the twilight of his scene, the more mournful the voices that float down the wind, the more the real enthusiasts expand and burgeon. Just give them a nice poetic strangling or something like that, and they are perfectly happy. Certainly, Mrs. De Frizac-Jones seemed to get a lot of fun out of "The Death of Tintagiles."

It was a cheerful little piece, all about a dear child and a black castle and a vampire queen. His young sisters try to shield him in their arms, but the queen's servants tear him away, and she slowly strangles him to death behind a big iron door while his sisters beat in despair upon it.

The reader will recognize at once how much better and stronger one feels when a play like this is over. Personally we almost gave three cheers when the poor little beggar was finally and completely killed. It put him out of pain—us, too. But fortunately Mrs. De Frizac-Jones checked us in time.

"No applause!" she commanded the company. "No applause! Silence is best."

We heroically restrained our desire to clap with our hands and pound with our feet on the rug; and everyone else sat still and frowned in intense thought. While they were wrestling with their souls, we slipped out into the hall. There we found one of the other men slipping away, too. Neither spoke a word, till we were both safely out on the sidewalk. Then he turned and pointed with his thumb to the house.

"Don't they beat hell!" he said.

BEAUTY IN THE BANK

Somehow we enjoy going to the bank nowadays far more than we used to. It isn't that we are more solvent than heretofore—our solvency does not seem to increase with our years—but the banks are much more interesting resorts than in the old days before the war filled them up with young ladies. The banks now have more color and animation, so to speak—especially since the girls have taken to wearing those gaudy pull-over sweaters.

We were reminded of this changed aspect of our sterner financial institutions the other day, when we caught ourself going in to have our bank-book made up for the third time in the week. Formerly it had been our custom to wait till we got a short and nasty note from the accountant asking us to call around and fix up that overdraught. But now we run right in every time we pass and have a little book-keeping done for us.

Instead of the gloomy young man who used to preside over the records of the savings department, they now have a bright young woman. This naturally introduces a very pleasing social atmosphere. We no longer chuck our bankbook in through the wicket with an air of weary nonchalance, or gaze coldly at the clerk as though daring him to make an insolent remark about the size of our balance and the amount of book-keeping it involves. Our account is still small and very lively, but we don't gaze coldly—on the contrary!

Now we take off our hat, and try to think up something sprightly to say about the weather. If it is a nice day in the summer, for instance, this leads naturally to a discussion of the best place to spend one's vacation, and whether or not one likes sailing, and does one do much dancing in the summer, and how good the roads are for motoring just now.

If it is winter or the weather is bad, it brings one at once to the tragic impossibility of going anywhere or doing anything, and how dull town is just now, and the theatre and the movies—especially the movies! This last is an opening we have found invariably successful. Once you mention Mary Pickford or Francis X. Bushman, acquaintance ripens visibly. Young ladies who turn coldly from almost any other conversational bait rise voraciously to this one, and take it hook, line, and sinker.

A great thing, too, about discussing film-favorites is that it furnishes a most useful index to character. Girls who like Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, for instance, are apt to be of the merry, hoydenish sort—fond of romping, you know, and caramels and practical jokes, and all that sort of jolly rot. The admirers of Clara Kimball Young or Mr. Bushman, on the other hand, are usually of the yearning, soulful type, the kind of girl who wants you to recite poetry to her in the twilight, and longs for some strong man to protect her—this sort of thing usually leads to solitaire-diamond rings. But the young ladies who enthuse over Theda Bara and Pauline Frederick—well, when we run across one of these we always look around for help. When one meets an amateur of vamping one had best not get too far from one's strategic reserves.

This conversational gambit, is all right, but the trouble in the banks is that they keep changing the young ladies around. Just as soon as we have got things moving along nicely, and have reached the point where we can talk about the young lady's preferences in the matter of supper, or can throw out general suggestions in the direction of an evening's paddle in the Island lagoon, they remove her to an inaccessible portion of the building—perhaps they confine her in the main vault—and we have to start all over again. It is a little discouraging, even though our heart is in the work. Bank managers and chief accountants certainly seem to be jealous devils.

Business men, too, are an awful nuisance. They have a way of breaking in disastrously on our little tête-à-têtes at the wicket. One day last summer an awfully nice girl was reading a cheque we brought in, while we playfully seized her other hand which she had left carelessly within reach. Naturally she didn't notice that we were holding it—wonderful concentration these business women have! And naturally neither of us was paying much attention to anyone else—not while this particular business matter was being settled.

"Say, what is this?" a wheezy voice asked at our ear. "Is this a bank or have I butted into a manicuring parlor?"

We looked at the person, a fat and clammy merchant with a bunch of colored cheques in his flabby fist, the sort of human hippo who wears a pink shirt with a Palm Beach suit, and perspires on the end of the nose. We looked coldly down him from the gaudy band on his Panama, to the gilded buckle of his belt—everything below that was concealed by the overhang—but we couldn't think of a darn thing to say. Nothing suitable for a bank, that is.

Fortunately the lady was more than equal to the occasion. She raised her eyebrows and looked at the cheques he held.

"Do you want to cash those?" she asked in silvery tones of hauteur.

"I do," he said with unabashed assurance, "if you can spare the time—and a hand."

"Well, then you had better run out and get someone to identify you—perhaps one of the other butchers might be willing."

We could see the ripples of rage run up the back of that fat financier's neck. He turned a rich magenta, and the diamond on his little finger wobbled about as though he were trying to send a distress message by heliograph.

"Where—where's the Manager?" he spluttered. "I want the Manager. I'll report you, that's what I'll do—you—you minx!"

"Second door at the left of the main entrance," she said sweetly, and reached for a ledger. She did not seem flustered in the least, but our little conversazione was over—this sort of interruption makes it so difficult to recapture the first fine careless rapture.

It was our own fault. We shouldn't have gone in at an hour when business men were likely to be shouldering their way up to the financial trough. In order to take advantage of the social possibilities of present-day banking, it is best to call early—say, around ten o'clock. Then the commercial machine has not got properly under way and little flowers of romance may be made to bloom in the arid paths of business.

But, of course, one mustn't go too early. One must give the girls a chance to exchange their little confidences with one another about the sort of time they had the night before, and what canoe club he belongs to, and how many fox-trots she had with him, and what she said to Reggie when Reggie objected to her going around with a former aviator—aviators presumably being men of flighty notions of morality—and the other vital topics that ladies discuss the morning after.

We made that mistake one morning two or three months ago. A fellow had given us a cheque—it was rather a surprise, we admit—and we were quite short of money, which is never a surprise to us. We needed it and we needed it quickly, so we were at the door of his bank just one minute and a half after it opened. We didn't want to give anyone else a chance to beat us to his bank-balance, so we were there at nine-thirty-six-and-a-half.

The young ladies were present all right—most of them, at any rate—but they had not yet turned their minds to the business of the day. About a dozen of them were gathered in chatty little groups, from which stray snatches of conversation reached our ears.

"I think I'd have frills on it, my dear," said one. "You know those net and muslin frills are all the rage. Gertie was over at Buffalo last week, and she said that the girls were wearing them all over."

How "all over?" But another broke in.

"Say, have you girls seen Maud's new Dew-Kist silk skirt?" she burbled. "It's just too sweet. But don't you think Dew-Kist is an awful nuisance?—everything sticks to it, you know. And it gets so fuzzy when it's rubbed."

Dew-Kist!—it certainly was a very pretty name. A Dew-Kist skirt suggested Arcadian gambols about the morning meadows, with singing and laughter and—well, there is no need of leaving all the kissing to the dew. But we decided not to rub one of those skirts—not if it was going to get all fuzzy and give us away like that. We even made a brief mental prayer that the vogue of Dew-Kist silk would be a short one, much as we liked the name.

Then we waited patiently for another five minutes, while the conversation turned lightly to chenille hats and knitted sweaters.

"I am doing mine in old-rose silk," one young lady informed the other girls and the banking public generally, as represented by us. "Wool is getting so common, don't you think? And the silk clings to the figure much better. You don't get that bulkiness around the waist."

Under the circumstances, we were strong for silk, and we were glad to think the girls were taking it up. In fact, we found the whole conversation very pleasant and improving. But we could not help reflecting that our financial purpose in visiting the bank was not being furthered by it, and that the Managing Editor might perhaps be impatient for our presence at the office. Of course, his humor would all depend on what sort of golf he had played the afternoon before, but one mustn't count too confidently on a good score.

So we coughed. We coughed gently at first, and then louder and louder, until finally we were tearing the fur lining out of our throat. A couple of fair bankeresses glanced at us as though we were an obnoxious June-bug. And then one of them—we think it was Claire—sauntered over to us humming one of Al Jolson's newest records. She laid a powder-puff on the desk and stretched a languid hand for our cheque. She read the cheque. She seemed to read it over several times. Then she laid it on the ledger and walked back to the group. An idea had evidently struck her—we thought she was going to call the police.

"Oh, girls," she said, "do you know what that dirty little cat, Edith...."

We wouldn't have minded so much if we had been able to catch the rest of it, but she lowered her voice, their heads all drew together, and we were left to beat our forehead against the brass grating in impotent rage. We also thumped on the desk with the end of our cane. They heard us—you could hear us two blocks away—but they heeded not.

Finally, the only man in sight came out of the teller's cage—if we worked in a bank these days, we also would wish to be kept in a cage. We would feel much safer that way. He was a comparatively young man but he looked harassed and worn. He came up to the wicket, and we pointed to our cheque—we were too hoarse to speak. He picked it up.

"Say, would some of you ladies kindly consent to attend to this?" he asked in an O-my-gawd tone of voice. It was the voice of a man who had suffered much and saw no relief in sight.

Claire came back, still humming. Her manner indicated that she despised us both. The Paying Teller—at least, that was the name on his cage—went into the big vault in the back of the office. Then he returned.

"Have you changed your combination, Miss Jenkins," he asked curtly, "or do you wish me to do it for you?"

Her combination—great heavens! We gasped and the purple flood of embarrassment mantled our particularly open countenance. But Claire was perfectly cool.

"Thanks," she said without the quiver of an eyelid, "but I want to get used to doing it myself."

She handed us our cheque and then she disappeared into the vault. No wonder they have big iron doors on those things!

KONCERNING KOSMETICS

As a matter of fact—and we are a bear for facts—it should be spelled with a "k." It comes from the Greek "kosmetikos," meaning one skilled in ornament. Honest to heaven, it does! We looked it up in the dictionary; and who are we that we should quarrel with a ten-pound lexicon? As a concession to custom, however, and to the beauty-experts who spell it with a "c," we will so far unbend from our classical austerity as to use the vulgar form "cosmetics" in the present article. The Greeks aren't likely to buy this book, anyway.

In the meantime the reader is probably wondering what in the world should cause us to write about the subject at all. The reader, we hope, is too well aware of our chaste aloofness of soul to suppose for a second that we have perhaps been cavorting about with persons who dye and stencil themselves—God bless us, no! We wouldn't do such a thing, even if the income taxes left us any money to do it with.

To tell the whole truth as simply as possible—and the person who tells the whole truth is obviously very simple—we were walking down to the office the other morning with a good churchman. Oh, a real pillar of ecclesiasticism! Not that we are in the habit of hunting up good churchmen to walk down with, but if we run into one—hang it all! we have to walk with him. We can't very well shout for a policeman.

Well, as we were walking down with him, and he was telling us some pretty little thing or other about something in the Thirty-Nine Articles—not to be confused with the Fifty-Seven, which are much spicier—we met a young lady, another pretty little thing. We meet her quite often. Morning after morning she walks up the street just about the time that we walk down. We don't know her. We don't even speak to her. But she looks sweetly at us, and we regard her in the tenderly paternal way befitting our years. A very nice little girl, indeed, and one of these days we are going to raise our hat, and...

This morning she dimpled daintily as usual, and we felt that soft glow which even the middle-aged can acknowledge without shame. It was pleasant meeting her. It gave a headier zest to the morning air, an additional sparkle to the winter sunshine, a sudden glamor as of green leaves and singing birds amid the bleak trees of December. It was as though old Pan had suddenly blown a few wild notes on his pipes and set a host of little elves peeping roguishly around the posts and porches of that monotonous and respectable street. For a moment we felt quite young and—well, rather devilish, you know.

"Tut, tut, tut," said our religious friend. "My, my, my—too bad, too bad!"

We wondered what the dickens he was tut-tutting about. He couldn't read our thoughts, and in any case they were entirely innocent. So why the tut-tutting? Why should a well-known drygoods merchant with a grown-up family go along making a noise like a sick Ford?

"What's the matter?" we asked. "Have you left something behind you at the house, or have you forgotten to shut off the draught of the furnace? That's the worst of furnaces, you have to be so...."

But he turned on us an appalled countenance as though he had just caught the rector kissing the president of the Ladies' Auxiliary. Instinctively we felt he was going to say something about our little friend of the dimples. He did.

"She paints!" he gasped. "Isn't it terrible to see a young girl—and rather comely, too, so far as I could observe in passing—paint the way she does?"

The old snooper! And he looked at us in the confident expectation that we would agree with him. We affected to misunderstand him and said that perhaps she did paint badly, and that Cubism and Futurism and the other new movements were playing the very devil with art. Painting wasn't at all what it used to be, and we proceeded to instance two or three men we know who also paint very badly indeed.

"They seem to have lost their sense of tonality and chiaroscuro," we remarked desperately, hoping the technical balderdash would distract his attention. "The vibration seems to have gone out of their paint, and their brush-work is..."

"But she paints herself!" he insisted.

Isn't that characteristic of the truly religious mind? They never miss a thing, those chaps. They seem to know instinctively—at least, we hope it is instinctively—everything that a woman shakes, smears, or pours on herself. They can tell rouge, face-powder, or hair-dye blocks away. If they tried hard they could probably tell you where every woman on the street buys her complexion, her coiffure, and her contours, and how they are put on. It is a great gift. Personally, it takes us years of acquaintance to find out.

We remember once a very churchly young man—the kind that always shows you to a pew and opens the hymn-book at the right place for you—telling us of a musical comedy into which he would seem to have wandered under a misapprehension. We had gone ourself, and it had struck us as being decidedly tame. But he was filled with indignant wonder that the Censor should permit such shameless and Babylonian displays.

"Fortunately I sat at the back of the house," he said, "or I wouldn't have known where to look. One of the girls in the chorus, the second from the right, didn't even wear tights, but danced in her bare legs!"

Great guns! And there we had sat up in Row E on the aisle—the Dramatic Critic let us have the seats that night—and hadn't seen a darn thing. Verily there is some power that sharpeneth the eye of the virtuous man and revealeth unto him the dishabille of the wicked. For an upright heart is more powerful than opera-glasses, and sanctity more exciting than a seat in the front row.

But to return to the young lady we met on our walk down to the office. Naturally we assured our godly friend that he must be mistaken in his suspicions. A little powder, perhaps, to give that pearly translucency to the complexion and soften the high-lights on the nose, but no paint—nothing like that.

"But powder won't make your face that funny shell-pink color," he argued. For a man of pious pursuits, it struck us, his knowledge was fairly broad.

We told him that powder was liable to make your face any shade in the spectrum. We know from personal experience. Occasionally after shaving, when our face feels more than usually lacerated, we rub some talcum on. It seems to take part of the sting out. It also covers the places on our neck where we have made futile and fumbling slashes at our jugular vein.

One morning we shook some powder out of a new tin, patted ourself with it, and then hurried down to breakfast. Our landlady looked at us with an interest and sympathy that were entirely unexpected and a little disquieting.

"Are you feeling well?" she asked, instead of demanding acrimoniously as usual what under heaven we had been doing upstairs for the last half hour or so, while the coffee was boiling itself to a poisonous consistency on the back of the stove.

We said we were perfectly all right, thanks, and would she please pass the prunes?

"But you don't look well," she persisted. "You got an awfully queer color this morning—kind of mauve."

A vague suspicion struck us that all was not well. We went over to the side-board and squinted at ourself in the silly little mirror which furniture-makers put in the back of such things. "Mauve" was right, though perhaps it would be more exact to state that we were a lovely shade of heliotrope, very decorative but rather Futurist in general effect. We looked as if we had succeeded in cutting our throat at last, and were now a pale and beautiful corpse. We suddenly recalled that our heart had been acting a little strangely of late, especially when we were introduced to new and pretty girls. Perhaps there really was something wrong with our old carburetor—or should we say our ignition system? We were scared a still paler shade of lavender.

Then we remembered the powder—somehow it hadn't seemed quite the same as the old stuff, though we had been in too much of a hurry to look closely at it. We ran upstairs and shook some of it out in our hand—it was a pretty and quite distinct violet, both as to color and perfume. Naturally there is no serious objection to smelling like a violet, but we had no ambition to have a complexion like one—we prefer that the resemblance should be confined to the beautiful modesty of our disposition.

We took the tin back to our druggist on the way down-town, and asked him with some asperity what the big idea was. We assured him that we hadn't bought the powder as part of the make-up to play the leading role at a wake, and that even in the event of our being laid out we didn't intend the dash of lavender to be so brazenly conspicuous—a little purple on our tie, perhaps, but none on our countenance.

"Oh, that's too bad," he said calmly—druggists are always calm—"I must have given you the powder for brunettes by mistake."

For brunettes!—but why, in the name of all that is sensible, we asked, should brunettes powder themselves with pale purple? He explained patiently that ladies of a dusky complexion sometimes used it to give their faces that fashionable pallor which is deemed a symptom of a certain blueness of the blood. He had several other shades, too, for other complexions, natural or desired.

We told our censorious walking companion all about this little experience of ours, but it had not the slightest effect on his opinion—you never saw such a hard man to convince. He still persisted that the young lady painted. In fact, he went so far as to describe how they rub the rouge on, spreading it out carefully with a rabbit's foot—for luck, we presume—and then cover it up with powder. Where the devil do these pious fellows get their information, anyway? He was too much for us. We had to let him have the last word.

After all, suppose she does paint—where's the harm? See how healthy and attractive it makes her look. Of course, the thing has to be done skilfully and with judgment. One must display artistic restraint in such matters, and not lay the color on with a palette-knife. Just a nuance, a soupçon, that's all.

Mind you, there is nothing like the real complexion—for one thing, it doesn't rub off on the shoulder of a fellow's coat. But suppose a lady hasn't a complexion which she can afford to display in unadorned splendor, what's she to do about it? She can't very well go out without a complexion, can she? The thing seems hardly decent.

Personally we have never sympathized with the censorious outcry against the more ruddy cosmetics. Why should this particular bit of camouflage be taboo, when so many other forms of it are regarded as permissible or even obligatory? Look at the liberties ladies take with their waist-line, for instance. Sometimes it is up under their shoulder-blades, and a few months later it is so low they are sitting on it. Half the time a man has to look twice to know where to place his arm.

It is true that the added brilliancy imparted to the female countenance by the judicious use of cosmetics constitutes a very formidable weapon against masculine peace of mind. So clearly is this recognized that in Kansas, the home of fearless and advanced legislation, there is a law forbidding the use of rouge by any woman under forty-five years of age. After that age it is felt they are entitled to every possible assistance—barring shot-guns, of course, or other forms of physical violence.

Perhaps it is a realization of the danger to himself that causes the average man to inveigh so furiously against cosmetics. But his attitude is more than a little absurd. He is bound to fall sooner or later, poor chap, and how does it really matter if he falls a bit sooner and a bit harder? Nevertheless, the average man is usually bitterly opposed to his fair friends making themselves still fairer by deftly heightening or counterfeiting the rosy bloom of youth. He is opposed to his own sisters doing it—the mean old thing!—and he frankly rages when he catches his wife at it. Extraordinary how sore hubbies get when they find wifey thus striving to make herself beautiful in their eyes—can it be that they are not quite sure whose eyes?

The deliciously inconsistent part of the whole thing is that no respectable woman ever dreamed of daubing herself up with cosmetics the way the ordinary barber plasters most men with powder and perfumed hair-tonic and toilet dope of all sorts. We have seen fat middle-aged men come out of a barber-shop with their face massaged and powdered, their hair greased back, their mustache waxed, their eyebrows smoothed into place, and their hands manicured, doing their utmost to look and smell like beautiful Circassian slaves. And yet those are the chaps who go home and holler if they catch their wives rubbing a little powder on their noses!

Not that it makes the slightest difference, of course! The ladies, bless their hearts, will go right on making themselves beautiful in every old way they know how, no matter what men say. And you are quite right, girls. Personally we feel that you can't go too far or be too successful. So do your darndest! It's a sad old world just now, in spite of peace with victory.

But there is just one little word of warning, girls. We know you will take it in good part from a man who has grown grey in the intensity of his admiration for you. And that is, don't do it in public. A bachelor, it is true, dearly loves to be initiated into the little mysteries of the toilet, but not at dinner. That talcum powder has an unpleasant way of floating on the soup or the salad dressing. And you can't possibly spread it with the true artistic evenness at the table. You nearly always get too much on one side of your nose. This gives us an almost irresistible impulse to lean over and brush it off for you, and—well, what would the head-waiter think? It would probably cost us five dollars in hush money.

CLURKS AND CLARKS

The chief difference between a "clurk" and a "clark" is about six dollars a week—the difference, that is, in mere vulgar coin of the post-war period. There are tremendous differences, however, in clothes, dignity, savoir faire, and such intangible things. There is also a very pronounced difference between the kinds of service they give you. A mere "clurk" may keep you waiting, but he or she never manages to make you feel apologetic. "Clarks" always do—it is their social privilege.

It is at the blessed season of Christmas that we are especially reminded of these things. It is a time when we are much exposed to clerks—"clerks" being the generic term. We consort—not to say cohabit—with both species. If hanging over a counter for hours at a time, yelling futile directions at a monomaniac who insists on dragging down everything on the shelves except the thing one wants—if this doesn't amount to cohabitation, we would like to know what does. But, of course, there is something to be said in extenuation for the clerks.

Some day when we are a lot older and have made our pile, and have the whole four hundred and sixty dollars salted away carefully in some nice safe mining-stock—some day, in short, when we are independently rich and careless of what we say, we will write down our frank and unexpurgated opinion of Christmas shoppers, and then spend the rest of our life trying to induce some paper to print it. But that is a long way off yet. For the present we will compromise with the simple generalization that the average Christmas shopper is a lineal and typical descendant of such Gadarenes as managed to swim to safety after they had taken that historic jump off the cliff.

We feel that it is only fair to make this statement before we go on writing about the Christmas "clurk" and the Christmas "clark." For the Christmas shopper explains many things. To have to stand for ten, twelve, perhaps fifteen hours a day, while a lot of people, who have gone insane from starting in to do their Christmas shopping early and keeping at it without intermission ever since, howl impossible orders at one, would make the patient man of Uz himself pick up a bolt of dress-goods or a reading-lamp or some such handy trifle and clear a breathing space with it. Samson used the jaw-bone of an ass. But the asses who wedge themselves up against counters and scream at the clerk for things that are sold either two floors up or three circles over, keep their jaw-bones to jaw with.

The movement in favor of doing your Christmas shopping early is no solution of the problem. It has been worked to death. If you want to get ahead of the Christmas shoppers now, you have to start in the latter part of August. In that case your Christmas presents are likely to consist of lawn-mowers, mosquito netting, and parasols.

As a matter of fact, the wise man will do his shopping—unless he is so darn wise that he doesn't shop at all—the very last thing on Christmas Eve. By then all the red-eyed shock-troops will have got through their deadly work in the stores, and will be strapped to their beds surrounded by anxious nurses. A week earlier an ordinary man who plunged into a department-store at any hour of the day would take his life in his hand—along with his eighty-seven cents. If he managed to get through alive, he wouldn't have enough clothes left on him to make it safe to meet a modest policeman.

Another advantage of putting off your Christmas shopping is that you are bound to forget a lot of people to whom you would otherwise have sent a collection of assorted junk. Of course, it is too late by the time you do think of them. You are just that much in pocket, and they are relieved because they won't have to send you anything next year.

But, to return to the clerks, we had a simply awful experience last Christmas. There is a nice old lady for whom we buy a present every year. As she isn't our grandmother—grandmothers are satisfied with any old token of affectionate regard whether it be a postcard or a hot-water bottle—we have to exercise a certain care and judgment. And naturally our knowledge of the personal needs and tastes of old ladies is somewhat limited.

Well, we were standing deep in thought before a shop-window full of fluffy white garments with frills and ribbons, intended for purposes mysterious to bachelor men, when a friend's wife, who occasionally takes a maternal—or perhaps we should say sororal—interest in us, came up and asked us what we were doing there. Her tone suggested that she did not believe our interest to be entirely innocent. But we did not take offence. We told her frankly that we were trying to pick out something that would be suitable as a gift for an old lady.

"But you don't suppose, do you, that a nice old lady would be willing to wear anything in that window?" she asked.

We said we didn't see why not, and that personally we thought that cute-looking garment up there in the corner, with the baby ribbon at the top and the two ruffles around the bottoms, would be just the thing. We spoke in complete guilelessness, but we spent the next ten minutes trying to convince her that we hadn't intended to be objectionable. Will someone please tell us why it isn't all right to talk about a thing that it is all right to display brazenly in a window? If it isn't fit to be mentioned it surely isn't fit to be shown. But you know what women are when they get an idea of that sort in their minds. This one looked us sternly in the eye.

"I don't believe there is any old lady at all," she said, "but if there is and you really want to buy her a present that won't cause her to write and complain to your family when she gets it, why not buy her a hug-me-tight?"

A hug-me-tight!—now that sounded like the very last thing we would have nerve enough to send a lady, no matter how old she was. Besides, we didn't know that a hug-me-tight was a thing one could send. We thought it was something one did. But we are always ready to learn, especially about things that have to do with hugging, figuratively or otherwise—and the more figuratively the better. But, of course, a good deal depends on the figure. So we got a few more directions, and then we walked right into that department-store and accosted a tall superior person in a morning-coat.

"Where do they sell hug-me-tights?" we asked.

"What's that?" he barked at us, in a manner which would have been offensive in anyone but a real silver-mounted "clark."

"A hug-me-tight," we repeated with emphasis, "a woolly business used by old ladies to protect the chest and back against draughts—the kind that come through the window, not out of a bottle."

We thought to cheer him up with this little touch about the "draughts"—mild, you know, but still a pun. Somehow he didn't seem to like it. Perhaps he didn't get it—these toffs often don't. Stately, you know, but a little slow.

"Woollen goods—third floor!" he finally grunted.

His manner was not of the sort to inspire much confidence, but we took his word—also the elevator. And when we say that we "took" the elevator, we mean that we fought our way into it through an army of maddened suffragettes. We bit the ends off two feathers; we were stabbed in several places with hat-pins; and finally at the third floor we were disgorged into the woolliest woollen department we have ever seen. It was full of woolly garments—some of a most embarrassingly intimate description—and ladies. There wasn't a man in sight. It was rather trying for us. There was on view a great deal of raiment of the sort that is "knit to fit," and—well, it has always seemed to us that there is something rather gross about wool. Now muslin—especially if complicated with lace and insertion—is filmy and charmingly illusive. But wool—no!

We picked out a plump little clerk-lady with woolly hair and brown eyes. We don't know why we picked her out particularly, except that she was the sort of girl we would naturally pick out. She seemed a young person who would know about hug-me-tights. So we went right up to her and—remembering just in time not to take off our hat as if she were a "ladifren" of ours—we asked her as casually as the nature of the case would permit where we could get a hug-me-tight.

"A hug-me-tight—you want a hug-me-tight? You—you?" and the shameless little huzzy buried her face in a pair of blankets with blue borders and bleated convulsively.

We moved on—with dignity, but hurriedly. It was a painful thing to have happen. There are dissolute and daring characters who would perhaps have enjoyed the situation. They might even have taken occasion from it to enter into conversation and find out the young lady's Christian name—if Christian—and whether or not she liked movie-shows. But ours is a mind above such trivial manoeuvres. We moved on, while a clammy perspiration bedewed our brow.

The next time we picked out the oldest and homeliest clerk we could see in that department. Taking courage from the thought that here was a woman who could not possibly put any personal significance into a request for a hug-me-tight, we went up to her and told her we wanted one. Involuntarily we lowered our voice till it was little above a whisper. Too late we realized our mistake. She gave us one horrified glance, and then, no doubt, recalling all the terrible stories she had read of young and pretty girls being "loored" to "roon" and never heard of more, she turned to cry for help. But we stopped her short.

"Madam," we said sternly, "the hug-me-tight referred to is a nice garment for a woolly old lady—no, no, a woolly garment for a nice old lady—and the sole motive in asking you for it is the hope that you might direct——"

"Three circles to the left!" she snapped in a sour tone, which for a wild moment suggested that she was disappointed. But we would hate to think that—at her age, too!

It was fully ten minutes before we could nerve ourself sufficiently to go to that third circle. Instead, we went over and looked at a lot of assorted mittens for children. We gazed at them with an intensity that must have given the young lady behind the counter the impression that we were the father of at least ten children—all small.

We even got a silly notion of buying a pair of them for the old lady—she has rather small hands. And there was a nice pair of red ones on a tape. Whenever she went out in the back-yard to make snowballs—but we decided against it. We were told to get a hug-me-tight; and a hug-me-tight we were resolved to get, even if they sent in a hurry-up call for the Morality Squad.

By this time, however, we were aware that a hug-me-tight was not a thing for a nervous man to ask a young lady for, without preparing her mind gently. We have always believed that we have a spiritual face—the grave, sweet expression of a monk who is happy in his calling. But any healthy man who says he can look spiritual while asking a lady-clerk for a hug-me-tight is a liar. We hate to be vulgar, but no other word will do. The thing isn't possible—that's all. So we were politic.

"Have you any woollen garments, something in the nature of a jacket," we asked in our most elaborately casual tone, while the blond person patted her hair and stared negligently past our right ear, "which would be suitable for an elderly lady to wear in the house or under a coat?"

"Oh, what you want is a hug-me-tight," she said.

And she never batted an eye! The self-control of women at times is really a wonderful thing. So we got our hug-me-tight at last. But never again—s'elp us! We'll get that nice old lady a meerschaum pipe first.

VENTILATION

This is the season of the year—we are writing on a fine brisk December day, friend reader—when ventilation becomes one of the paramount issues. To open the window or not to open it, that is the question. Discussions on this topic have been known to split families. They have even led to the splitting of heads.

Heaven only knows how many divorces have been started by arguments as to how much air should be let into the bedroom o' nights—with the number of blankets and the thickness of the eiderdown as sub-headings of debate.

Consider the sad lot of the ordinary poor anæmic husband married to one of those hardy modern women, who are so full-blooded that they can't bear to wear anything to speak of above the corset-top or below the knees. We saw one on the street the other day, and about the only difference between her and "September Morn" was a sealskin coat thrown back on the shoulders, and the fact that she didn't stand the same way as the lady in the picture. It was a cold day, too.

Naturally persons of such airy inclinations and fervid temperament wouldn't want to be burdened with a whole lot of blankets and quilts when they go by-by. Obviously you can't take a really truly "beauty sleep" with several layers of bed-clothes piled up on you like the roof of a dug-out. The thing isn't done—not in any pictures that we have seen, that is. As a pious and embarrassed bachelor, of course, we speak of such matters purely from report and from such evidences as we have gleaned from the movies and from those bed-room scenes now so popular in stage-performances. Stage-beds never have any blankets. Their appointments always are of pink silk, and no conscientious actress would dream of pulling them up any higher than the lace-work on her nighty.

But consider the case of the modern husband. He, poor devil, is not hardened by going around the streets with his shirt laid open so as to expose everything from his collar-bone to his solar-plexus. Also his pants are of wool—or so the tailor claims—and they extend to his feet. If they were made of georgette (we got this from a department-store "ad") and cut off at the knee so as to display about three dollars' worth of transparent silk stocking, they might help to harden his constitution—also his nerve. But, as a matter of fact, he would probably get double pneumonia while the first policeman he met was dragging him off to the station. If he didn't get double pneumonia, he would certainly get three months.

Naturally such a man is soft and sensitive to cold. If he lets any draught into his room at night, he wants a nice, tame little draught that will coil up quietly under the dresser and stay there. His wife on the other hand, accustomed to the rigors of the open street with hardly any other defence than her natural beauty, insists on letting into the room one of those northern zephyrs that play about exposed street-corners in the month of January. That is where the trouble starts, and—well, when we finally get a divorce court in Canada, this will probably be regarded as one of the statutory causes.

Of course, it isn't only a man's wife that drives him into nightly cold storage. There is the pressure of public opinion, for instance. The same absurd force of custom which drags a man out of bed in the morning, blue and shivering, and plunges him into a tub full of icy water, directs that he shall leave his window open all night for fear of what the neighbors would think of him if he didn't.

We are a coward like everyone else, and we do it. We don't believe the health-hints we see in the magazines. We have no wife to bully us in the matter of the aeration of our boudoir. And yet we cower miserably under the clothes all winter long, while icy gales leap in through the window, chucking our garments off the chair where we pile them up, blowing the undress portraits of our favorite characters in ancient history, Helen of Troy, Venus, and Phryne, about the room, and reaching under the clothes to tickle our feet with icicles.

It isn't good for us. It isn't good for any man to spend the night with his head under the pillow instead of on top of it. But what are we to do about it? We don't dare keep our window closed—what would our landlady say, if she found out? She'd probably decide we had measles, and throw us out to prevent the house being quarantined.

And next morning! Great guns, but that room is cold! It would be just about right for a little Esquimau, but we are not a little Esquimau. We don't rub ourself all over with train-oil or whale-blubber. We don't even know how to induce a whale to blubber on us. Neither do we sleep in fur pyjamas, which also serve for business and social purposes. Little Esquimaus don't even have to put their hats on when they get up. They are all dressed as it is.

The terrible predicament of a civilized man dressing in a cold room is that he has to take off what little he has on before he can put on anything else. One's flannelette nighty may be no great shakes as a protection, but at least one has been able to warm it up a little during the night. And then to take it off, while your teeth chatter and your blood congeals—there are few sadder partings than this.

One's only safety lies in speed. If you could only see us as we leap—oh, with a chaperon, of course, dearie—no, no, we don't mean that we leap with a chaperon, but that it would be all right for you to see us if you brought a chaperon—oh, well, anyway, we certainly leap.

But it must be admitted that civilized male habiliments are not adapted to speedy dressing. Neither are female, for that matter, judging by the length of time we have to wait whenever we take anyone to the theatre. If they would only devise some sort of clothes—for the winter months, at any rate—that a man could jump into and fasten with one or two buttons! You know how a firehorse runs into his harness. Well, something along that line would do.

As it is, we drop our robe de nuit like Psyche at the bath—only a little more hurriedly, perhaps—and then we start a deadly wrestle with a set of underwear which has deliberately tied itself up in a series of fancy knots. Our feet stick halfway in, and we stagger about on one foot dragging and moaning, while our epidermis assumes all the colors of a sick chameleon. It is a very painful predicament, mortifying to one's sense of dignity, and hurtful to one's eternal salvation because of the expletives one is sometimes led to blurt out.

And then think of the complication of hose-supports, suspenders, collars and ties, and all the rest of it. Besides, you have probably forgotten to put buttons in a clean shirt the night before, and you have to stand there with palsied fingers babbling in imbecile rage while the studs roll gaily under the bureau. No wonder a man comes down to his breakfast on cold mornings with a seething rage that would make a Prussian hate-party look like a June day in the pigeon-loft.

Who started this ventilation racket, anyway? Our grandfathers had no use for it, Heaven knows. Personally we can recall our paternal grandparent, armed with a large, strong kitchen-knife, shoving gobs of cotton-batting into the cracks around the double-windows, in case a skinny little draught should be able to worm its way in somewhere. And yet the old gentleman was not cut off prematurely by some wasting disease. He celebrated, on the contrary, a very merry ninety-fourth birthday before he went aloft to poke cotton-batting cloudlets, no doubt, into the crevices in the pearly panes of heaven.

We have also known a lot of other vigorous old people who had about as much use for ventilation as they had for a velocipede. Of course, this sort of talk from us sounds very reactionary and benighted and all that, but we can't help recalling that people seemed to live longer and more comfortably in the good old stuffy days than they do now, when a man is a small body of chills entirely surrounded by draughts. Perhaps some brother or sister will rise up in meeting and explain this little matter to us.

Air, fresh air—everyone seems to be shouting for it as though they were Huns caught in a foundered submarine. But old-fashioned business men used to do their work in hermetically sealed offices containing a wood-stove that made the varnish smoke on the furniture. If anyone opened the door wide enough to let in a draught the size of a lead-pencil, they swore at him. And as for opening the windows—only over their dead bodies, that's all! Besides, they were usually nailed down till the next spring.

But your modern business man's ideal seems to be an office that is about as weather-proof as a squirrel-cage. We called on a man the other day, and he was sitting between two wide-open windows with a gale blowing through them that nearly shot us back down the stairs again.

"Great, isn't it?" the Arctic idiot chortled. "Nothing like good fresh air! Keeps up your efficiency, you know, puts pep into you."

We said that obviously a man would have to keep moving if he wanted to save himself from freezing to death in that office. But where did his customers get off? It might be all right for him to freeze out a poor devil of a journalist like ourself, but how about freezing out a pork-packer or a bank-president? Not that we have any painful objection to seeing them frozen, God Wot—we have been frozen out of banks too often ourself.

"Oh, a man's customers come in off the street," he said breezily, "and they're usually wearing their street-clothes, so they're all right."

We took the tip. We buttoned our overcoat, turned up our collar, pulled our hat well down on our head, drew on our gloves, hunched up our back, and were able to talk to him for three minutes about as comfortably as though we were sitting on the top ledge of a sky-scraper in a blizzard. If there's anything we hate, it is a draught in the ear. The only draught we don't object to is the sort that one gets out of a keg, and naturally one doesn't get it in the ear—not unless the party has been going on a long time.

Take our own office. The window swings on a central pivot. The beauty of this system is that you can get more air this way in a shorter time than by any other expedient short of removing the side wall. But you can't get just a little air. Either you don't get any at all, or you get a tornado that lifts you out of your seat by the back-hair.

Of course, the system has one advantage—you can aim the draught. By setting the window at the correct angle, you can switch an aerial Niagara into the next office, from which it comes back slightly warmed up and as a rule highly flavored with cigarette smoke and profanity. This vicarious ventilation, so to speak, has its advantages, but it is apt to lead to reprisals—and not always in kind. Some son of a gun, for instance, slipped into our office this afternoon and stole all our matches. We know they weren't blown away, for they were in a drawer.

While we feel keenly on this subject of ventilation and believe that the thing is being greatly overdone, we don't wish to write ourself down as entirely opposed to fresh air. Some concessions must be made to the popular hygiene of the day. All that we ask for is reasonable moderation. We don't mind a nice little draught slipping into the room from time to time, so long as it comes in quietly and unnoticeably. What we hate is the sort of draught that leaps at the back of our neck and shoves an icy mitt down our collar.

Personally, we look forward to the time—will the reader please excuse us for a moment? The chap in the office next door has just opened his pivot window again, and has blown our hat, ten pages of this manuscript, a dollar bill, and seventeen cents' worth of postage stamps down the corridor. We are going in to speak to him about it.

(We are taking a paper-weight with us).

CITY CHICKENS

For a long time we have wanted to write about urban poultry; but we have been too nervous to start. It may seem to the reader that we are carrying our natural delicacy too far and are becoming almost prudish, but the fact remains that we were afraid to write about city chickens for fear of being misunderstood.

You see the word "chicken" has acquired ramifications of meaning which have nothing whatever to do with Plymouth Rocks, or Silver Wyandottes, or Buff Cochins, or any of the other standard breeds of hen. It occurred to us, therefore, that if we were to start an article about keeping chickens and dressing chickens and that sort of thing, readers of a precipitous turn of mind might jump to indecorous conclusions.

We hasten to assure the reader that we don't mean that kind of "chicken" at all. In the first place, we don't know anything about them. We are too virtuous—also too poor. It is true that occasionally, when forced by our professional duties to investigate the night-life of great cities, we have seen poultry of this sort gaily cavorting about and—but we are growing prolix. Let it suffice to state that this article is written about the sort of chicken that goes garbed in feathers—hen feathers, we mean, not ostrich plumes.

It is really extraordinary how many people in town keep chickens. The love of things rural seems to die hard in the urban breast. Unable to go out in the early dawn and chew straws while he gazes placidly at his hay field or his hog lot, the city man keeps hens.

First of all he purchases a whole library of hen literature. He discovers that there are about seven hundred breeds, and that each one is ideal for his purposes. Finally he buys four hens and a rooster which can trace back their ancestry through two hundred generations or more of aristocratic hendom. No common pullets for the city man who is going in for poultry—nothing but the real blue bloods at about forty dollars apiece.

He has previously built a strictly up-to-date hen-house—steam heat, hot and cold water, nursery, tiled bathroom, maid's quarters, and all the rest. If he is a very kind-hearted man, he may even put in a gramophone and hang comic pictures on the walls. They say it is very important that hens should be kept in a cheerful state of mind. Personally, we have always had our doubts about a chicken having any mind at all. But that's what the books say, and who are we that we should venture to dispute with a book?

Of course, these chickens don't lay. Purse-proud and aristocratic chickens of this sort never do. They have no incentive. Why should they go to the trouble of laying eggs and having a family when they can get everything a hen's heart desires without it? Besides, the late hours they keep tend to a low birth-rate.

The Downer, however, gets it into his poor numb noodle that the food isn't right. He starts experimenting, and once you start experimenting with hen-feed you are headed for bankruptcy and the bug-buggy. The only thing that saves you is that the chickens die in time—chickens that are fed everything from canary seed to lobster and champagne are apt to die young.

Is the owner discouraged?—usually, no. Ten to one he goes out and buys another half dozen members of the poultry peerage. The only difference is that this time he gets a different family, Brown Leghorns instead of Black Minorcas, for instance. But the result is always the same.

Occasionally, of course, a hen will forget herself and the social exigencies of city life and will lay an egg. Now and then they are even known to have a chicken—in extreme cases, two or three. But families of this unfashionable size are extremely rare. At a moderate estimate—allowing only a reasonable interest on capital invested, the house, hens, food, etc.—the eggs cost three dollars and a half each, and the baby chickens six and a quarter. But every time one arrives the proud owner goes about for days telling all his friends what a convenience and economy it is to grow your own eggs and spring chickens right there on the premises.

There is something pathetic about the way the moral character of chickens deteriorates in town. We have often wondered, in fact, why the parsons do not draw stern ethical lessons for their sermons from the way decent, well-behaved country chickens take to evil courses in large cities.

Time and time again we have seen innocent and energetic young roosters from the farm come into our neighborhood—rather a respectable neighborhood, too, as neighborhoods go—nice, young roosters of good habits, who always got up at the proper time in the morning and went to bed early o'nights and crowed with fidelity and discretion.

And what happened? Why, those roosters wouldn't be exposed to the pernicious influence of city life for more than a month before they would be staying up all night, crowing at the electric lights, and keeping the hens up, too. What becomes of family life under these conditions? What sort of future is there before a hennery where the rooster sleeps all day and the hens sit around and hold mothers' meetings without an egg or a chick in the place?

There is a rooster in our block just now, who has gone absolutely to the demnition bow-wows. We first knew him as a kindly young cockerel from one of the small provincial towns, good humored, honest, and orderly. But you ought to see him now—especially you ought to hear him. The brute crows his head off every time in the night that an automobile goes by; and he spends his afternoons sitting on the side fence watching the girls in the tight skirts—with the nastiest leer in his eye! We often hear the hens calling to him; but what does he care about his family responsibilities?—not a kluck!

The neighbors are all talking about that rooster. They are also shying things at him whenever he gets within range. This brings up another unpleasant feature of keeping hens in town. The neighbors are very apt to be cross about it. They never seem able to take the same idyllic view of chickens that the owner does—very narrow-minded people, neighbors, as a rule.

Even the best-behaved fowl are likely to fly over the fence occasionally into a neighbor's yard and dig worms out of the gravel walk or make impromptu salad of his geraniums and young onions. And you have no idea how annoyed the neighbor gets over these little outbreaks of playfulness. Think, too, of the eggs that must result from it. Just imagine, friend reader, an egg with a geranium shell and a flavor of young onion!—or heliotrope and carrot tops!—or burdock and tomato can! The possibilities are unlimited.

This reminds us of a man we knew once who lived back of a brewery. We didn't seek out his acquaintance and make ourself a friend of his just because he lived back of a brewery—it happened that way, that's all. We couldn't very well cut a man just because he lived back of a brewery, could we?

He also kept chickens. We didn't let this interfere with our friendship either. But he had certainly the gosh-darndest time with his chickens of anyone we ever knew. There were about fifty of them—four roosters—and they had a nice, roomy hen-house with separate beds and great big perches to sit around and talk on, every comfort in fact.

But did those chickens stay at home and lay eggs and rear large families and attend to the other duties of their station in life? No, they did not. They took to drink. We can hear the reader snort in disgust as he reads this—if he does. The reader no doubt thinks we are lying. Not knowing the sterling honesty of our nature, the reader doubts our word. But fortunately we have court records to back us up, for our friend sued the brewery for damages.

You see, the brewers used to throw out their used malt and the lees of the beer-vats in a huge pile just back of our friend's fence. One day an enterprising young rooster, whose moral upbringing had been neglected, hopped over the fence and tried some of the malt. It tasted good. Little did he know, poor bird, that he was getting into the clutches of the Demon Rum. He ate fermented malt till he couldn't jam down another grain.

Did it go to his head? Did it?—dear reader, that young rooster accumulated the loveliest load of lush, the most beauteous and bountiful "bun" ever seen in that district—and it is a district rather famous for its "buns."

It was long after dark when the young rooster got home—trying to find the key-hole, no doubt—and he aroused the whole hennery. He staggered around crowing comic songs, insulted all the most respectable hens in the place, started out to whip the other roosters, and put the whole place on the blink generally.

Our friend was aroused by the uproar, and rushed out, thinking that a rat or a stray dog had got into the hen house. He said that it was the finest representation of a hilarious "jag" in an old ladies' home that he ever saw. But, of course, he didn't know at the time what was wrong with the young rooster. He thought he was sick, and went out next morning and gave him some bread and milk—or whatever it is one gives sick roosters. But the rooster would have none of it. He didn't want bread and milk. What he wanted was some bromo-seltzer or a "Collins."

Was the young rooster enlightened as to the evil of his ways? Did he take the pledge and climb on the water-bucket? Alas, no! What that young rooster did was to fly right back over the fence that very afternoon and tank up once more. Worse still, he brought the other roosters with him.

That night there was another rough party in the hennery—four times rougher than the other, for there were four roosters in it. They went in for close harmony in their choral work, and also did a little close scrapping. They even tried to whip our friend the owner when he went out to restore order.

Talk about drunkards' homes and temperance lessons!—that hennery would have furnished the W.C.T.U. and the Prohibitionists generally with arguments for a five years' campaign. In a few days every chicken in the place had developed a taste and capacity for beer that would have filled half the population of Bavaria with envy. Life for them became just one big "bust" after another.

Instead of hopping cheerfully from bed at the first peep of dawn, those chickens slept in till noon. They didn't care who got the early worm. Then they piled over the fence to the malt pile, and stayed right there till closing time and after. They stayed, in fact, till our friend went over and carried them back. He said it made him feel like a police van on the Twelfth of July.

Nothing could keep those hens away from the booze. Our friend built the fence higher; but they dug a tunnel under it. When he blocked that up, they flew over into the neighbors' yards and got around that way. They would even go out by his front gate and walk around the block, and come staggering back at all hours of the night in a way that would give any house a bad name.

Finally he sued the brewery for alienating his hens' affections—they only laid one egg in three months, and when our friend tried to eat it it went to his head it was so full of alcohol. But the Judge said that a man who kept hens in town should be shut up somewhere and have his property managed for him.

PORTERS, PULLMANS AND PATIENCE

The luxury of modern travel is a thing one often hears spoken about nowadays. Personally, we have had to listen to it for so long, and we are so heartily convinced that it is a piece of arrant humbug, that we are finally moved to protest. "The luxury of modern travel"—pish tush, and again pish! There ain't no such thing.

Travel may not have been luxurious, but it was at least interesting in the good old days of the mail-coaches. We like to think of them rolling with a tremendous clatter of hoofs and a flourish on the guard's horn through grey villages dozing among their elms, right up to the doors of glorious old inns where the hostlers tumbled out with fresh horses and journeying gentlemen tumbled in for a glass of mulled port.

That was travelling, bless you! There was some sport to that, some exhilaration. A man might well be moved to song on the top of one of those old coaches of a fine spring morning with the hedge-rows all in tender green. Even we ourself, who have a voice that causes people to turn around and scowl when we join in a chorus, even we might be led to troll a rollicking catch under such circumstances as that.

But who ever heard of anyone singing in a Pullman car—unless it should be a traveller in the smoking-room who had travelled not wisely but too well? And even those days are past now. Singing isn't done, that's all. There is no excuse for it, except inebriety or a brainstorm—and we have ruled out inebriety, more or less. Besides, the man who manages to get an extra Scotch or so nowadays doesn't make a fuss about it. He keeps the fact a dark and happy secret. So, instead of singing in a Pullman car, one simply sits and grouches until that blessed moment of release when the porter has brushed all the dust off one's coat into one's eye, and one can seize one's grip and totter out into the open air once more.

The misery of modern travel starts from the moment the traveller, laden with disheveled impediments of all sorts, plunges madly out of the house watch in hand—this is difficult but it can be done—to the taxicab which has come just twenty minutes late. The driver says it is because the people at the garage gave him the wrong address, the intimation being that he had finally arrived at the right one by some process of complicated and inspired ratiocination. The real truth is that he stopped to talk to a "ladifren."

Personally, we plunge out and catch a streetcar. We are a democratic cuss. Also they don't make one wait so long. Moreover, it is so exciting to stand on the back platform and pull out one's watch—it is ten minutes fast, though one doesn't suspect it—and break into a cold sweat every time anyone stops the car either to get on or off.

The car-line we usually take crosses railroad-tracks in two or three places. This may seem to the reader an irrelevant detail, but it wouldn't seem so if the reader had to take it. Invariably when one is in a bigger hurry than usual, a shunting-engine and a crew of leisurely fiends in dingy overalls are engaged in chivvying a bunch of freight-cars backwards and forwards over the crossing, while one notes the second-hand of one's watch slipping merrily around and one mentally calls on all the lurid reserves of language.

Rushing into the depot—dear reader, did you ever rush into the Toronto Union Depot? Did you ever sprint madly, with your bag banging against your knees, down that interminable corridor—it seems a mile and a half long at the very least—from the main entrance to the door where a cool ruffian in a uniform insists on stopping you and seeing your ticket, though you have just four seconds to catch your train and you know on what track it is just as well as he does? And when you have finally got by him, did you ever slide down one of those flights of iron steps into that damp and dismal tunnel where the trains stand? If you have ever done any of these things, you can sympathize with us when we repeat with an intonation of melancholy contempt, "The luxury of modern travel!"

But somehow or other in a fashion which strengthens our belief in a kindly Providence, we catch the train. We always do. Just as the porter picks up his little stool and climbs aboard, we hurl ourself and our bag into the vestibule after him. Then, when the conductor and brakeman have lifted us off our ebony brother in livery, we are shown to our berth. Removing our overcoat and picking out of our bag a book and such cigars as have not been reduced to fine-cut, we adjourn to the smoking-room.

There is a general notion, principally among ladies, that the smoking-room of a sleeping-car is a place of extraordinary hilarity and indecorous enjoyment. They have visions of men sitting around in their shirt-sleeves playing poker, drinking out of pocket-flasks, and exchanging amid clouds of smoke stories that would make even the porter blush. But, alas, it is not thus.

Our own experience of Pullman smoking-rooms is that they are the dullest holes on earth. The smoke is there all right, dense clouds of it. And such smoke!—any old thing that will burn, native shag, Turkish cigarettes, five-cent cigars, pipes of every age and degree of disrepute, all mixed up together. But of conversation there is none, except when a couple of commercial travellers start a competition in mendacity as to the number of orders they have taken in the towns along the line. As for stories—we haven't heard a new one yet.

So far as cards are concerned, we once saw a man play solitaire. And on two or three occasions in the more convivial past, crude but friendly souls have drawn from hip-pockets pint-flasks which they have timidly proffered by way of brightening the general gloom. We always hated to refuse—exhibitions of hospitality were so rare there. If an African chief came in and wanted to rub noses—we believe that is the usual expression of friendly interest in Ashantee—we would hardly have had the heart to decline.

About midnight, when one has no decent excuse for putting it off any longer—especially as the porter, who sleeps in the smoking-room, comes in and scowls every few minutes until one gives it up to him—we drag ourself to our berth. That is, we stow ourself away in a dark cubby-hole, too short for us by three inches actual measurement, and just high enough to bruise the top of our head every time we sit up. There we proceed to divest ourself of our garments and lay them away in places where they will fall down on our face at intervals during the night—the intervals being whenever we start to doze.

We would like to go into the details of our divestiture, with a view to comparing notes with other tall gentlemen who have been compelled to remove their habiliments—mentionable and otherwise—within the confines of a berth. In view, however, of the somewhat intimate nature of the case, we are obliged to let it go with the general statement that the performance is a highly acrobatic one. We get our things off somehow or other—probably we give anyone coming along the aisle the impression that a sea-lion or a dromedary has got into our compartment. And then, our final frantic struggle having made us free, we address ourself to sleep.

Sleeping-cars are so named because you try to and can't. Some people can, of course. When they can, they always snore—fiendishly. Invariably there is a man across the aisle with one of those going-down-for-the-third-time snores, the kind that suggest a muffled shriek of agony. All night long you keep hoping against hope that he is really strangling. But he never is. Next morning he always bobs up smiling and rubicund, and informs everyone in the wash-room that he slept like a top—meaning, of course, a racing automobile with the muffler cut out.

Somehow the night goes by. It is one of the melancholy compensations of life that everything passes. Just about dawn you drop off into the first decent nap you have been able to get; and twenty minutes later the porter reaches in and punches you in the ribs or pounds on the roof of the berth to let you know it is time you were up. As a matter of fact, you have a full hour or more before you arrive. But he believes in getting people up early. It gives him a chance to roll up the berths and stow them out of sight in the mysterious recesses the Lord and Mr. Pullman have provided for that purpose. Besides, it is a display of authority, and this is always dear to the porteresque heart—most people's hearts, in fact.

So you sit up suddenly and bang your head. Being thus thoroughly awakened, you glance out of the window and study the fence-posts or the clay banks past which you are speeding. Then you poke a frowsy head into the aisle through the curtains, and promptly drag it back as a large lady in a flowered kimona bears down upon you with an angry glare. It is obvious that she thinks you have been sitting there for half an hour peeping into the aisle till you could get that chance to look at her in her dishabille. Naturally you can't explain. What is there to say? Least of all can you tell her the simple truth, which is that if you had known anything like that was prowling around the car you wouldn't have peeped out for a flock of limousines—or should it be "covey?"

Will someone kindly tell us, will someone please explain, why it is ladies assume that frigidly severe attitude when anyone happens to look at them during their matutinal parades up and down the aisle? If we ourself catch anyone glancing at us while we meander towards the wash-room with our toothbrush and our other collar—anyone, that is, of the opposite sex, and it is surprising how very opposite some of them are—we merely blush in simple-hearted confusion. We may wonder why the lady should look at us. But it would never occur to us to be indignant over the matter, not even if we were wearing a flowered kimona and carried our toilet tools in a cute little silk bag.

In the wash-room you stand for half an hour behind a row of gentlemen with their heads in basins. Every now and then one comes up to breathe, and then he goes down again for another five minutes during which he throws soap-suds all over you. When finally you manage to get a basin yourself, the car gives a sudden lurch and it empties itself gracefully into your lap.

When you have contrived at last to wiggle into your clothes—they always look as if you had spent the night tying knots in them—you go back and sit on the end of your suit-case in the aisle, or somebody else's suit-case, while the porter brushes everybody in sight and takes a quarter away from each of them. We don't mind the quarter. We'd gladly give much more than that if he would only leave us alone. But he won't. He fixes us with his shiny eye; he beckons to us; and we walk away down the aisle to meet him. There he turns our coat-collar back, sifts an ounce or two of coal-dust down our neck, deftly blows the rest of it into our ear, knocks our hat all out of shape, seizes the coin which we feverishly proffer him as the price of our deliverance, and then drops us for the next victim.

"Montreal—this way out!"

One staggers painfully from the car down to the station platform. There a horde of "red caps" descend upon you in a flying phalanx. Taking your luggage and your breath at the same time, they vanish, only to reappear ten minutes later at the station door—you have just about decided they have absconded with your bags—and there they demand salvage for them.

"The luxury of modern travel"—O Lord!

HELPING OUR FRIENDS TO ECONOMIZE

We are of a saving nature. We say this more in sorrow than in pride. It has been forced on us. We have saved stamps and cigar-bands. We have saved cigarette pictures and theatre programmes. We have even made sporadic endeavors to save our soul. For the past few months especially our gaze has been fixed on the skies. We had hoped that once the fighting was over—but peace hath her battles no less than war. So we turn our eyes to those celestial abodes where the Bolsheviki cease from troubling. Our only hope is in heaven. In fact, even a nice, quiet corner in hell—but, hush, let us not think of such things!

When we speak, however, of our saving nature, we refer principally, if not exclusively, to money. We have a disposition to save money. We would like to put away huge jars of it. We would enjoy sneaking down to the vault in the middle of the night to count our gold and gloat over it. We would do it even at the risk of getting our new pyjamas all dirtied up with gold-dust.

Not that we have ever been able to accumulate any vast amount of coin, specie, mazuma, cush, dust, rhino, bullion, long green—in short, money. No trust companies grow plethoric with our securities. No vaults strain at their rivets with our lacs of rupees. But the disposition is there on our part. We would save if we had the wherewithal.

That is why we have such a kindly feeling for others who are trying to save—especially now when the high cost of living has combined with the high cost of killing, as represented in war-taxation, to put such a crimp in a fellow's income that it looks like a French pea to a famished ostrich. That is why we never feel aggrieved when our friends don't invite us to dinner, or give us cold mutton or stew when they do. That is why we never make any remarks on the age of their hats or complain of the cold in their houses or express wonder that they don't light the furnace sooner. They are cutting down expenses and we sympathize with them.

We like to see people save. We smile benignly, as one who murmurs, "Bless you, children," when we catch them laying by for a rainy day. We believe in economy. At the same time, it should not be carried to extravagant lengths—at least, not at our expense. We are willing to help our friends to economize, but there are reasonable limits. They must not crowd the kindly mourner too far.

For instance, there is Binks—awfully nice chap, Binks. You must know him, short, fairly stout, wears lavender ties, and rides down to the office every morning on the rear platform of the street-car for the sake of the air. Great fellow for hygiene is Binks. Plays a good game of tennis, too.

Binks invited us over to dinner one Saturday not long ago.

"Tell you what," said Binks in his buoyant way, "come on over early—say, about two o'clock—and we'll walk out to my new lot in the West Annex if it's a fine day and get back in nice time for dinner. Great for the appetite—you'll feel like a prize-fighter after you've strolled around through the woods for a few hours."

It sounded good, and the day was fine, and we were there at two sharp—difficult as it is for us to be anywhere at anything sharp. We were neatly but inconspicuously clad in our walking clothes, Norfolk jacket, green hat, and pipe. We also wore a tan cane and chamois gloves. Nothing elaborate, you know, but grace in every line.

Binks, on the contrary, had on the worst suit we have ever seen out of the furnace room. A greasy old peak-cap reposed on his head, and his trousers were patched and frayed. We didn't mind that. We are not snobbish. But we did object to the tools.

Binks had a cross-cut saw, a sledge-hammer weighing approximately twelve pounds, an axe, and two steel wedges weighing about five pounds each. We looked long and hard at them, and longer and harder at Binks. He had the grace to blush.

"I hope you don't mind, old man," he said with affected lightness, "but there's a bit of a tree fallen down on the lot, and I thought it would be good sport to cut it up this afternoon. Great exercise, you know—brings all the muscles of the back into play. Besides, the wood will come in handy in the grate this winter. Stringency, you see—got to save every penny these times, eh, what?"

We are weak. We gulped once or twice, but what was there to say? We could do nothing but fall in with the plan, and let on that we were overjoyed at the prospect of bringing the muscles of our back into play. It did occur to us, however, that there might be jollier methods of doing so than cutting up fallen trees.

"You better carry the saw," said Binks, "it's light. I'll pack the rest of the stuff—unless you could carry one of the wedges. It's only a short way to the car, you know."

It was only a short way to the car, true enough. But, friend the reader, have you ever tried to carry a cross-cut saw? This particular one was about six feet long, and it had a full set of two-inch teeth, the suppleness of a boa-constrictor, and the temper of a worried weasel. It was simply a long thin band of steel with a heavy wooden handle at each end and enough elasticity to curl around you twice and reach up and bite the top off either ear.

The instant that we put the infernal saw oh our shoulder we realized that we had made a mistake. It slashed around in the air a couple of times to get the exact range, and then it dived down and chewed a neat triangular piece out of our trouser-leg. It would probably have kept right on through our own leg, if we had not by some happy chance or unconscious skill managed to get our cane in the way. This saved the leg, to which we not unnaturally attach a certain value, but it was the last of a very fine piece of malacca. That ferocious saw gnashed its teeth just once, and there were two canes where only one had grown before—two nice little canes each about twenty inches long and cut somewhat on the bias.

This was only a starter. In two seconds that saw had us tied up in a complicated knot, with one handle gouging us just under the left ear, and the other playfully wandering about our frame, while the teeth nipped off exposed pieces of cuticle here and there in an arbitrary and capricious manner. When we got a chance to examine ourself that night in the chaste seclusion of the boudoir, we looked as if we had been tied up in the cellar and the mice had got at us.

We shrieked to Binks to pull the thing off us. After some time and effort—also a few light casualties of his own—he finally did manage to extricate what was left of us. We were going to quit on the spot. We told Binks so with what he must have regarded as a great deal of unnecessary emphasis. But he is a very persuasive cuss, and—well, as we said before, we are weak. We consented to see the thing through. But we declined firmly to carry that saw another foot of the way. We finally compromised, however, and each took a handle. It was awkward but safe enough. The thing bucked occasionally and made frantic efforts to jump on one or other of us; but we held it tight and we got it to the car without further bloodshed.

When we tumbled on board, the conductor took one good look at our equipment and immediately became distinctly unpleasant. He asked us if we had mistaken the car for a motor-lorry, and whether or not we intended to bring a few trees along, too. He said it seemed too bad to leave them behind when there was all that room in the aisle. He also suggested that we should put the saw on the roof and let the handles hang down at each end of the car—he said it was less likely to kill anyone up there.

Our position was most embarrassing—even Binks almost lost his temper, though that wouldn't have done any good. The worst of it was that the passengers seemed to consider the vulgar brute funny, while we couldn't think of anything crushing to say in reply till we had got off and the car was blocks away. Then we realized that we should have said—but perhaps we had better save this up. We may need it some day.

We reached the lot at last after tramping through so-called woodland scenery for miles and miles. The landscape was a tumbled stretch of scrubby bush which had never been fit for anything once the original big trees had been cut off. So a soulless real-estate agent had sliced it up into suburban lots and sold it to enthusiastic asses like our friend Binks. Twenty years from now it will, no doubt, be a thriving and even fashionable suburb, but not now—Lord, no! It is possible, however, that we are somewhat prejudiced against this particular landscape. Who can enjoy scenery while tramping through it with a twelve-pound sledge, a five-pound wedge, and the handle of a cross-cut saw—sounds almost like a refrain, doesn't it?

How the mischief Binks was able to tell his own lot in that wilderness will always remain a marvel to us. But he picked it out all right, and there, sure enough, was the tree. It was the biggest, knottiest, meanest-looking jack-oak we have seen in years. No wonder the lightning struck it. The only wonder is that it didn't burn it right up.

"Isn't she a beauty?" gloated Binks insanely. "Won't those gnarled logs crackle fine in the grate this winter?"

We looked at him in gloomy wonder. Did the poor idiot think we were going to help dissect that ligneous monstrosity entirely? We didn't mind cutting off a limb or two, but no more—not in one day. Little did we suspect the fate that was hanging over us.

"And now to work," said Binks with the imbecile cheerfulness of his kind. "We'll cut this old rascal into handy lengths in a couple of hours or so, and then the carter will come along with the team, and we'll ride home on the load—just like one of those old pictures of forest-life, you I know."

But we were in no mood to enthuse. Slowly and sadly we pulled off our Norfolk jacket and folded it neatly. We turned a wistful and lingering regard on the landscape; and then we betook us dismally to our toil. We were helpless in the grip of Bink's will, a regular slave of the lamp.

That afternoon will remain a nightmare for years to come. Whenever after this we go into gilded dens of folly and eat lobster à la Newburg, whenever we commit indiscretions with mince-pie or home-made whiskey, we know the form our penitential dreams will take. We will see ourself standing at one end of that awful saw with Binks at the other, and we will go on forever and ever shoving the saw away from us and pulling it back again through a cast-iron log with Bessemer-steel knots, which will shriek in agony at every stroke. And Binks will be wearing a red suit of tights and a pair of cute little horns and a spiked tail.

It was a terrible experience. What Binks said about bringing our back muscles into play was perfectly true. We brought them into play with a vengeance. We brought into play muscles that we never dreamed of possessing. But we didn't like the way they played. There was something very rough about it.

The shades of night fell softly upon us, and still we sawed. The hoot-owls hooted at us in derision, but still that fiendish saw rasped on. In the beginning we had suggested rest a few times, but Binks merely assured us that once we got our second wind we would be all right.

We got our second wind, but it wasn't long before we used it up. Then we called out our third line of reserves, our pulmonary landsturm, so to speak, and we exhausted that, too. By the time we finally quit we were using only the extreme upper lobe of each lung, and all we could do was to gasp and hang on to the handle of the saw lest the thing should leap at us and sink its teeth in our jugular.

Finally Binks stopped. We had cut through the last knot of the last limb of the last length of that interminable trunk—by this time it seemed seven miles long. Binks stopped, and we fell in our tracks. We dropped where we stood, right there in the saw-dust.

"Tell you what," said Binks mopping his brow—we could barely see him in the darkness—"tell you what, there is nothing like this fine, simple, open-air life to make a fellow feel like a king."

The creature was inexorable. His remark was a gratuitous insult; but we were beyond the desire or even the possibility of reply. We could only lie there on our back and look up longingly at the stars, and think how mother used to steal in and kiss us in our little white cot, and how horrified Binks would be when he discovered that we were dying.

"Great Jumping Jee-hosophat!" shouted Binks a moment later. He had struck a match and looked at his watch. "It's a quarter to eight, and we were to have been back at dinner at seven. And that damn carter hasn't come yet!"

He said a lot more about the carter, and the carter's family for some generations back, and the carter's prospects in the future life. Binks is not exactly a cussing man, but he gave a very fair imitation of one—it would do till a real cusser came around.

We heard him, but we heeded not. We just lay there and smiled blandly at the Milky Way. We had reached the point where we didn't care a darn if the race of carters became utterly extinct, and we were extinguished with them. All we wanted was to be left alone.

Binks, however, was indomitable. That man's energy was positively terrifying. He got us on our feet, put our coat on us in spite of our feeble resistance, stuck one end of that fatal saw in our hand, and dragged us two miles or more through the bush and the darkness to the street-car. With the help of the conductor he lifted us on and propped us up in the end of a seat. We remember that we moaned when they took the handle of the saw away from us. We had grown attached to it.

We don't recall much about the trip on the car, except hearing the conductor tell Binks that people who couldn't carry liquor any better than we seemed able to do shouldn't be allowed to have any. He said that sort of thing was what started Prohibition movements. And Binks agreed with him!

When we got to Bink's house, the dinner had long since been burned to a crisp, and Mrs. Binks registered about six hundred pounds pressure on her temper-gauge. It was a terrible meal. We don't remember what we ate, or whether we ate at all. All we know is that when it was over, we stumbled right over to our hat and then back to Mrs. Binks.

"Goo' night—lovely time," we said. "Hope you're the same!"

Binks saw us to the door. As a matter of fact, we had started to walk into the fire-place. He seemed to feel the need of some explanation.

"Sorry, old man, about that infernal carter," he said, "but tell you what we'll do. Some day next week we'll stroll out to the lot and have the fun of loading up, and then...."

We are not quite clear what it was that we said to Binks, but we must have said something fairly significant, for neither Binks nor his wife has spoken to us since.

Of course, we are sorry that Binks and his wife feel that way about it. But after all the first law of life is self-preservation, and we can't afford to run that sort of risk again. We didn't heal up for a week or more after that dreadful grapple with the cross-cut saw. In fact, we had some notion of going to a surgeon and having the bites cauterized.

Even this was nothing to the soreness in our legs and arms and the famous "back-muscles" that Binks brought into play. We spent all our evenings for the next fortnight rubbing arnica into them—also a wonderful liniment which our landlady gave us. It must have been a fine liniment for it smelled so strong that people turned around and looked after us on the street, as if they thought we ought to be quarantined and were in two minds about calling a policeman. And we didn't dare visit our friends. But then what's the use of going to see a lady if you moan in pain every time you try to put your arm around—well, around the back of the chair?

REFRESHMENTS AT FIVE

Five o'clock appears to be a very critical time in the day. On the manner in which the next three-quarters of an hour are spent may depend one's well-being and good temper for the rest of the day and the evening and possibly the first couple of hours of the morrow.

Some people—low persons who need the money or whose bosses will not permit them to leave the office—make a habit of working through till six, or whatever time it is that they punch the clock and go home in a street-car strap. Naturally such persons have no place in an article of this character.

To sensitive and cultured people who have spent the afternoon playing bridge or in the cellar brewing the family liquor—that, we believe, is the intellectual pastime of the moment—or in mahogany-furnished offices persuading innocent folk with money to buy Nicaragua banana-lands or bunk stocks on punk margins, five o'clock is the blessed hour of surcease and repose. It is balm in Gilead, cool rains after the heat of the day, a friendly hotel after walking across a "dry" county, divorce after—oh, g'wan and make your own metaphors!

Personally we are an ardent and determined five-o'clocker. We have played it every way there is—straight, for place, for show, and across the board. There is no kind of five-o'clock performance—in accordance, that is, with the purity and piety of our character and upbringing—that we have not done or witnessed. We have attended teas of every description and shade of color, pink, yellow, mauve, and with dashes of cerise. We have gone to the tango kind, and to those discreet teas in sequestered corners of tea-rooms to which one conducts fair students of the drama after the matinee.

In older and perhaps happier—certainly freer—days, we were a frequent guest and occasional host at little informal five-o'clock functions, where one inquired of the rest of the company what they were having and requested the attendant to "fill 'em up again, Jawn!" We attended such functions in clubs, cafes, and those democratic places of resort which were entered by swinging doors—up to eleven on ordinary nights and seven on Saturdays. And we did this as part of that systematic study of humanity—including the things they eat and the drinks they drink—which is recommended so earnestly by the philosophers.

All this is by way of letting the reader see how thoroughly qualified we are by nature and training to write on this important subject of five-o'clock refreshments. We say "important" advisedly and with no ironic intent. We have devoted to the question of how best to spend the time between five and a quarter to six much time, energy, and serious thought—not without considerable difficulty and several vigorous rows with persons we have at various times consented to work for. And, as a result of our studies, we are convinced that rest and refreshment at five are a human necessity, whether you take it with two lumps or with soda, and whether you eat out of the "curate" or off the free-lunch counter.

Of course, this whole institution of five-o'clock refreshment is an intensely modern and hyper-civilized development—at least, here in Canada. It represents a reaction from the nerve-stresses of up-to-date urban existence. Our sturdy forefathers knew it not, and verily there are still many places where people do not practice it. Farmers as a class, for instance, have still maintained their ancient prejudice against eating and drinking till it is too dark or the weather is too bad to do anything else.

Naturally there would have been something absurdly incongruous in our great-grandfathers stopping in the midst of shooting bears or Indians or burning out a clearing, in order to tramp back to the log-cabin for a pimento sandwich or a cup or two of oolong. But, even at that, we would hate to believe that the old boys didn't occasionally knock off for a few minutes about five, and drag the old cider-jug from its place of concealment in a hollow stump, and have a pull or two at the juice that cheers and eke inebriates—if it is "hard" enough.

Five-o'clock refreshments, however, as we know them, are a peculiarly modern institution. We got the habit from England, where we get our spats and our knighthoods, our green hats and our Governors-General. In England they all do it, and it won't be long before we are all doing it, too. Talk about the effects of the War on our soldiers!—if you could see the splendid fellows now pouring their own in the tea-rooms, you would fear the worst.

A friend of ours who occasionally—and even oftener if things are slow at home—takes a run over to London to refresh his accent and to study life in its more dignified and also its lighter phases, has told us of a visit he paid to a great English factory. As he was being shown over the plant by the owner—jolly old dog, too, egad!—a gong sounded suddenly. Everybody instantly dropped their tools and climbed down from their machines; a gang of waiters burst upon the scene carrying huge trays of steaming cups with two little crackers on the side of each saucer; and everybody had tea. Even the boss, just to show what a democratic old cuss he was, had a cup with the rest—the clawsses drinking with the mawsses, so to speak.

Once in our journalistic youth—we felt about a hundred and eighty in experience of life—we had occasion (meaning we were sent by a profane and peremptory city editor) to interview the heads of a great business corporation regarding the financial situation. It was a time of panic, and this particular concern was reported to be in a bad way. A heavy sense of responsibility weighed upon us as we loosed our pencil in its patent sheath, and entered the office of the two brothers who directed the destinies of the company.

They were at tea! A fat, perspiring waiter—why do waiters always perspire?—had just carried in from a neighboring cafe a large tray bearing a tea-pot, a jug of hot water, plate of sandwiches, ditto of cute little cakes, and all the various accessories of tea-making and drinking. Our heart sank. We felt that this particular company was doomed. It wouldn't have been a greater shock to us if we had discovered them playing marbles—in fact, we would have been more likely to regard marbles as an amiable eccentricity.

They hospitably insisted that we should join them, but we declined with decision. We felt as if we had been invited to take out our sewing and while away a pleasant hour with the rest of the girls doing embroidery and eating marshmallows. But our contempt for these particular gentlemen was slightly modified by their producing cigarettes—very good cigarettes, too—after tea and lighting up. Naturally we joined in that. And our feelings were changed to something like genuine respect when we discovered what rattling good "copy" they could talk. Oh, they weathered the financial gale all right, in spite of the tea. And the experience made us more tolerant of the vice.

As for the ordinary sort of pink tea—you know the kind of thing where the dear boys in morning-coats pass the vittles to the dear girls in feathers and a string of beads—we are a hardened and weary veteran. We used to be one of the best young amateur waiters you ever saw, and could juggle a "curate" with a grace and efficiency that would have been the despair of Beau Brummel, if he had survived to witness it. But never again!

Incidentally, why are those three-storey arrangements called "curates?" Is it because they are always planted among the girls? Or because social events are not really respectable without one around? Or is it simply because they can hold so much cake?

Whatever the reason for the name, we became an out-and-out expert at wielding the things. Handing cups of tea with the right hand, and with the left dealing from the top or bottom deck of the "curate" with equal ease, we must have been a genteelly inspiring sight. But we have no joy of the recollection. Think of a healthy man spending his time like that!

Of course, we still go to teas occasionally—even the most fertile and mendacious excuser is sometimes caught without an alibi. Not that these social evasions are lies exactly, but you know the way one says: "Next Thursday did you say, my dear? So good of you, and I would just love to, but I'm all filled up for next Thursday," etc., etc. And being "all filled up," naturally one cannot be expected to fill up any more. But sometimes it is not so easy to get out of it, and we are occasionally caught by a sudden flank attack. But we are never a willing prisoner—we go down fighting desperately to the last.

As a matter of fact, teas long ago ceased to hold any delight for us. Like Martha we chose the worser part; but this was back in the wicked days before Prohibition descended on us all like a bomb from a Zeppelin. Every now and then—not every day, for we were not unabashed in our delinquency—a friend or two would drop in about five. We would discuss the weather in a dispassionate and scientific manner, as well as the Mexican situation—it was the only war on at the time—and the prospects for the baseball or hockey championship, according to the time of year. We talked of many things, but all in the same cool and detached way, as of men whose minds were elsewhere and busy with more vital matters. Then suddenly we would all rise up as one man and go silently away to a place we wotted of, where the clerk knew us by name, and asked us if we were having "the same old poison." Or better still, he would nod in a friendly way and without waiting to ask would set out the materials on the ba—no, no, counter!—with calm assurance bred of an intimate knowledge of our preferences.

It is a curious trait in human nature but the average man used to take much joy and pride out of having a refreshment-clerk—and when we say "refreshment" we use the word in its most dynamic significance—call him by name and hand him out his favorite brand without asking. It did him more good than if the president of the bank he made his over-draughts on had picked him up in the presidential limousine as he was walking down to the office of a morning.

Perhaps we should not speak about these things now that they are over and done with and everyone is reformed and uncomfortable; but how is the coming generation to know anything about the habits of us their ancestors, unless someone tells them the thirsty truth? As a matter of fact, it is more than likely that the reader of fifty years from now, coming on this book among some empty bottles in a dark corner of the attic, won't know what the dickens we are talking about. Poor old John Barleycorn may have ceased to be even a memory, and—but then again perhaps he won't. Very hardy old chap, John!

We do not wish, however, to close this veracious and useful disquisition on what might be called the Bacchic note—though Bacchic in the most gentlemanly and respectable sense, of course. Besides, all this talk of teas has reminded us of one which we like best—though it is a wistful pleasure—to remember. You see, it was quite a long time ago, and—but let us get on with the story.

To begin with, we had telephoned to the house—Heaven only knows about what! Any old excuse was a good excuse in those days. And she said, after a certain amount of persiflage and badinage—you know the sort of thing people talk over the 'phone in the spring—she said to come up and have a cup of tea with her.

It was right in office hours and we had a lot of work to do. But did we go? Yes, Friend Reader, we did. We rushed out clutching our hat in our hand, nearly broke a leg catching a car, and every time it stopped to let anyone on or off, we indulged in a line of mental profanity which must have created a faint blue aureole around our head like a mediæval saint.

They were all out—the family, that is—even to the servant-girl. But we didn't mind. In fact, our relief was such that we realized at once it would be unseemly to show it. Our recollection is that we expressed a certain mild regret for their absence—Lord, what a liar a man can make of himself at times! Then having behaved like a really nice boy, we had an apron tied on us, for we had to help make the sandwiches. A pair of very pretty arms reached round us from behind and hung a silly little arrangement of linen and frills upon our manly waist, after a great deal of tugging and squeezing, which was rather complicated by our irresistible inclination to twist around and watch the strings being tied in the middle of our back—obviously a difficult feat of an acrobatic nature.

The sandwiches were finally made—we remember we were told we had spread the butter too thick. Then we carried the tray in beside a grate-fire, just an ordinary gas-grate, but if it had been the fires of the eternal dawn it couldn't have seemed any more cheering. Sunlight streamed in through the window on a big bowl of daffodils, themselves like a great splash of sunshine. Outside in the street youngsters were at play. We never even yet eat a certain kind of sandwich that we don't remember....

But, oh, pshaw, what's the use? What's the use? Besides, think how much freer and more solvent we are in our present celibate condition. But there are times and moods, mere trifles like a glimpse of flowers in the spring or a robin's song or the odor of wet lawns, which bring her back to us again and make us wince once more as we recall that her name is now Mrs. Spoffkins.

MANNERS FOR THE MASSES

"Manners Makyth Man."

How often in our eager youth was that hoary old maxim quoted to us with stern insistence, what time we had seized the last piece of cake on the plate, or were absorbing our soup with a noise like that of a punctured vacuum cleaner. Manners makyth man, perhaps; but in those days manners made us tired.

Now that we have attained manhood's estate, however, and grey hair and a nice discrimination in Scotch, when there is any to practice on, we realize the need of more manners—manners for the masses. People in general are not so polite as they used to be and ought to be. Street-car conductors, for instance, do not treat us at all times with the consideration we feel to be our due.

We do not object so bitterly to being told to "step lively there," or having the conductor jab the end of the fare-box into our diaphragm. Such little crudities of manner are perhaps inseparable from his rather trying profession. But the other day we handed a conductor by mistake a quarter of suspicious antecedents—metallurgically speaking, of course. Money we can't pass is the only sort of tainted money we recognize. We fear this particular coin contained more than the usual amount of alloy. As a matter of fact, we hadn't intended giving it to him at all. We had laid it aside for a church collection, or a tag-day, or the first pretty Salvation Army lass we should see with a "self-denial-week" box at a street corner. But it got into the wrong pocket.

We handed it to the conductor and said, "Blue, please!"—alluding to the cerulean hue of the tickets. He turned it over two or three times in his hand, glared at us, walked down to the rear platform to see it in the better light there, asked two or three men what they thought of it, and then carried it back to us between the thumb and index finger of the right hand as though he were holding something dead by the tail. The whole car watched him drop it with a thud into our grey-suede palm.

"The Company don't let us take nothin' but silver quarters," he remarked in a loud voice and with quite undue emphasis on the "silver."

We had to hunt through our pockets for a five-cent piece to put in the box. It was a very painful moment, and naturally the only nickle we owned hid itself amid a mass of coppers—we had enough of them to bust our suspenders. And while we hunted, the conductor stood there and shook the box belligerently under our nose.

Therefore, we repeat, let us by all means have more manners—manners for street-car conductors and plumbers and elevator-men and the masses generally. Not even bank-clerks are altogether above reproach in this respect. We have had several rather regrettable experiences with bank-clerks—usually in connection with slight over-draughts. And yet bank-clerks are generally regarded as the budding Chesterfields of the financial world.

Talking of Chesterfield reminds us of that period in our development at which his "Letters" burst upon us as a brilliant and a guiding star. We were about sixteen, and our voice still oscillated between a squeaking treble and a booming bass. We were also having considerable difficulty in keeping our extremities decently within the compass of our clothes.

Our manners at that time were those of a breezy but well-intentioned caveman. No effete conventions for us!—no, sir, nothing but the simple, unaffected utterance of the heart. It was our aim to be a rough diamond, a fellow whose shaggy exterior concealed a beautiful soul, and whom people would come to understand and love after a long time—maybe, after we were dead. We could see ourself smiling peacefully in our padded coffin, while the family wept all over the oxidized-silver plate bearing our name and two dates—n-n-nothing m-m-more!

Perhaps this shaggy-breast-and-heart-of-gold business was not "getting across" as successfully as we had hoped. Perhaps we had grown weary of doing little acts of kindness and of love in a rude, untutored way. Or perhaps the time was merely ripe for a new phase of our social development. Anyhow, we one day picked up Lord Chesterfield's "Letters to My Son," and at a bound became a suave and graceful man of the world, concealing under a smile of wistful charm a cynical and disillusioned heart. Whatever might be the bitterness of our regrets, as befitted a man who had known life and women and had suffered, no shadow disturbed the serenity of our brow. We continued to smile and bow with the old nonchalant grace, as though it were roses, roses all the way. This was the impression we tried to convey, at any rate.

The family received our change of heart and manner in a spirit of levity against which our new ideals were not always proof—but you know the gentle way of families. Instead of teaching the young idea how to shoot, they are apt to suggest that it ought to go out and shoot itself. Naturally we suffered, and not unresentfully. In fact, we so far forgot ourself as to try to lick our younger brother—a very un-Chesterfieldian endeavor, and not entirely successful. He had a rushing style of fighting which—but there are bygones which had best be has-beens.

Of course, we have long since realized that it isn't wise to carry even so good a thing as manners to an over-elaborate extreme. Not long ago we had an instance of this—which brings us back to a street-car again. Wonderful how much one can learn in those humble but interesting conveyances! It was a crowded car, and we got up when a statuesque young woman in a very tight skirt stood right in front of us. We got up as gracefully as the movement of the car would permit, and hanging on a strap with the skill of long practice we adroitly removed our hat and bowed. We wanted to let her know that our action was the expression of a distant but chivalrous respect.

The statuesque young woman never quivered a hair of her expensive willow-plume, but stared penetratingly at a male collar-ad just over her head. Perhaps she had not seen us in her reverie. Perhaps the face of the young gentleman in the dreadfully conspicuous collar reminded her of someone she knew or loved or both—though we have never known any human being to look like those faces, and certainly would not think of loving him if he did.

Whatever the reason she certainly did not see us. We waited for a block or two, and then we made bold to touch her arm just above the chain of her beaded bag—it looked like something the Shah of Persia would wear.

"Madam," we said in our most mellow and flute-like tone, "won't you take this seat?"

She flashed on us a pair of large, dark pupils—belladonna, we presume—and said in a voice like the drip of an icicle in a cemetery, "I don't care to sit down."

That was all—no "Thank you" or "Much obliged" or any other of the ready phrases of casual courtesy. Just, "I don't care to sit down."

It was an unfortunate and deucedly embarrassing experience. We didn't like to sit down again—in our confusion we would probably have sat in someone else's lap. And yet it seemed frightfully silly for the two of us to go on standing there in front of that empty seat. So we stopped the car and got off half a mile from home.

Now, why did she do that? Was she afraid that if she sat down and said, "Thank you," we might presume on her graciousness to make a few timely remarks about the weather, and after a brief survey of the Russian situation or the newest thing in "movies," should end up by offering her some gum? Or, on the other hand was she a suffragette who refused to be put on a basis of inequality and treated as a member of a weaker sex? Did she see in our action the gloating superiority of man the master?

Then again she may have been unwilling to sit down because—well, because—oh, dash it all, you know how tight those skirts are! Besides, occasionally in shop-windows and while hurrying modestly past certain "circles" in department-stores, we have inadvertently seen articles of feminine attire (warranted pure whalebone) which would seem to make the operation of sitting down a difficult and painful feat of compression. We feel a certain delicacy in mentioning this, and not for worlds would we dream of using the language in which these garments are described in the newspaper ads—the accompanying photographs almost make it impossible for us to read them. But the fact remains that the statuesque young lady in the car may not have been able to bend any more than her neck, which was quite bare and untrammelled halfway down the lungs.

Of course, Lord Chesterfield and all the books of etiquette since his time have been strong for self-possession. A man, they say, should be self-possessed under any and every circumstance—the more surprising and unpleasant they are, the more self-possessed he should be. It is the secret of good manners.

Now that is just the sort of excellent and utterly futile advice that we are always getting. Be self-possessed—sure! But how? That's what we want—specific directions, not general advice. We would welcome a few concrete illustrations for maintaining one's self-possession when meeting one's recently divorced wife, for instance, or after dropping a soda-check in the collection plate, or while mother is showing pictures of one as a baby, or while purchasing long silk hose and explaining that auntie is having a birthday. Situations such as these are apt to occur in the most skilfully regulated lives, and naturally we would like to know what to do—meaning, what to do with our hands and the perspiration on our brow and the blushes on our face.

Just as a case in point—we went into a department-store some months back to buy a thimble. We do a little sewing now and then, you know—nothing fancy, just buttons and repairs of a temporary and intimate nature. It occurred to us that we ought to have a thimble. A bed-post is all right, if it is handy. But you are not always near enough to be able to shove the needle against it; and naturally one can't very well carry a bed-post around with one, can one?

So we decided to buy a thimble and went into a department-store for the purpose, having previously steeled our breast and made brazen our countenance. But we didn't have the courage to ask anyone, least of all a floor-walker, where the things were sold. For fifteen minutes we wandered about peering at the various "circles," and rousing the worst suspicions of the shop-detectives. There were at least two men shadowing us by the time we finally saw a tray of thimbles and rushed at it with a gasp of relief.

Our relief, however, was premature. There was a girl standing back of the tray—not the usual beauty in a lace blouse, who toys with her back-hair and stares through a man with devastating indifference. We were prepared for that sort, and had several curt and peremptory things ready to say. But this was a nice, motherly girl, the kind of girl who makes a man feel that he is just seven years old and is about to have his face washed. These are overwhelming!

"A thimble?—you want a thimble?" she asked with an air of bustling solicitude. "What size? But, of course, a man never does know the size. Let me see your finger."

Now, we had started out with an insane notion that we would say the thimble was for our wife, who was too ill to come down-town and wanted a thimble for a little crochet-work or something to while away the time. You know the sort of silly yarn a man would naturally invent. But we realized at once that it was no use here. We felt that this girl knew we were a bachelor; knew the sort of sewing we do; and probably knew just what buttons were missing on just what coat, and all about that rip in the waist-band of our trousers.

So we held out our finger—our index finger! Patiently she put it back and took the next one to it, holding it very firmly while she tried two or three thimbles on it in rapid succession. We felt like a June bride watching the bridegroom fiddle with the ring.

"Will you take this thimble?" she finally asked.

"I w-w-will!"

The infernal phrase slipped out in spite of us, in a voice which we in vain endeavored to make assured. It was an absurd predicament. All that was lacking was a parson and that tum-tum-tiddee thing from "Lohengrin."

"But isn't it a little loose?" she persisted. Then she took it off and tried on a few more. By this time three or four other girls had come up, and were inspecting us with a detached and somewhat contemptuous interest—all except a little fool who blushed and giggled. If the maternal one hadn't had such a tight hold on our finger, we would have run. We could feel the perspiration sizzling on our burning cheeks.

"Ah, that's better," she said at last, after she had tried on about fifteen. "Men always like them tight, you know. And now you want some thread, don't you?—some nice, strong, black and white thread."

We did, but we wouldn't have admitted it for anything in this world—or the world to come either. Not if we had to fasten our suspenders with clothes-pins. We simply seized that infernal thimble and hurried away in such a blind agony of shame that we forgot our change and nearly knocked a floor-walker down.

Self-possession—gawd!

RAIMENT AND MERE CLOTHES

Women, of course, dress to annoy one another. We wouldn't be guilty of a truism of this nature, if it were not that a lot of worthy people have gone about lately talking and writing and warning from pulpits as though women dressed for the express purpose of luring the minds of men from the contemplation of the higher and more spiritual things to which they are naturally inclined.

There has even been a Papal Bull—or if not a real honest-to-goodness Bull, at least a good husky yearling of the sort known as an Encyclical—condemning slit skirts and demi-tasse waists and the dances people do in them, on the ground that they put in masculine minds ideas that wouldn't be there naturally. This, however, shows how little the Vatican knows about feminine psychology—though their ignorance is naturally very much to their credit.

In the first place, no lady would do such a thing—would you, girls? In the second, the average man is too unobservant. And in the third, the women are too busy considering how to "put it over" one another, to have time to worry about the effect of the things they wear—or don't—on their male entourage (with the accent on the "—rawzh," the Society Editor assures us). As we said above with epigrammatic force and brilliancy, women dress to annoy one another. The mere fact that someone else or several may have said the same thing before does not lessen the truth of the aphorism or the pleasure we take in it.

Whatever their motive, women devote a lot of thought, time, and some man's money to the subject of dress. Most people are agreed on this. With men, however, it is supposed to be very different. There is a curious theory that men don't give a dern—whatever that may amount to—about their clothes. People generally seem to have an idea that a man waits till his suit is torn, or so shiny that he gives the effect of an animated heliograph, before he orders another. And when he does, he is supposed to rush in to his tailor for half a minute between important business calls, or he rings him up on the 'phone.

"Send me up a new suit," he shouts, or something to this hasty effect. "What color?—oh, any old color you got. Something that will wear a long time. Solong!"

That is the way most women and a few men think the average man buys his clothes. But they are wrong. If you want to know how wrong, you have only to go into a tailor's place, Friend Reader—supposing you keep a tailor and not a bargain-counter—while some fat old boy with mutton-chops and a protuberant abdominal profile is raising the dickens because the poor tailor can't take the strain off the trouser-band and put it on the top buttons of the vest. Then you will learn that the shaping of collars and shoulders is a matter of supreme masculine concern, and that the hang of a trouser-leg is a thing on which the happiness of years may depend. Then possibly you will come to the conclusion that the average man thinks a great deal more about his attire than you have ever suspected.

Not that the average man's clothes are numerous or conspicuous—not at present prices, anyway. On the contrary, they are usually quite few and inconspicuous—except possibly from age. But the fewer they are the more attention he has to devote to them. That is the paradox of the thing.

A wealthy Adonis—or one with a good line of credit, at least—can adopt a careless attitude towards his clothes. He may even keep a valet to worry about them. When he orders a new suit he orders two or three. His shirts and ties and socks he buys by the dozen. Suits he doesn't like, he doesn't have to wear. If he grows weary of a certain color or pattern—one of those shepherd-plaids you can play chess on, for instance, or a nice hot brown that would melt the film of a camera—he tosses it to his man or an itinerant Hebrew and turns to one of a dozen other outfits in the wardrobe. Why should he worry? He doesn't.

The man, however, who gets a couple of suits a year—or more probably only one—has a quite different problem to face, calling for the finest qualities of artistic and economic judgment. With what anxiety he studies the various samples of cloth! Will this wear well? Will that one gloss? Will the grey go with his brown overcoat?—perhaps not, but then the green is so striking that people will notice it next year and remember.

Then as to the cut. It must be in the style, but not too pronounced. Those lapels are too wide, or the slit in the back isn't long enough, or the cuff on the trousers isn't sufficiently deep. One has to be careful, for—dash it all!—the suit has to do two years. So he worries the life out of his tailor for an hour a day through a fortnight or more, brings the coat back three times for alterations, and then pays for the suit in small instalments.

If a man's troubles were over once he got his suit, it wouldn't be so bad. But the older a suit gets the more trouble it gives. For one thing, you have to keep it pressed. Coats will get wrinkled, and human knees are obviously intended by nature to put bags in trousers. Occasionally, too, while playing approach shots with the soup or making short putts in the pudding sauce, a gentleman is liable to foozle and get it all over his vest—unless, of course, he makes a habit of tying his napkin around his neck. Incidentally, this is a much more sensible system than draping it over his right knee. Who ever spilled anything on his right knee, anyway?

These are serious questions to resolve. What should one do about it?—have a fellow in livery and a Ford call around once a week and carry one's garments off and bathe them in benzine and manhandle them with electric-irons? This is handy, of course, but in a few months it costs more than the suit is worth. Tip the cook, then, to press your trousers, and trust to heaven and a patent-hanger to keep the coat in shape? Sometimes this works, but naturally a lot depends on the cook.

Once we entrusted the trousers of our "other" suit to the cook, a colored lady of unblemished character and cheerful disposition. We were going out informally that evening, but we wanted to make a good showing, and we needed those trousers pressed in a hurry. She pressed them all right. She pressed them so hard she almost split the cloth on the edges. But when we saw them—modestly stretching a bare arm for them around the corner of the door—we smiled bravely, thanked her for her exceeding goodness, and then closed the door and wept feebly upon them. She had put the creases in the sides! Since then we make a point of keeping our "other" trousers under the mattress that they may be ready in cases of sudden emergency.

Another difficulty is in the matter of the buttons to be sewn on and the occasional rents to be mended. These are more slings and arrows of outrageous fortune which noble bachelor minds are called upon to suffer. Landladies are sometimes kind-hearted and can be flattered into displaying other domestic virtues than those connected with the making of beds and the frying of matutinal bacon. But usually they are too busy. Of course, a man can always get married, but ... and you don't always get your buttons sewn on, at that.

Personally, after much worry and embarrassment, we have acquired a very decent skill with the needle—nothing fancy, you know, but substantial. We can't use a thimble yet with any confidence, but there is usually a bed-post handy to shove the needle against. Not even during the patriotic activities of the war did we have any occasion to sew in hotel-lobbies or at concerts or in street-cars. What sewing we do is done in the privacy of the boudoir, and only when vitally necessary.

We have a friend, rather a dandy, who says that the ideal of good dressing—no, not the kind that comes with a turkey, girls—is that a man's personality should show through his clothes. This, of course, is very æsthetic and quite as it should be. But the thing must not be overdone. Occasionally a man's personality shows through too clearly, and then the only thing to do is to take a large needle, double the thread, and sew the place up.

Some day we hope to have a million—honestly acquired, we trust, but still a million. When that happy time arrives, we will dress as we darn well please. We will wear old clothes and let our pants bag at the knees. We will cease to pinch our feet in tight boots, or half-strangle ourself with high stiff collars. And people will not despise us for our shabby exterior. On the contrary, they will admire us for it, and think we are a democratic old cuss, and forgive us for owning so much money.

Till that period of affluence arrives, however, we will be forced to go on devoting too much time and attention and money to our habiliments. Not that we are a "knut," Friend Reader—the mere thought fills us with horror. On the contrary, our whole endeavor is to avoid the garish and extreme. We aim at elegant discretion. It is our ideal to give the impression that we are a wealthy amateur who has taken up journalism as a hobby.

A time there was, however, when we cherished other notions of journalistic attire. It was when we had first left our alma mater—one's alma mater may be anything from a night-school to five years at Oxford—and had entered on the high mission of moulding public opinion at "twelve per." Then it was our ambition to be Bohemian. We wore very wide-brimmed hats, and low collars with generous openings in front so as to display the Adam's-apple in all its unfettered freedom. We never brushed our clothes, and we kept our hair rather long. We wanted to look like an eager young genius, whose gaze was on far and high things, and who spurned such petty distinctions as are conferred by creases in the front of one's pants.

One night our theory of sumptuary beauty received an awful jolt. The discovery was forced upon us that other people did not see eye to eye with us in the matter of the æsthetics of dress. There was one suit we owned—one of the two, that is—which we hated with a whole-hearted hatred. It was too much even for us. We bought it from a friend who had just gone into the tailoring profession. It was probably his first case, and the operation was not a success—he was nervous, perhaps. The cloth was a heather-mixture—that is what he called it, at any rate, though the color suggested that a number of chameleons had committed suicide on it. The cut was indescribable. The coat was dimly reminiscent of a Roman toga—we had told him to make it loose—and the trousers were obviously modelled on those of Micawber in old illustrated editions of "David Copperfield."

Being unable to afford the relief of throwing the thing away, we tried to get a certain amount of wear out of it under an overcoat. One evening when we were surreptitiously taking it for a walk under a mackintosh, we met an artist friend of ours. He was all muffled up to the throat, as though he, too, were concealing a sartorial mishap.

"Come on over to the Art Gallery," said he, "there are some rather nice things over there—imported."

We like pictures, especially those foreign ones—"Lady with Green Stocking," you know the sort—so we hastened gladly along with our friend, only stopping twice on the way. It was before the advent of Prohibition, and—well, if we had known what we were going to run into at the Art Gallery, we would have had about a quart, neat.

When we reached the place and our friend struggled out of his overcoat, we saw that he was in evening clothes. We were surprised, but thinking he was perhaps saving his business suit—besides, you never can tell how an artist will dress—we said nothing. But when we got into the gallery we understood. It was opening night, private view, by invitation only—the complete formal caper, b' Jove!—and every blessed soul in the place was in full regalia. Every woman present seemed to be "posing for the bust"—that, we believe is the technical phrase—and the gentlemen could be distinguished from waiters only by the wrinkles in their clothes and the faint aroma of camphor and moth-balls.

We would have cut and run if we had been given the chance; but our friend was a hospitable chap. He grabbed us by the arm and dragged us about from picture to picture, while we perspired agony at every pore and everybody in the gallery glared at us as though we were the tattooed man clad only in our illustrations. Art-lovers are supposed to be an unconventional set. If you want to find out how unconventional they are, go to an "opening night" in business clothes, and see!

Finally we made our escape—we pleaded illness or a twisted ankle or something of that sort. We hurried home and as soon as we got there we pitched that suit out of the window. It caught in the branches of a tree where it stayed till the family made us get a ladder and take it down—they said it gave the public the idea that the gentlemen in the house ran around without any clothes on.

We never did wear it again. The very next day we went out and bought a set of open-faced formal clothes. For months afterwards we wouldn't go out for a walk in the evening without them. We didn't feel safe. Mere clothes might be all right for millionaires and geniuses, but sumptuous raiment for ours! We couldn't afford to wear less.

THAT FUR COAT

Ever since our downy and callow youth the fur-lined overcoat has been for us a symbol of wealth and a certain dashing deviltry. Of course, we are perfectly well aware that a number of tame married men, holding positions worth about twenty dollars a week, own fur-lined coats. Even on the editorial staff of which we are the bright particular star there are two or three overcoats lined with something definitely recognizable as fur.

Nevertheless we have never been able to conquer our instinctive feeling that a fur-lined overcoat indicates the possession of a great deal of money and a doggish tendency to spend it on wine, women, and—well, the singing is not so important in the picture. Whenever we see a man sporting a fur-lined overcoat our first thought is to wonder whether or not his wife has found out about him. Our second is to wish we had a coat like it.

The origin of this curious and somewhat pathetic feeling about fur-lined coats is probably to be found in the days of our adolescence, when we wore deliriously exotic ties and attended the presentations of refined melodrama. We devoted much thought in those days to the subject of masculine attire—possibly with some obscure notion of attracting the weaker sex by the brilliancy of our plumage—and the villain always fascinated while he revolted us. We had much joy of his clothes.

To see the handsome devil swing across the stage with his light but fiendish ha-ha, his cigarette, and the dress-suit which is the national costume of villains, always gave us a thrill which the chaste embraces of the hero and heroine seldom provided. Even to this day we wouldn't give a darn to watch some other fellow hugging a comely young woman.

Usually the villain wore a fur-lined coat at some stage of his hellish machinations—preferably at the height of them, when he was about to boil the heroine's baby, for instance, or was engaged in tying that long-suffering and virtuous lady in the path of the onrushing train. It was at such moments that he threw open the coat loaned by the well-known firm of local furriers—as the programme never forgot to state—and displayed the mink lining of luxurious sin. We always wondered how the heroine found the strength of mind to resist his wicked advances to her.

Incidentally, we noticed that no matter what liberties the hero might take with the person of the villain—the hero was usually a muscular blond—he always forebore to lay the hands of avenging justice on the fur-lined coat. He might pitch the tr-r-raitor-r off a cliff, or slowly choke him to death after a furious grapple, or shoot him in the nick of time and the chest, but never with the coat on. If the villain forgot to take it off, the hero always taunted him into doing so. Whereupon the villain, knowing full well that he had come to the end of his evil tether, either hung the coat carefully on a handy hook or folded it neatly on a chair. The owner might be down in the orchestra seats.

Such scenes bred in us a superstitious reverence for fur-lined garments. It became the dream of our young life to possess such an overcoat, a gold cigarette-case, and three or four wives whom we had married for their money. But you know how disappointing these dreams are apt to be. We didn't even get the wives.

The nearest we ever came to a fur-lined coat was owning one with a Persian-lamb collar. We never cared much for that coat. There was an air of superficiality about it. Not that we have anything against Persian-lamb collars so far as they go. But they don't go very far. Besides, they make one look like a police-lieutenant or a chauffeur.

Mind you, it was a swagger garment in its way. In addition to the fur collar it had a double-breasted front, and was fastened with barrel-shaped arrangements instead of buttons. It had everything pertaining to a fur-lined coat, except the fur-lining.

Of course, you wouldn't notice that vital defect unless we opened the coat or took it off. And we never did either in public. We have sat in street-cars up near the stove with that coat buttoned up to our chin, until people have moved away from us under the impression that we had the measles. We have almost had to thrash butlers to prevent them helping us off with it—if there is anything obstinate on earth, it is a butler with the idea that you are hiding something from him. We have even retired into dark doorways to get a cent out of our pants-pocket to buy a paper, rather than open the coat on a busy corner.

In spite of these precautions, we always had the feeling that people knew about that coat and discussed it. They had a way of looking at it as though they thought the collar had been put on with safety-pins. We grew to hate the coat. Finally the moths got it. That is, they bored holes in it—probably looking for the lining.

Still our thwarted ambition to possess a real fur-lined coat has persisted. We want it as badly as we ever did. It is nothing to us that they have gone out of exclusive style. We care not that every second man on the street has a coat with some sort of hairy stuff on the collar and the interior draped with the mortal remains of the commoner sort of muskrat. We are still faithful to our early love.

From time to time we have gone into one or other of the various local emporiums—or should it be "emporia?"—of skins, peltry, fleece, hides, and fur, and have priced the garment of our longing. We have looked at mink-lined ones, rat-lined, rabbit-lined, and even seal-lined. We have tried them on and talked sagely to salesmen about them. But we have bought not, neither have we paid down in instalments. We have sighed, jingled the quarter against the small change in our pocket, and said we would call again soon.

The trouble is that the only coats we like are those ranging from about four hundred up—up as far as you can see, and then some! The seal ones we definitely gave up. No one but a former manufacturer of munitions or an inventor of booze-substitutes should aspire to those. It isn't only the initial expense but the way you have to live up to them—taxicabs, diamonds, and half a dollar to the hat-boy every time he helps you on with it.

That left mink, and mink we resolved it should be, in spite of its scarcity. You see, the mink is a small animal of retiring nature and celibate instincts. At least, the mink does not seem to run to large families. The rabbit takes up fatherhood as a profession—but nothing like that for the mink! One or two little minks, and that's all. The mink is a sort of natural Eugenist. "Better babies" is his slogan, not "More babies." As a result minks are hard to get, and correspondingly expensive.

Frequently have we cast eyes of longing on mink-lined coats in fur-store windows, as we strolled along to the office on cold mornings in our combination raincoat and winter ulster. They have been handsome coats, too, many of them, but there has always been something about them we didn't like—sometimes the collar, occasionally the shell (how those military terms will creep in even yet!), and nearly always the small tag hanging from the upper righthand button-hole and proclaiming the price.

But one fine day during that very cold snap we finally saw the fur-coat of our youthful vision. There it hung, or rather stood, in the window, spreading its mink lining to the ravished gaze and ruffling its otter collar in tantalizing beauty. That collar had been peeled off the emperor of all the otters—or the crown prince, at the very least—and Heaven alone knows how many minks had delivered up their fluffy integument to furnish forth that sumptuous lining.

It was a beautiful thing, God wot, and the price was right—only two hundred and fifty iron men, simoleons, bucks, bones, or spondulicks. Not that we take a light view of a sum which in the old days would have bought two thousand cocktails, and if judiciously expended on "lush" would have enabled one to laugh at Prohibition for many happy weeks. But what is two hundred and fifty dollars for a fur-coat which was originally five hundred as the tag explicitly declared, and had come down through successive stages to this absurdly inadequate figure?

We rushed right in and made a clerk drag it out of the window. He did it a little doubtfully, it seemed—evidently unaware how many moneyed men dress very plainly, not to say shabbily. But our enthusiasm finally impressed him. He held it up for us, and we slipped with a sigh of tremulous delight into its soothing embrace. Lordy, how that coat fitted! How gently it caressed us, and how gracefully it hung upon the angles of our frame! There is something positively sinful in such comfort as that.

Of course, it wouldn't do to let the clerk see how delighted we were with it—he might raise the price again. So we controlled our voice as best we could, and asked him if the skins were all right. We even tried to look disparaging.

"All right?" he almost shouted. "Why, if it wasn't for the stringency and all that, this coat would be selling at three times—but you can see for yourself. Just look at those skins—everyone of them taken in the middle of winter!" And in his indignation at our attitude, he grabbed a couple of minks and crumpled them up as if he were going to tear them out of the coat and throw them away.

That's a peculiar thing about fine furs. The finer they are, the more the connoisseur seems to abuse them. Poor skins have to be handled with great care, we presume, but when your real expert gets hold of a good piece of fur, he shakes it and beats it and tries to pull the hair out of it.

It was also very nice to know that the minks had been taken in the winter when they had all their fur on. In the summer, when the minks are wearing nothing but their swimming-trunks, so to speak—but the thing doesn't bear thinking of.

It was just the coat we had always wanted—the clerk said we looked great in it—but after a hasty recollection of our bank-balance as it appeared when we last put a dint in it, we told him we would call again. And we kept calling. We called about a dozen times. We simply couldn't keep away from that fur-coat. And every time we went we brought a friend or two with us to look it over and give us advice. We put the coat on and walked around the store in it to show how it hung, and then we took it off and adjourned to the nearest cigar-stand or blind-pig to discuss the matter. The coat cost us about twenty dollars in a couple of weeks.

Our friends all admired the coat, but curiously enough, they all advised against us buying it—perhaps from a conscientious objection to seeing so much money tied up in mere fur. They always warned us that if we once wore it, we'd have to go on wearing it all the time for fear of catching cold. They said that's the worst of fur-coats—one doesn't dare leave them off. But naturally, if we got that coat, we intended to go on wearing it till about the middle of June. When it got too hot to wear it open, we'd carry it on our arm with the lining turned out.

Lately the clerk had been getting quite sniffy. The last time we were in, he intimated that the coat was beginning to look rather used from being worn around the store so much. We finally had to discontinue these visits, but we hated to tear ourself away from that glorious garment. The first thing we knew some butcher might buy it.

But perhaps some rich relative of ours, turning up rather unexpectedly—we don't insist on any close consanguinity so long as he is rich—may see this pathetic screed and feel that here is a chance to help genius in distress. What's the use of erecting monuments to us after we are dead? How much better and kinder it would be to buy that coat and send it down to the office while we are still comparatively alive. In fact, this is our idea in writing this article.

SPRING IN THE CITY

A thick, creamy, white lather covering that part of our countenance which indicates strength of character, showed that we were about to shave. It is our matutinal custom. Poised in our hand was the lethal weapon with which we perform this painful rite.

At that moment we heard the robin! At that very instant of the morning of Saturday, April the sixth, the voice of the robin was heard in the block. Immediately we threw up the window, and careless of the rather intimate nature of our habiliments, we leaned out over the ledge.

There was no robin in sight. No glimpse of red-breast gladdened our heart. We looked in vain at each of the miniature plots of mud which residents on our street refer to as the "lawn." Nowhere could we see Cock Robin sturdily dragging a large, thick worm from his lair, or waiting with dignified alertness for breakfast to poke up its head. But his voice filled the street, clear and high and vibrant with delight—the very voice of triumphant spring!

"Some class to that whistlin'," said someone below us.

We looked down and saw a dingy man with a bag of tools on his shoulder, who was frankly watching us and grinning with disgusting familiarity. Plumbers never are in a hurry.

"Makes a fella feel like chuckin' his work, don't it?" he persisted.

"It does," we burbled through the lather, and drew in our head with reckless haste. We afterwards discovered some of our back-hair still clinging to the lower edge of the window-frame. But not even the painful presence of a protuberance on our skull where none had been before could banish our joy in that robin's song.

Spring was here at last! It is true there was still much ice in our backyard, and in our neighbor's backyard, and in the backyard beyond his. It is true also that icicles hung from the roofs, and that the water in our bath-tub was still of a temperature to produce curiously mottled effects on our general complexion. But we were happy and we sang as we splashed about, for we knew that spring was here.

Therefore did we kick into a corner with joyous abandon the thick, fuzzy garments—warranted pure wool and unshrinkable (base deception!)—with which we had armed ourself as with triple brass against the onslaught of old Boreas. And from a camphored recess in our trunk we drew forth tenuous and elastic vesture which clung to our manly form and restored to it its summer slimness.

When the coal-man's bill arrived in the morning mail, we threw it carelessly aside for our landlady. Our attitude towards coal-men had suddenly changed from anxious propitiation to bored indifference. The strike news in the papers moved not our Olympian serenity. We sympathized with the miners. We felt that if we were a miner ourself, we would strike at once and stay struck till the dog-days caused us to long for subterranean coolness.

Then draping our light overcoat in a jaunty way over our arm, we walked down town. It wasn't a case of going out with the avowed intention of walking, and then sprinting after the first street-car we saw. No, we really walked, inhaling large breaths of vernal ozone. And a lot of other men were similarly engaged. Fellows that we used to see morning after morning furtively slipping into a street-car—the same car that we slipped into ourself—now swung along with their chests swelling out of their coats and a good-to-be-alive expression on their faces. We also noticed that they seemed to take more than the normal masculine interest in the spring dresses which flitted by—especially those affectionate gowns which cling so alluringly to their fair owners. Verily it was the spring.

In a bit of ground where the mud had been pounded to the shiny consistency of overdone chocolate blanc-mange, three very dirty and very serious-minded urchins played marbles. Further on a spoiled darling of fortune who possessed a top spun it with studied indifference—and with a cord, too, of course—while a couple of other youngsters less favored of the gods looked enviously on.

A garden patch littered with sticks and wet leaves and the water-logged aftermath of winter held a resolute little old man with an immense rake, who was endeavoring to introduce some order into his chaotic cosmos. He was having a very busy time, something like a pup who had got into a boneyard. He scratched and tugged and grunted, and here and there he managed to get the stuff gathered into piles. He may have had some notion of burning it, but it would take many sunny days before the stuff would be dry enough to burn anywhere but in a very hot and active volcano.

We leaned on the fence and sniffed the moist rich odors of the dead leaves. They brought to mind pleasant pictures of the approaching time of planting, when enthusiastic amateurs, heedless of the mud on the knees of their trousers, would be jabbing holes in every available bit of ground and sticking seeds and bulbs into them. And we reflected sadly on the sardonic humor of fate which had made us a book-reviewer instead of a happy farmer lad carolling to the sun as we went about the simple and healthful duties of our husbandry. We thought of striding out to the fields with the sun turning the frosted grass to silver filigree, and then we noticed that the old gentleman was contemplating us with the cold and wary eye of a disillusioned sparrow.

"Are you looking for work, young man?" he asked, "or are you merely looking at it? Because, if you really want a job, there is one right here that I would like...."

But we were already on our way. We suddenly recalled that the mail must be piled up on our desk, and that our presence was urgently needed at the office. Did we want work? And so in an instant we were brought back from the golden meadows of dreamland, where we saw ourself wandering a flushed young god in the morning of the world, and became once more a middle-aged office-man, somewhat stooped from bending over a desk.

The spring was in our blood, however, and our spirits revived at the first park we came to. On such mornings one makes a point of walking through the parks, and Allen Gardens lay right on our line of march. They were a scene of joyous activity. Chief gardeners and assistant and deputy-assistant gardeners ran about in amiable confusion. There was a tremendous raking up of straw and mulch—mulch being the technical name for everything that is thrown on a flower-bed, from bricks to sardine-tins.

Around the fountain a lot of blithesome little toddlers pulled one another's hair, or made frantic efforts to drown themselves, while the nurse-girls exchanged confidences as to the precise tone in which "he said" and the elegant vivacity with which "I said to him."

The benches were out and they were occupied. Perhaps it is enough to say that the benches were out. They are never left unoccupied on a nice day of spring. Gentlemen of shabby leisure abhor a vacant seat. One is led to wonder where the men who sit in parks go during the winter—into cracks in the wall, possibly, like the flies. But the day was warm and the bench-boarders were out. There they sat blinking their eyes in drowsy contentment and sniffing hopefully the breezes of spring.

We paused to make some of the kindly and philosophic reflections which are dictated to us on such occasions by our whimsical genius. We looked about us with just such a keen and humorous expression as we felt Montaigne would have worn under similar circumstances. We were preparing to say something rather clever to ourself about the life of man, which is as a spring day, etc.

"Well, the long winter is over at last," said a voice at our elbow, or rather at our left shoulder-blade. It was a melancholy voice, a voice which intimated that the owner doubted he would ever see another spring. But a large face of more than usual redness caused one to question the likelihood of a demise so immediate.

"Yes," we admitted, "it seems to be over, and it is about time."

"Ah, the spring is a great season for them as is young and strong and handsome."

The wistful expression with which this battered, red-faced, watery-eyed person regarded us indicated that he thought we were all these things. We blushed slightly, and to hide our embarrassment—we are not used to such compliments, implied or otherwise—said in a voice of great heartiness:

"Ho, yes—nothing like the spring! Makes a fellow glad to be alive."

"Yes, yes," he agreed still more wistfully, "it makes a handsome young gentleman's heart expand—it makes him free-handed and generous." A sudden cold suspicion seized our vernal ardor and strangled it. Could it be possible that ... yes, it could! And that rubicund old scoundrel proceeded to inform us that the "temporary loan—(the printer will please emphasize temporary")—of half a dollar would cause him to recall our memory with gratitude at frequent intervals for the rest of his life.

If we had had half a dollar in our pocket, we might ... but what man who is paid on Saturdays ever had any money to bring down to the office Saturday morning? We hinted discreetly at our destitution, but the red-faced man merely grunted and turned away. We fear he did not believe us.

We regretted his distrust, of course, but, as Emerson might have said, it is great to be misunderstood in the spring. In a few minutes we forgot our embarrassment and remembered the ruddy one merely as a humorous episode of the jovial day. We chuckled all the way down to the office as we thought of the open and unabashed admiration with which he had regarded us, till he discovered that we were a good Samaritan without the price.

At the office everybody was glad to see us. Even the Managing Editor was amiable. He said nothing about the hour we got in—he seemed to think it was very nice of us to come down at all. And then he sat on the corner of our desk and talked about the beauty of living in the country, and waking up in the morning with the calves bleating around you and the hens and all that, and walking out in the fields to see the fine, healthy farmer lads turning up the sod and reaping and harrowing and everything.

Of course, it was immediately obvious to us that the Managing Editor's idea of country life had been gained from the reading of sentimental verse. Unfortunately, we find it difficult to share this enthusiasm for rural life. You see, we worked on a few farms when we were a wild lad just out of college—we were seeking inspiration in the soil. So we know just how a farm looks and smells in the spring when they are enriching the ground. But we didn't disillusion the M.E.—we wanted everyone to be happy.

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