Chimney- Pot Papers. 
 
) ^ 2 - O 
 
07 
 
 Cl 
 
 Copyright, 1919, by 
 Yale University Press. 
 
 First published, 1919. 
 Second printing, 1920. 
 
 Publisher s Note: 
 
 The Yale University Press makes grateful 
 acknowledgment to the Editors of the 
 Unpopular Review and The Century Maga 
 zine for permission to include in the 
 present volume, essays of which they were 
 the original publishers. 
 
 - -LTCH t 
 
To Minerva, my Wife. 
 
 429137 
 
Contents. 
 
 I. The Chimney-Pots 11 
 
 II. The Quest of the Lost Digamma . 19 
 
 ^ III. On a Rainy Morning .... 35 
 
 IV. "1917" 43 
 
 ^x V. On Going Afoot 47 
 
 ^VI. On Livelihoods 68 
 
 VII. The Tread of the Friendly Giants . 79 
 
 VIII. On Spending a Holiday .... 89 
 
 IK. Runaway Studies 109 
 
 X. On Turning into Forty .... 117 
 ^"XI. On the Difference between Wit and 
 
 Humor 128 
 
 XII. On Going to a Party 136 
 
 XIII. On a Pair of Leather Suspenders . 146 
 
 XIV. Boots for Runaways 159 
 
 XV. On Hanging a Stocking at Christ 
 mas 169 
 
The Chimney-Pots. 
 
 MY windows look across the roofs of the 
 crowded city and my thoughts often take 
 their suggestion from the life that is mani 
 fest at my neighbors windows and on these roofs. 
 
 Across the way, one story lower than our own, 
 there dwells "with his subsidiary parents" a little lad 
 who has been ill for several weeks. After his house 
 hold is up and dressed I regularly discover him in 
 bed, with his books and toys piled about him. Some 
 times his knees are raised to form a snowy mountain, 
 and he leads his paper soldiers up the slope. Some 
 times his kitten romps across the coverlet and pounces 
 on his wriggling toes; and again sleeps on the sunny 
 window-sill. His book, by his rapt attention, must 
 deal with far-off islands and with waving cocoa- 
 nut trees. Lately I have observed that a yellow 
 drink is brought to him in the afternoon a delicious 
 blend of eggs and milk and by the zest with which 
 he licks the remainder from his lips, it is a prime 
 favorite of his. In these last few days, however, I 
 have seen the lad s nose flat and eager on the window, 
 and I know that he is convalescent. 
 
 At another set of windows now that the days are 
 growing short and there is need of lights I see 
 in shadowgraph against the curtains an occasional 
 
1% ** : *> CHIMNEY-TOT PAPERS 
 
 domestic drama. Tonight, by the appearance of 
 hurry and the shifting of garments, I surmise that 
 there is preparation for a party. Presently, when 
 the upstairs lights have disappeared, I shall see these 
 folk below, issuing from their door in glossy raiment. 
 My dear sir and madame, I wish you an agreeable 
 dinner and if your tooth resembles mine ice-cream 
 for dessert. 
 
 The window of a kitchen, also, is opposite, and I 
 often look on savory messes as they ripen on the fire 
 a stirring with a long iron spoon. This spoon is of 
 such unusual length that even if one supped with the 
 devil (surely the fearful adage cannot apply to our 
 quiet street) he might lift his food in safety from the 
 common pot. 
 
 A good many stories lower there is a bit of roof 
 that is set with wicker furniture and a row of gay 
 plants along the gutter. Here every afternoon 
 exactly at six the roof being then in shadow a man 
 appears and reads his evening paper. Later his wife 
 joins him and they eat their supper from a tray. 
 They are sunk almost in a well of buildings which, 
 like the hedge of a fairy garden, shuts them from all 
 contact with the world. And here they sit when the 
 tray has been removed. The twilight falls early at 
 their level and, like cottagers in a valley, they watch 
 the daylight that still gilds the peaks above them. 
 
 There is another of these out-of-door rooms above 
 me on a higher building. From my lower level I can 
 
THE CHIMNEY-POTS 13 
 
 see the bright canvas and the side of the trellis that 
 supports it. Here, doubtless, in the cool breeze of 
 these summer evenings, honest folk sip their coffee 
 and watch the lights start across the city. 
 
 Thus, all around, I have glimpses of my neigh 
 bors a form against the curtains a group, in the 
 season, around the fire the week s darning in a 
 rocker an early nose sniffing at the open window 
 the morning airs. 
 
 But it is these roofs themselves that are the general 
 prospect. 
 
 Close at hand are graveled surfaces with spouts 
 and whirling vents and chimneys. Here are posts 
 and lines for washing, and a scuttle from which once 
 a week a laundress pops her head. Although her 
 coming is timed to the very hour almost to the 
 minute yet when the scuttle stirs it is with an ap 
 pearance of mystery, as if one of the forty thieves 
 were below, boosting at the rocks that guard his cave. 
 But the laundress is of so unromantic and jouncing 
 a figure that I abandon the fancy when no more than 
 her shoulders are above the scuttle. She is, however, 
 an amiable creature and, if the wind is right, I hear 
 her singing at her task. When clothespins fill her 
 mouth, she experiments with popular tunes. One 
 of these wooden bipeds once slipped inside and nearly 
 strangled her. 
 
 In the distance, on the taller buildings, water tanks 
 are lifted against the sky. They are perched aloft 
 
14 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 on three fingers, as it were, as if the buildings were 
 just won to prohibition and held up their water cups 
 in the first excitement of a novice to pledge the cause. 
 Let hard liquor crouch and tremble in its rathskeller 
 below the sidewalk! In the basement let musty kegs 
 roll and gurgle with hopeless fear! Der Tag! The 
 roof, the triumphant roof, has gone dry. 
 
 This range of buildings with water tanks and 
 towers stops my gaze to the North. There is a 
 crowded world beyond rolling valleys of human 
 ity the heights of Harlem but although my win 
 dows stand on tiptoe, they may not discover these 
 distant scenes. 
 
 On summer days these roofs burn in the sun and 
 spirals of heat arise. Tar flows from the joints in 
 the tin. Tar and the adder is it not a bright day 
 that brings them forth? Now washing hangs limp 
 upon the line. There is no frisk in undergarments. 
 These stockings that hang shriveled and anaemic 
 can it be possible that they once trotted to a lively 
 tune, or that a lifted skirt upon a crosswalk drew the 
 eye? The very spouts and chimneys droop in the 
 heavy sunlight. All the spinning vents are still. On 
 these roofs, as on a steaming altar, August celebrates 
 its hot midsummer rites. ^ 
 
 But in winter, when the wmd is up, the roofs show 
 another aspect. The storm, in frayed and cloudy 
 garment, now plunges across the city. It snaps 
 
THE CHIMNEY-POTS 15 
 
 its boisterous fingers. It pipes a song to sum 
 mon rowdy companions off the sea. The whirling 
 vents hum shrilly to the tune. And the tempests are 
 roused, and the windy creatures of the hills make 
 answer. The towers even the nearer buildings are 
 obscured. The sky is gray with rain. Smoke is torn 
 from the chimneys. Down below let a fire be snug 
 upon the hearth and let warm folk sit and toast their 
 feet! Let shadows romp upon the walls! Let the 
 andirons wink at the sleepy cat! Cream or lemon, 
 two lumps or one. Here aloft is brisker business. 
 There is storm upon the roof. The tempest holds a 
 carnival. And the winds pounce upon the smoke as 
 it issues from the chimney-pots and wring it by the 
 neck as they bear it off. 
 
 And sometimes it seems that these roofs represent 
 youth, and its purpose, its ambition and adventure. 
 For, from of old, have not poets lived in garrets? 
 And are not all poets young even if their beards are 
 white? Round and round the poet climbs, up these 
 bare creaking flights to the very top. There is a stove 
 to be lighted unless the woodbox fails a sloping 
 ceiling and a window huddled to the floor. The poet s 
 fingers may be numb. Although the inkpot be full, 
 his stomach may be emjrty. And yet from this win 
 dow, lately, a poem was cast upward to the moon. 
 And youth and truth still rhyme in these upper rooms. 
 Linda s voice is still the music of a sonnet. Still do 
 
16 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 the roses fade, and love is always like the constant 
 stars. And once, this! surely from a garret: 
 
 When I behold, upon the night s starr d face, 
 Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, 
 And think that I may never live to trace 
 Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance 
 
 Poor starved wretches are we who live softly in the 
 lower stories, although we are fat of body. 
 
 If a mighty pair of shears were to clip the city 
 somewhere below these windy gutters would there not 
 be a dearth of poems in the spring? Who then 
 would be left to note the changing colors of the twi 
 light and the peaceful transit of the stars? Would 
 gray beech trees in the winter find a voice? Would 
 there still be a song of water and of wind? Who 
 would catch the rhythm of the waves and the wheat 
 fields in the breeze? What lilts and melodies would 
 vanish from the world! How stale and flat the city 
 without its roofs ! 
 
 But it is at night that these roofs show best. Then, 
 as below a philosopher in his tower, the city spreads 
 its web of streets, and its lights gleam in answer to 
 the lights above. Galileo in his tower Teufels- 
 drockh at his far-seeing attic window saw this 
 glistening pageantry and had thoughts unutterable. 
 
 In this darkness these roofs are the true suburb of 
 the world the outpost the pleasant edge of our 
 human earth turned up toward the barren moon. 
 
THE CHIMNEY-POTS 17 
 
 Chimneys stand as sentinels on the border of the sky. 
 Pointed towers mark the passage of the stars. Great 
 buildings are the cliffs on the shores of night. A sky 
 light shows as a pleasant signal to guide the wander 
 ing skipper of the moon. 
 
The Quest of the Lost Digamma. 
 
 MANY years ago there was a club of college 
 undergraduates which called itself the Lost 
 Digamma. The digamma, I am informed, 
 is a letter that was lost in prehistoric times from the 
 Greek alphabet. A prudent alphabet would have 
 offered a reward at once and would have beaten up 
 the bushes all about, but evidently these remedies were 
 neglected. As the years went on the other letters 
 gradually assumed its duties. The philological 
 chores, so to speak, night and morning, that had once 
 fallen to the digamma, they took upon themselves, 
 until the very name of the letter was all but lost. 
 
 Those who are practiced in such matters humped 
 men who blink with learning claim to discover evi 
 dence of the letter now and then in their reading. 
 Perhaps the missing letter still gives a false quantity 
 to a vowel or shifts an accent. It is remembered, as 
 it were, by its vacant chair. Or rather, like a ghost 
 it haunts a word, rattling a warning lest we dis 
 arrange a syllable. Its absence, however, in the flesh, 
 despite the lapse of time for it went off long ago 
 when the mastodon still wandered on the pleasant 
 upland its continued absence vexes the learned. 
 They scan ancient texts for an improper syllable and 
 mark the time upon their brown old fingers, if pos- 
 
tO CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 sibly a jolting measure may offer them a clue. Al 
 though it must appear that the digamma if it yet 
 rambles alive somewhere beneath the moon has by 
 this time grown a beard and is lost beyond recognition, 
 still old gentlemen meet weekly and read papers to 
 one another on the progress of the search. Like the 
 old woman of the story they still keep a light burning 
 in their study windows against the wanderer s return. 
 
 Now it happened once that a group of under 
 graduates, stirred to sympathy beyond the common 
 usage of the classroom, formed themselves into a club 
 to aid in the search. It is not recorded that they were 
 the deepest students in the class, yet mark their zeal! 
 On a rumor arising from the chairman that the pres 
 ence of the lost digamma was suspected the group 
 rushed together of an evening, for there was an in 
 stinct that the digamma, like the raccoon, was easiest 
 trapped at night. To stay their stomachs against a 
 protracted search, for their colloquies sat late, they 
 ordered a plentiful dinner to be placed before them. 
 Also, on the happy chance that success might crown 
 the night, a row of stout Tobies was set upon the 
 board. If the prodigal lurked without and his 
 vagrant nose were seen at last upon the window, then 
 musty liquor, from a Toby s three-cornered hat, 
 would be a fitting pledge for his return. 
 
 I do not know to a certainty the place of these 
 meetings, but I choose to fancy that it was an upper 
 room in a modest restaurant that went by the name 
 
THE QUEST OF THE LOST DIG AM MA $1 
 
 of Mory s not the modern Mory s that affects the 
 manners of a club, but the original Temple Bar, 
 remembered justly for its brown ale and golden 
 bucks. 
 
 There was, of course, a choice of places where the 
 Lost Digamma might have pushed its search. Waiv 
 ing Billy s and the meaner joints conferred on fresh 
 men, there was, to be sure, the scholastic murk of 
 Traeger s one room especially at the rear with steins 
 around the walls. There was Heublein s, also. Even 
 the Tontine might rouse a student. But I choose to 
 consider that Mory s was the place. 
 
 Never elsewhere has cheese sputtered on toast with 
 such hot delight. Never have such fair round eggs 
 perched upon the top. The hen who laid the golden 
 egg for it could be none other than she who worked 
 the miracle at Mory s must have clucked like a brag 
 gart when the smoking dish came in. The dullest 
 nose, even if it had drowsed like a Stoic through the 
 day, perked and quivered when the breath came off 
 the kitchen. Ears that before had never wiggled to 
 the loudest noise came flapping forward when the 
 door was opened. Or maybe in those days your 
 wealth, huddled closely through the week, stretched 
 on Saturday night to a mutton chop with bacon on 
 the side. This chop, named of the southern downs, 
 was so big that it curled like an anchovy to get upon 
 the plate. The sheep that bore it across the grassy 
 moors must have out-topped the horse. The hills 
 
CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 must have shaken beneath his tread. With what 
 eagerness you squared your lean elbows for the feast, 
 with knife and fork turned upwards in your fists! 
 
 But chops in these modern days are retrograde. 
 Sheep have fallen to a decadent race. Cheese has lost 
 its cunning. Someone, alas, as the story says, has 
 killed the hen that laid the golden egg. Mory s is 
 sunk and gone. Its faded prints of the Old Brick 
 Row, its tables carved with students names, its brown 
 Tobies in their three-cornered hats, the brasses of the 
 tiny bar, the rickety rooms themselves these rise 
 from the past like genial ghosts and beckon us 
 toward pleasant memories. 
 
 Such was the zeal in those older days which the 
 members of the Lost Digamma spent upon their quest 
 that belated pedestrians if the legend of the district 
 be believed have stopped upon the curb and have 
 inquired the meaning of the glad shouts that issued 
 from the upper windows, and they have gone off 
 marveling at the enthusiasm attendant on this high 
 endeavor. It is rumored that once when the excite 
 ment of the chase had gone to an unusual height and 
 the students were beating their Tobies on the table, 
 one of them, a fellow of uncommon ardor, lunging 
 forward from his chair, got salt upon the creature s 
 tail. The exploit overturned the table and so rocked 
 the house that Louis, who was the guardian of the 
 place, put his nose above the stairs and cooled the 
 meeting. Had it not been for his interference he 
 
THE QUEST OF THE LOST DIG AM MA 23 
 
 was a good-natured fellow but unacquainted with the 
 frenzy that marks the scholar the lost digamma 
 might have been trapped, to the lasting glory of the 
 college. 
 
 As to the further progress of the club I am not 
 informed. Doubtless it ran an honorable course and 
 passed on from class to class the tradition of its high 
 ambition, but never again was the lost digamma so 
 nearly in its grasp. If it still meets upon its mid 
 night labors, a toothless member boasts of that night 
 of its topmost glory, and those who have gathered to 
 his words rap their stale unprofitable mugs upon the 
 table. 
 
 It would be unjust to assume that you are so poor 
 a student as myself. Doubtless you are a scholar and 
 can discourse deeply of the older centuries. You 
 know the ancient works of Tweedledum and can dis 
 tinguish to a hair s breadth twixt him and Tweedle- 
 dee. Learning is candy on your tooth. Perhaps you 
 stroke your sagacious beard and give a nimble reason 
 for the lightning. To you the hills have whispered 
 how they came, and the streams their purpose and 
 ambition. You have studied the first shrinkage of 
 the earth when the plains wrinkled and broke into 
 mountain peaks. The mystery of the stars is to you 
 as familiar as your garter. If such depth is yours, 
 I am content to sit before you like a bucket below 
 a tap. 
 
CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 At your banquet I sit as a poor relation. If the 
 viands hold, I fork a cold morsel from your dish. . . . 
 
 But modesty must not gag me. I do myself some 
 what lean towards knowledge. I run to a dictionary 
 on a disputed word, and I point my inquiring nose 
 upon the page like a careful schoolman. On a spurt 
 I pry into an uncertain date, but I lack the persever 
 ance and the wakefulness for sustained endeavor. To 
 repair my infirmity, I frequently go among those of 
 steadier application, if haply their devotion may 
 prove contagious. It was but lately that I dined with 
 a group of the Cognoscenti. There were light words 
 at first, as when a juggler carelessly tosses up a ball 
 or two just to try his hand before he displays his 
 genius a jest or two, into which I entered as an 
 equal. In these shallow moments we waded through 
 our soup. But we had hardly got beyond the fish 
 when the company plunged into greater depth. I 
 soon discovered that I was among persons skilled in 
 those economic and social studies that now most stir 
 us. My neighbor on the left offered to gossip with 
 me on the latest evaluations and eventuations for 
 such were her pleasing words in the department of 
 knowledge dearest to her. While I was still fumbling 
 for a response, my neighbor on the right, abandoning 
 her meat, informed me of the progress of a survey of 
 charitable organizations that was then under way. 
 By mischance, however, while flipping up the salad 
 on my fork, I dropped a morsel on the cloth, and I 
 
THE QUEST OF THE LOST DIGAMMA 25 
 
 was so intent in manoeuvring my plates and spoons 
 to cover up the speck, that I lost a good part of her 
 improving discourse. 
 
 I was still, however, making a tolerable pretense 
 of attention, when a learned person across the table 
 was sharp enough to see that I was a novice in the 
 gathering. For my improvement, therefore, he fixed 
 his great round glasses in my direction. In my con 
 fusion they seemed burning lenses hotly focused on 
 me. Under such a glare, he thought, my tender 
 sprouts of knowledge must spring up to full blossom. 
 
 When he had my attention, he proceeded to lay 
 out the dinner into calories, which I now discovered 
 to be a kind of heat or nutritive unit. He cast his 
 appraisal on the meat and vegetables, and turned an 
 ear toward the pantry door if by chance he might 
 catch a hint of the dessert for his estimate, but by this 
 time, being overwrought, I gave up all pretense, and 
 put my coarse attention on my plate. 
 
 Sometimes I fall on better luck. It was but yester 
 day that I sat waiting for a book in the Public 
 Library, when a young woman came and sat beside 
 me on the common bench. Immediately she opened 
 a monstrous note-book, and fell to studying it. I had 
 myself been reading, but I had held my book at a 
 stingy angle against the spying of my neighbors. As 
 the young woman was of a more open nature, she laid 
 hers out flat. It is my weakness to pry upon an 
 other s book. Especially if it is old and worn a 
 
CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 musty history or an essay from the past I squirm 
 and edge myself until I can follow the reader s thumb. 
 
 At the top of each page she had written the title 
 of a book, with a space below for comment, now well 
 filled. There were a hundred of these titles, and all 
 of them concerned John Paul Jones. She busied her 
 self scratching and amending her notes. The whole 
 was thrown into such a snarl of interlineation, was so 
 disfigured with revision, and the writing so started 
 up the margins to get breath at the top, that I won 
 dered how she could possibly bring a straight narra 
 tive out of the confusion. Yet here was a book 
 growing up beneath my very nose. If in a year s 
 time or perhaps in a six-month, if the manuscript 
 is not hawked too long among publishers if when 
 again the nights are raw, a new biography of John 
 Paul Jones appears, and you cut its leaves while your 
 legs are stretched upon the hearth, I bid you to recog 
 nize as its author my companion on the bench. Al 
 though she did not have beauty to rouse a bachelor, 
 yet she had an agreeable face and, if a soft white 
 collar of pleasing fashion be evidence, she put more 
 than a scholar s care upon her dress. 
 
 I am not entirely a novice in a library. Once I 
 gained admittance to the Reading Room of the Brit 
 ish Museum no light task even before the war. 
 This was the manner of it. First, I went among the 
 policemen who frequent the outer corridors, and in 
 quired for a certain office which I had been told con- 
 
THE QUEST OF THE LOST D1GAMMA 27 
 
 trolled its affairs. The third policeman had heard of 
 it and sent me off with directions. Presently I went 
 through an obscure doorway, traversed a mean hall 
 with a dirty gas-jet at the turn and came before a 
 wicket. A dark man with the blood of a Spanish 
 inquisitor asked my business. I told him I was a poor 
 student, without taint or heresy, who sought knowl 
 edge. He stroked his chin as though it were a 
 monstrous improbability. He looked me up and 
 down, but this might have been merely a secular in 
 quiry on the chance that I carried explosives. He 
 then dipped his pen in an ancient well (it was from 
 such a dusty fount that the warrant for Saint Barthol 
 omew went forth), then bidding me be careful in my 
 answers, he cocked his head and shut his less sus 
 picious eye lest it yield to mercy. 
 
 He asked my name in full, middle name and all 
 as though villainy might lurk in an initial my hotel, 
 my length of stay in London, my residence in 
 America, my occupation, the titles of the books I 
 sought. When he had done, I offered him my age 
 and my weakness for French pastry, in order that 
 material for a monograph might be at hand if at last 
 I came to fame, but he silenced me with his cold eye. 
 He now thrust a pamphlet in my hands, and told me 
 to sit alongside and read it. It contained the rules 
 that govern the use of the Reading Room. It was 
 eight pages long, and intolerably dry, and towards 
 the end I nodded. Awaking with a start, I was about 
 
CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 to hold up my hands for the adjustment of the thumb 
 screws for I had fallen on a nightmare when he 
 softened. The Imperial Government was now pleased 
 to admit me to the Reading Room for such knowl 
 edge as might lie in my capacity. 
 
 The Reading Room is used chiefly by authors, 
 gray fellows mostly, dried and wrinkled scholars who 
 come here to pilfer innocently from antiquity. 
 Among these musty memorial shelves, if anywhere, 
 it would seem that the dusty padding feet of the lost 
 digamma might be heard. In this room, perhaps, 
 Christian Mentzelius was at work when he heard the 
 book-worm flap its wings. 
 
 Here sit the scholars at great desks with ingenious 
 shelves and racks, and they write all day and copy 
 excerpts from the older authors. If one of them 
 hesitates and seems to chew upon his pencil, it is but 
 indecision whether Hume or Buckle will weigh 
 heavier on his page. Or if one of them looks up 
 from his desk in a blurred near-sighted manner, it is 
 because his eyes have been so stretched upon the dis 
 tant centuries, that they can hardly focus on a room. 
 If a scholar chances to sneeze because of the infection, 
 let it be his consolation that the dust arises from the 
 most ancient and respected authors! Pages move 
 silently about with tall dingy tomes in their arms. 
 Other tomes, whose use is past, they bear off to the 
 shades below. 
 
 I am told that once in a long time a student of 
 
THE QUEST OF THE LOST DIGAMMA 29 
 
 fresher complexion gets in a novitiate with the first 
 scholastic down upon his cheek a tender stripling 
 on his first high quest a broth of a boy barely off his 
 primer but no sooner is he set than he feels unpleas 
 antly conspicuous among his elders. Most of these 
 youth bolt, offering to the doorman as a pretext some 
 neglect a forgotten mission at a book-stall an 
 errand with a tailor. Even those few who remain 
 because of the greater passion for their studies, find 
 it to their comfort to break their condition. Either 
 they put on glasses or they affect a limp. I know one 
 persistent youth who was so consumed with desire 
 for history, yet so modest against exposure, that he 
 bargained with a beggar for his crutch. It was, how 
 ever, the rascal s only livelihood. This crutch and 
 his piteous whimper had worked so profitably on the 
 crowd that, in consequence, its price fell beyond the 
 student s purse. My friend, therefore, practiced a 
 palsy until, being perfect in the part, he could take 
 his seat without notice or embarrassment. Alas, the 
 need of these pretenses is short. Such is the contagion 
 of the place a breath from Egypt comes up from the 
 lower stacks that a youth s appearance, like a dyer s 
 hand, is soon subdued to what it works in. In a 
 month or so a general dust has settled on him. Too 
 often learning is a Rip Van Winkle s flagon. 
 
 On a rare occasion I have myself been a student, 
 and have plied my book with diligence. Not long 
 ago I spent a week of agreeable days reading the 
 
30 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 many versions of Shakespeare that were played from 
 the Restoration through the eighteenth century. 
 They are well known to scholars, but the general 
 reader is perhaps unfamiliar how Shakespeare was 
 perverted. From this material I thought that I might 
 lay out an instructive paper; how, for example, the 
 whirling passion of Lear was once wrought to soft 
 and pleasant uses for a holiday. Cordelia is rescued 
 from the villains by the hero Kent, who cries out in 
 a transport, "Come to my arms, thou loveliest, best 
 of women!" The scene is laid in the woods, but as 
 night comes on, Cordelia s old nurse appears. A 
 scandal is averted. Whereupon Kent marries Cor 
 delia, and they reign happily ever afterward. As 
 for Lear, he advances into a gentle convalescence. 
 Before the week is out he will be sunning himself on 
 the bench beneath his pear tree and babbling of his 
 early days. 
 
 There were extra witches in Macbeth. Romeo and 
 Juliet lived and the quarreling families were united. 
 Desdemona remained un-smothered to the end. 
 There was one stout author but here I trust to 
 memory who even attempted to rescue Hamlet and 
 to substitute for the distant rolling of the drum of 
 Fortinbras, the pipes and timbrels of his happy wed 
 ding. There is yet to be made a lively paper of these 
 Shakespeare tinkers of the eighteenth century. 
 
 And then John Timbs was to have been my text, 
 who was an antiquary of the nineteenth century. I 
 
THE QUEST OF THE LOST DIGAMMA 31 
 
 had come frequently on his books. They are seldom 
 found in first-hand shops. More appropriately they 
 are offered where the older books are sold where 
 there are racks before the door for the rakings of the 
 place, and inside an ancient smell of leather. If there 
 are barrels in the basement, stocked and overflowing, 
 it is sure that a volume of Timbs is upon the premises. 
 
 I visited the Public Library and asked a sharp- 
 nosed person how I might best learn about John 
 Timbs. I followed the direction of his wagging 
 thumb. The accounts of the encyclopedias are 
 meager, a date of birth and of death, a few facts of 
 residence, the titles of his hundred and fifty books, 
 and little more. Some neglect him entirely; skipping 
 lightly from Timbrel to Timbuctoo. Indeed, Tim- 
 buctoo turned up so often that even against my inten 
 tion I came to a knowledge of the place. It lies 
 against the desert and exports ostrich feathers, gums, 
 salts and kola-nuts. Nor are timbrels to be scorned. 
 They were used I quote precisely "by David when 
 he danced before the ark." Surely not Noah s ark! 
 I must brush up on David. 
 
 Timbs is matter for an engaging paper. His pas 
 sion was London. He had a fling at other subjects 
 a dozen books or so but his graver hours were given 
 to the study of London. There is hardly a park or 
 square or street, palace, theatre or tavern that did not 
 yield its secret to him. Here and there an upstart 
 building, too new for legend, may have had no gossip 
 
CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 for him, but all others John Timbs knew, and the 
 personages who lived in them. And he knew whether 
 they were of sour temper, whether they were rich or 
 poor, and if poor, what shifts and pretenses they 
 practiced. He knew the windows of the town where 
 the beaux commonly ogled the passing beauties. He 
 knew the chatter of the theatres and of society. He 
 traced the walls of the old city, and explored the 
 lanes. Unless I am much mistaken, there is not a 
 fellow of the Dunciad to whom he has not assigned a 
 house. Nor is any man of deeper knowledge of the 
 clubs and coffee-houses and taverns. One would say 
 that he had sat at Will s with Dryden, and that he 
 had gone to Button s arm in arm with Addison. 
 Did Goldsmith journey to his tailor for a plum- 
 colored suit, you may be sure that Timbs tagged him 
 at the elbow. If Sam Johnson sat at the Mitre or 
 Marlowe caroused in Deptford, Timbs was of the 
 company. There has scarcely been a play acted in 
 London since the days of Burbage which Timbs did 
 not chronicle. 
 
 But presently I gave up the study of John Timbs. 
 Although I had accumulated interesting facts about 
 him, and had got so far as to lay out several amusing 
 paragraphs, still I could not fit them together to an 
 agreeable result. It was as though I could blow a 
 melodious C upon a horn, and lower down, after 
 preparation, a dulcet G, but failed to make a tune of 
 them. 
 
THE QUEST OF THE LOST DIG AM MA 33 
 
 But although my studies so far have been unsuc 
 cessful, doubtless I shall persist. Even now I have 
 several topics in mind that may yet serve for pleasant 
 papers. If I fail, it will be my comfort that others 
 far better than myself achieve but a half success. 
 Although the digamma escapes our salt, somewhere 
 he lurks on the lonely mountains. And often when 
 our lamps burn late, we fancy that we catch a waving 
 of his tail and hear him padding across the night. 
 But although we lash ourselves upon the chase and 
 strain forward in the dark, the timid beast runs on 
 swifter feet and scampers off. 
 
On a Rainy Morning. 
 
 A NORTHEASTER blew up last night and 
 this morning we are lashed by wind and rain. 
 M foretold the change yesterday when 
 
 we rode upon a bus top at nightfall. It was then 
 pleasant enough and to my eye all was right aloft. 
 I am not, however, weather-wise. I must feel the 
 first patter of the storm before I hazard a judgment. 
 To learn even the quarter of a breeze unless there 
 is a trail of smoke to guide me I must hold up a wet 
 finger. In my ignorance clouds sail across the heav 
 ens on a whim. Like white sheep they wander here 
 and there for forage, and my suspicion of bad weather 
 comes only when the tempest has whipped them to a 
 gallop. Even a band around the moon which I am 
 told is primary instruction on the coming of a storm 
 stirs me chiefly by its deeper mystery, as if astrology, 
 come in from the distant stars, lifts here a warning 
 
 finger. But M was brought up beside the sea, 
 
 and she has a sailor s instinct for the weather. At the 
 first preliminary shifting of the heavens, too slight 
 for my coarser senses, she will tilt her nose and look 
 around, then pronounce the coming of a storm. To 
 her, therefore, I leave all questions of umbrellas and 
 raincoats, and on her decision we go abroad. 
 
 Last night when I awoke I knew that her prophecy 
 
86 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 was right again, for the rain was blowing in my face 
 and slashing on the upper window. The wind, too, 
 was whistling along the roofs, with a try at chimney 
 pots and spouts. It was the wolf in the fairy story 
 who said he d huff and he d puff, and he d blow in 
 the house where the little pig lived; yet tonight his 
 humor was less savage. Down below I heard ash- 
 cans toppling over all along the street and rolling to 
 the gutters. It lacks a few nights of Hallowe en, but 
 doubtless the wind s calendar is awry and he is out 
 already with his mischief. When a window rattles 
 at this season, it is the tick-tack of his roguish finger. 
 If a chimney is overthrown, it is his jest. Tomorrow 
 we shall find a broken shutter as his rowdy celebration 
 of the night. 
 
 This morning is by general agreement a nasty day. 
 I am not sure that I assent. If I were the old woman 
 at the corner who sells newspapers from a stand, I 
 would not like the weather, for the pent roof drops 
 water on her stock. Scarcely is the peppermint safe 
 beyond the splatter. Nor is it, I fancy, a profitable 
 day for a street-organ man, who requires a sunny 
 morning with open windows for a rush of business. 
 Nor is there any good reason why a house-painter 
 should be delighted with this blustering sky, unless 
 he is an idle fellow who seeks an excuse to lie in bed. 
 But except in sympathy, why is our elevator boy so 
 fiercely disposed against the weather? His cage is 
 snug as long as the skylight holds. And why should 
 
ON A RAINY MORNING 87 
 
 the warm dry noses of the city, pressed against ten 
 thousand windows up and down the streets, be flat 
 and sour this morning with disapproval? 
 
 It may savor of bravado to find pleasure in what 
 is so commonly condemned. Here is a smart fellow, 
 you may say, who sets up a paradox a conceited 
 braggart who professes a difference to mankind. Or 
 worse, it may appear that I try my hand at writing 
 in a "happy vein." God forbid that I should be such 
 a villain! For I once knew a man who, by reading 
 these happy books, fell into pessimism and a sharp 
 decline. He had wasted to a peevish shadow and had 
 taken to his bed before his physician discovered the 
 seat of his anaemia. It was only by cutting the evil 
 dose, chapter by chapter, that he finally restored him 
 to his friends. Yet neither supposition of my case 
 is true. We who enjoy wet and windy days are of 
 a considerable number, and if our voices are seldom 
 heard in public dispute, it is because we are overcome 
 by the growling majority. You may know us, how 
 ever, by our stout boots, the kind of battered hats we 
 wear, and our disregard of puddles. To our eyes 
 alone, the rain swirls along the pavements like the 
 mad rush of sixteenth notes upon a music staff. And 
 to our ears alone, the wind sings the rattling tune 
 recorded. 
 
 Certainly there is more comedy on the streets on 
 a wet and windy day than there is under a fair sky. 
 Thin folk hold on at corners. Fat folk waddle before 
 
38 CHIMNEY -POT PAPERS 
 
 the wind, their racing elbows wing and wing. Hats 
 are whisked off and sail down the gutters on excited 
 purposes of their own. It was only this morning that 
 I saw an artistocratic silk hat bobbing along the pave 
 ment in familiar company with a stranger bonnet 
 surely a misalliance, for the bonnet was a shabby one. 
 But in the wind, despite the difference of social 
 station, an instant affinity had been established and 
 an elopement was under way. 
 
 Persons with umbrellas clamp them down close 
 upon their heads and proceed blindly like the larger 
 and more reckless crabs that you see in aquariums. 
 Nor can we know until now what spirit for adventure 
 resides in an umbrella. Hitherto it has stood in a 
 Chinese vase beneath the stairs and has seemed a list 
 less creature. But when a November wind is up it 
 is a cousin of the balloon, with an equal zest to explore 
 the wider precincts of the earth and to alight upon 
 the moon. Only persons of heavier ballast such as 
 have been fed on sweets plump pancake persons 
 can hold now an umbrella to the ground. A long 
 stowage of muffins and sugar is the only anchor. 
 
 At this moment beneath my window there is a dear 
 little girl who brings home a package from the 
 grocer s. She is tugged and blown by her umbrella, 
 and at every puff of wind she goes up on tiptoe. If 
 I were writing a fairy tale I would make her the 
 Princess of my plot, and I would transport her 
 underneath her umbrella in this whisking wind to her 
 
ON A RAINY MORNING 39 
 
 far adventures, just as Davy sailed off to the land of 
 Goblins inside his grandfather s clock. She would 
 be carried over seas, until she could sniff the spice 
 winds of the south. Then she would be set down in 
 the orchard of the Golden Prince, who presently 
 would spy her from his window a mite of a pretty 
 girl, all mussed and blown about. And then I would 
 spin out the tale to its true and happy end, and they 
 would live together ever after. How she labors at 
 the turn, hugging her paper bag and holding her 
 flying skirts against her knees! An umbrella, how 
 ever, usually turns inside out before it gets you off 
 the pavement, and then it looks like a wrecked Zeppe 
 lin. You put it in the first ash-can, and walk off in 
 an attempt not to be conspicuous. 
 
 Although the man who pursues his hat is, in some 
 sort, conscious that he plays a comic part, and al 
 though there is a pleasing relish on the curb at his 
 discomfort, yet it must not be assumed that all the 
 humor on the street rises from misadventure. Rather, 
 it arises from a general acceptance of the day and a 
 feeling of common partnership in the storm. The 
 policeman in his rubber coat exchanges banter with 
 a cab-driver. If there is a tangle in the traffic, it 
 comes nearer to a jest than on a fairer day. A team 
 ster sitting dry inside his hood, whistles so cheerily 
 that he can be heard at the farther sidewalk. Good- 
 naturedly he sets his tune as a rival to the wind. 
 
 It must be that only good-tempered persons are 
 
40 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 abroad those whose humor endures and likes the 
 storm and that when the swift dark clouds drove 
 across the world, all sullen folk scurried for a roof. 
 And is it not wise, now and then, that folk be thus 
 parceled with their kind? Must we wait for Gabriel s 
 Trump for our division? I have been told but the 
 story seems incredible that that seemingly cursed 
 thing, the Customs Wharf, was established not so 
 much for our nation s profit as in acceptance of some 
 such general theory in a word, that all sour persons 
 might be housed together for their employment and 
 society be rid of them. It is by an extension of this 
 obscure but beneficent division that only those of 
 better nature go abroad on these blustering November 
 days. 
 
 There are many persons, of course, who like sum 
 mer rains and boast of their liking. This is nothing. 
 One might as well boast of his appetite for toasted 
 cheese. Does one pin himself with badges if he plies 
 an enthusiastic spoon in an ice-cream dish? Or was 
 the love of sack ever a virtue, and has Falstaff become 
 a saint? If he now sing in the Upper Choir, the 
 bench must sag. But persons of this turn of argu 
 ment make a point of their willingness to walk out 
 in a June rain. They think it a merit to go tripping 
 across the damp grass to inspect their gardens. 
 Toasted cheese! Of course they like it. Who could 
 help it? This is no proof of merit. Such folk, at 
 best, are but sisters in the brotherhood. 
 
ON A RAINY MORNING 
 
 And yet a November rain is but an August rain 
 that has grown a beard and taken on the stalwart 
 manners of the world. And the November wind, 
 which piped madrigals in June and lazy melodies all 
 the summer, has done no more than learn brisker 
 braver tunes to befit the coming winter. If the wind 
 tugs at your coat-tails, it only seeks a companion for 
 its games. It goes forth whistling for honest cele 
 bration, and who shall begrudge it here and there a 
 chimney if it topple it in sport? 
 
 Despite this, rainy weather has a bad name. So 
 general is its evil reputation that from of old one of 
 the lowest circles of Hell has been plagued with raw 
 winds and covered thick with ooze a testament to 
 our northern March and in this villains were set 
 shivering to their chins. But the beginning of the 
 distaste for rainy weather may be traced to Noah. 
 Certain it is that toward the end of his cruise, when 
 the passengers were already chafing with the ani 
 mals the kangaroos, in particular, it is said, played 
 leap-frog in the hold and disturbed the skipper s 
 sleep certain it is while the heavens were still over 
 cast that Noah each morning put his head anxiously 
 up through the forward hatch for a change of sky. 
 There was rejoicing from stem to stern so runs the 
 legend when at last his old white beard, shifting 
 from west to east, gave promise of a clearing wind. 
 But from that day to this, as is natural, there has 
 persisted a stout prejudice against wind and rain. 
 
48 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 But this is not just. If a rainy day lacks sun 
 shine, it has vigor for a substitute. The wind whistles 
 briskly among the chimney tops. There is so much 
 life on wet and windy days. Yesterday Nature 
 yawned, but today she is wide awake. Yesterday the 
 earth seemed lolling idly in the heavens. It was a 
 time of celestial vacation and all the suns and moons 
 were vacant of their usual purpose. But today the 
 earth whirls and spins through space. Her gray 
 cloud cap is pulled down across her nose and she leans 
 in her hurry against the storm. The heavens have 
 piped the planets to their work. 
 
 Yesterday the smoke of chimneys drifted up with 
 tired content from lazy roofs, but today the smoke 
 is stretched and torn like a triumphant banner of the 
 storm. 
 
4 4 
 
 1917." 
 
 I DREAMED last night a fearful dream and this 
 morning even the familiar contact of the subway 
 has been unable to shake it from me. 
 I know of few things that are so momentarily 
 tragical as awakening from a frightful dream. Even 
 if you know with returning consciousness that it was 
 a dream, it seems as if a part of it must have a basis 
 in fact. The death that was recorded is it true or 
 not? And in your mind you grope among the famil 
 iar landmarks of your recollection to discover where 
 the true and the fictitious join. 
 
 But this dream of last night was so vivid that this 
 morning I cannot shake it from me. 
 
 I dreamed ridiculously enough that the whole 
 world was at war, and that big and little nations were 
 fighting. 
 
 In my dream the round earth hung before me 
 
44 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 against the background of the night, and red flames 
 shot from every part. 
 
 I heard cries of anguish men blinded by gases 
 and crazed by suffering. I saw women dressed in 
 black a long procession stretching hideously from 
 mist to mist walking with erect heads, dry-eyed, for 
 grief had starved them of tears. I saw ships sinking 
 and a thousand arms raised for a moment above the 
 waves. I saw children lying dead among their toys. 
 
 And I saw boys throw down their books and tools 
 and go off with glad cries, and men I saw, grown 
 gray with despair, staggering under heavy weights. 
 
 There were millions of dead upon the earth that 
 hung before me, and I smelled the battlefield. 
 
 And I beheld one man one hundred men secure 
 in an outlawed country who looked from far win 
 dowsmen bitter with disappointment men who 
 blasphemed of God, while their victims rotted in 
 Flanders. 
 
 And in my dream it seemed that I did not have a 
 sword, but that I, too, looked upon the battle from 
 a place where there were no flames. I ran little 
 errands for the war. 
 
 There is the familiar window that dull outline 
 across the room. Here is the accustomed door. The 
 bed is set between. It was but a dream after all. And 
 yet how it has shaken me ! 
 
 Of course the dream was absurd. No man no 
 
"1917" 45 
 
 nation certainly could be so mad. The whole whirl 
 ing earth could not burn with fire. Until the final 
 trumpet, no such calamity is possible. Thank God, 
 it was but a dream, and I can continue today my 
 peaceful occupation. 
 
 Calico, I m told, is going up. I must protect our 
 contracts. 
 
On Going Afoot. 
 
 THERE is a tale that somewhere in the world 
 there is a merry river that dances as often as 
 it hears sweet music. The tale is not precise 
 whether this river is neighbor to us or is a stream of 
 the older world. "It dances at the noise of musick," 
 so runs the legend, "for with musick it bubbles, dances 
 and grows sandy." This tale may be the conceit of 
 one of those older poets whose verses celebrate the 
 morning and the freshness of the earth Thomas 
 Heywood could have written it or even the least of 
 those poets who sat their evenings at the Mermaid 
 or the tale may arise more remotely from an old wor 
 ship of the god Pan, who is said to have piped along 
 the streams. I offer my credence to the earlier origin 
 as the more pleasing. And therefore on a country 
 walk I observe the streams if by chance any of them 
 shall fit the tale. Not yet have I seen Pan puffing his 
 cheeks with melody on a streamside bank by ill luck 
 I squint short-sightedly but I often hear melodies 
 of such woodsy composition that surely they must 
 issue from his pipe. The stream leaps gaily across 
 the shallows that glitter with sunlight, and I am 
 tempted to the agreeable suspicion that I have hit 
 upon the very stream of the legend and that the god 
 Pan sits hard by in the thicket and beats his shaggy 
 
48 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 hoof in rhythm. It is his song that the wind sings in 
 the trees. If a bird sings in the meadow its tune is 
 pitched to Pan s reedy obligato. 
 
 Whether or not this is true, I confess to a love of 
 a stream. This may be merely an anaemic love of 
 beauty, such as is commonly bred in townsfolk on a 
 holiday, or it may descend from braver ancestors who 
 once were anglers and played truant with hook and 
 line. You may recall that the milk-women of Kent 
 told Piscator when he came at the end of his day s 
 fishing to beg a cup of red cow s milk, that anglers 
 were "honest, civil, quiet men." I have, also, a habit 
 of contemplation, which I am told is proper to an 
 angler. I can lean longer than most across the railing 
 of a country bridge if the water runs noisily on the 
 stones. If I chance to come off a dusty road unless 
 hunger stirs me to an inn I can listen for an hour, 
 for of all sounds it is the most musical. When earth 
 and air and water play in concert, which are the 
 master musicians this side of the moon, surely their 
 harmony rises above the music of the stars. 
 
 In a more familiar mood I throw stepping stones 
 in the water to hear them splash, or I cram them in 
 a dam to thwart the purpose of the stream, laying 
 ever a higher stone when the water laps the top. I 
 scoop out the sand and stones as if a mighty shipping 
 begged for passage. Or I rest from this prodigious 
 engineering upon my back and watch the white traffic 
 of the clouds across the summer sky. The roots of 
 
ON GOING AFOOT 49 
 
 an antique oak peep upon the flood as in the golden 
 days of Arden. Apple blossoms fall upon the water 
 like the snow of a more kindly winter. A gay leaf 
 puts out upon the channel like a painted galleon for 
 far adventure. A twig sails off freighted with my 
 drowsy thoughts. A branch of a willow dips in the 
 stream and writes an endless trail of words in the 
 running water. In these evil days when the whole 
 fair world is trenched and bruised with war, what 
 wisdom does it send to the valleys where men reside 
 what love and peace and gentleness what promise 
 of better days to come that it makes this eternal 
 stream its messenger ! 
 
 And yet a stream is best if it is but an incident in 
 travel if it break the dusty afternoon and send one 
 off refreshed. Rather than a place for fishing it 
 invites one to bathe his feet. There are, indeed, 
 persons so careful of their health as to assert that cold 
 water endangers blisters. Theirs is a prudence to be 
 neglected. Such persons had better leave their feet 
 at home safely slippered on the fender. If one s feet 
 go upon a holiday, is it fair that for fear of conse 
 quence they be kept housed in their shoes? Shall the 
 toes sit inside their battered caravans while the legs 
 and arms frisk outside? Is there such torture in a 
 blister even if the prevention be sure to outweigh 
 the pleasure of cold water running across the ankles? 
 
 It was but lately that I followed a road that lay off 
 the general travel through a pleasant country of hills 
 
60 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 and streams. As the road was not a thoroughfare 
 and journeyed no farther than the near-by town 
 where I was to get my supper, it went at a lazy wind 
 ing pace. If a dog barked it was in sleepy fashion. 
 He yelped merely to check his loneliness. There 
 could be no venom on his drowsy tooth. The very 
 cows that fed along its fences were of a slower breed 
 and more contemplative whisk of tail than are found 
 upon the thoroughfares. Sheep patched the fields 
 with gray and followed their sleepy banquet across 
 the hills. 
 
 The country was laid out with farms orchards 
 and soft fields of grain that waved like a golden 
 lake but there were few farmhouses. In all the 
 afternoon I passed but one person, a deaf man who 
 asked for direction. When I cried out that I was a 
 stranger, he held his hand to his ear, but his mouth 
 fell open as if my words, denied by deafness from a 
 proper portal, were offered here a service entrance. 
 I spread my map before him and he put an ample 
 thumb upon it. Then inquiring whether I had 
 crossed a road with a red house upon it where his 
 friend resided, he thanked me and walked off with 
 such speed as his years had left him. Birds sang 
 delightfully on the fences and in the field, yet I knew 
 not their names. Shall one not enjoy a symphony 
 without precise knowledge of the instrument that 
 gives the tune? If an oboe sound a melody, must one 
 bestow a special praise, with a knowledge of its func- 
 
ON GOING AFOOT 51 
 
 tion in the concert? Or if a trombone please, must 
 one know the brassy creature by its name? Rather, 
 whether I listen to horns or birds, in my ignorance I 
 bestow loosely a general approbation; yet is the song 
 sweet. 
 
 All afternoon I walked with the sound of wind and 
 water in my ears, and at night, when I had gained my 
 journey s end and lay in bed, I heard beneath my 
 window in the garden the music of a little runnel that 
 was like a faint and pleasant echo of my hillside walk. 
 I fell asleep to its soothing sound and its trickle made 
 a pattern across my dreams. 
 
 But perhaps you yourself, my dear sir, are addicted 
 to these country walks, either for an afternoon or for 
 a week s duration with a rucksack strapped across 
 your back. If denied the longer outing, I hope that 
 at least it is your custom to go forth upon a holiday 
 to look upon the larger earth. Where the road most 
 winds and dips and the distance is of the finer purple, 
 let that direction be your choice! Seek out the region 
 of the hills! Outposts and valleys here, with smoke 
 of suppers rising. Trains are so small that a child 
 might draw them with a string. Far-off hills are 
 tumbled and in confusion, as if a giant were roused 
 and had flung his rumpled cloak upon the plain. 
 
 Or if a road and a stream seem close companions, 
 tag along with them! Like three cronies you may 
 work the countryside together! There are old mills 
 
CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 with dams and mossy water wheels, and rumbling 
 covered bridges. 
 
 But chiefly I beg that you wander out at random 
 without too precise knowledge of where you go or 
 where you shall get your supper. If you are of a 
 cautious nature, as springs from a delicate stomach 
 or too sheltered life, you may stuff a bar of chocolate 
 in your pocket. Or an apple if you shift your other 
 ballast will not sag you beyond locomotion. I have 
 known persons who prize a tomato as offering both 
 food and drink, yet it is too likely to be damaged and 
 squirt inside the pocket if you rub against a tree. 
 Instead, the cucumber is to be commended for its 
 coolness, and a pickle is a sour refreshment that 
 should be nibbled in turn against the chocolate. 
 
 Food oftentimes is to be got upon the way. There 
 is a kind of cocoanut bar, flat and corrugated, that 
 may be had at most crossroads. I no longer consider 
 these a delicacy, but in my memory I see a boy bar 
 gaining for them at the counter. They are counted 
 into his dirty palm. He stuffs a whole one in his 
 mouth, from ear to ear. His bicycle leans against the 
 trough outside. He mounts, wabbling from side to 
 side to reach the pedals. Before him lie the moun 
 tains of the world. 
 
 Nor shall I complain if you hold roughly in your 
 mind, subject to a whim s reversal, an evening desti 
 nation to check your hunger. But do not bend your 
 circuit back to the noisy city! Let your march end 
 
ON GOING AFOOT 53 
 
 at the inn of a country town! If it is but a station on 
 your journey and you continue on the morrow, let 
 there be an ample porch and a rail to rest your feet! 
 Here you may sit in the comfortable twilight when 
 crammed with food and observe the town s small 
 traffic. Country folk come about, if you are of easy 
 address, and engage you on their crops. The village 
 prophet strokes his wise beard at your request anji. 
 squinting at the sky, foretells a storm. Or if the 
 night is cold, a fire is laid inside and a wrinkled board 
 for the conduct of the war debates upon the hearth. 
 But so far as your infirmity permits, go forth at 
 random with a spirit for adventure! If the prospect 
 pleases you as the train slows down for the platform, 
 cast a penny on your knee and abide its fall ! 
 
 Or if on principle you abhor a choice that is made 
 wickedly on the falling of a coin, let an irrelevant 
 circumstance direct your destination! I once walked 
 outside of London, making my start at Dorking for 
 no other reason except that Sam Weller s mother-in- 
 law had once lived there. You will recall how the 
 elder Mr. Weller in the hour of his affliction dis 
 coursed on widows in the taproom of the Marquis 
 of Granby when the funeral was done, and how later, 
 being pestered with the Reverend Mr. Stiggins, he 
 immersed him in the horse-trough to ease his grief. 
 All through the town I looked for red-nosed men who 
 might be descended from the reverend shepherd, 
 and once when I passed a horse-trough of uncommon 
 
54 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 size I asked the merchant at the corner if it might 
 not be the very place. I was met, however, by such 
 a vacant stare for the fellow was unlettered that 
 to rouse him I bought a cucumber from an open crate 
 against the time of lunch, and I followed my pursuit 
 further in the town. The cucumber was of monstrous 
 length and thin. All about the town its end stuck out 
 of my pocket inquisitively, as though it were a fellow 
 traveler down from London to see the sights. But 
 although I inquired for the Weller family, it seems 
 that they were dead and gone. Even the Marquis of 
 Granby had disappeared, with its room behind the 
 bar where Mr. Stiggins drank pineapple rum with 
 water, luke, from the kettle on the hob. 
 
 We left Dorking and walked all afternoon through 
 a pleasant sunny country, up hill and down, to the 
 town of Guildford. At four o clock, to break the 
 journey, we laid out our lunch of bread and cheese 
 and cucumber, and rested for an hour. The place 
 was a grassy bank along a road above a fertile valley 
 where men were pitching hay. Their shouts were 
 carried across the fields with an agreeable softness. 
 Today, doubtless, women work in those fields. 
 
 On another occasion we walked from Maidstone to 
 Rochester on pilgrimage to the inn where Alfred 
 Jingle borrowed Mr. Winkle s coat to attend the 
 Assembly, when he made love to the buxom widow. 
 War had just been declared between Britain and 
 Germany, and soldiers guarded the roads above the 
 
ON GOING AFOOT 55 
 
 town. At a tea-room in the outskirts army officers 
 ate at a neighboring table. Later, it is likely, they 
 were in the retreat from Mons : for the expeditionary 
 force crossed the channel within a week. Yet so does 
 farce march along with tragedy that our chief con 
 cern in Rochester was the old inn where the ball was 
 held. 
 
 A surly woman who sat behind the cashier s wicket 
 fixed me with her eye. "Might we visit the ball 
 room?" I inquired. Evidently not, unless we were 
 stopping at the house. "Madame," I said, "perhaps 
 you are unaware that the immortal Mr. Pickwick 
 once sojourned beneath your roof." There was no 
 response. "The celebrated Mr. Pickwick, G. C. M. 
 P. C.," I continued, "who was the discoverer of the 
 sources of the Hampstead Ponds." At this for my 
 manner was impressive she fumbled through the last 
 few pages of her register and admitted that he might 
 have been once a patron of the house, but that he had 
 now paid his bill and gone. 
 
 I was about to question her about the poet Augus 
 tus Snodgrass, who had been with Mr. Pickwick on 
 his travels, when a waiter, a humorous fellow with a 
 vision of a sixpence, offered to be our guide. We 
 climbed the stairs and came upon the ballroom. It 
 was a small room. Three quadrilles must have 
 stuffed it to the edge a dingy place with bare win 
 dows on a deserted innyard. At one end was a 
 balcony that would hold not more than three musi- 
 
56 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 cians. The candles of its former brightness have 
 long since burned to socket. Vanished are "Sir 
 Thomas Clubber, Lady Clubber and the Miss 
 Clubbers!" Gone is the Honorable Wilmot Snipe 
 and all the notables that once crowded it! Vanished 
 is the punchbowl where the amorous Tracy Tupman 
 drank too many cups of negus on that memorable 
 night. I gave the dirty waiter a sixpence and came 
 away. 
 
 I discourage the usual literary pilgrimage. In 
 deed, if there is a rumor that Milton died in a neigh 
 boring town, or a treaty of consequence was signed 
 close by, choose another path! Let neither Oliver 
 Cromwell nor the Magna Carta deflect your course! 
 One of my finest walks was on no better advice than 
 the avoidance of a celebrated shrine. I was led along 
 the swift waters of a river, through several pretty 
 towns, and witnessed the building of a lofty bridge. 
 For lunch I had some memorable griddlecakes. 
 Finally I rode on top of a rattling stage with a gossip 
 for a driver, whose long finger pointed out the sights 
 upon the road. 
 
 But for the liveliest truancy, keep an eye out for 
 red-haired and freckled lads, and make them your 
 counselors! Lads so spotted and colored, I have 
 found, are of unusual enterprise in knowing the best 
 woodland paths and the loftiest views. A yellow- 
 haired boy, being of paler wit, will suck his thumb 
 upon a question. A touzled black exhibits a sulky 
 
ON GOING AFOOT 57 
 
 absorption in his work. An indifferent brown, at 
 best, runs for an answer to the kitchen. But red- 
 haired and freckled lads are alive at once. Whether 
 or not their roving spirit, which is the basis of their 
 deeper and quicker knowledge, proceeds from the 
 magic of the pigment, the fact yet remains that such 
 boys are surer than a signpost to direct one to ad 
 venture. This truth is so general that I have read 
 the lives of the voyagers Robinson Crusoe, Captain 
 Kidd and the worthies out of Hakluyt if perhaps 
 a hint might drop that they too in their younger days 
 were freckled and red-haired. Sir Walter Raleigh 
 I choose at random was doubtless called "Carrots" 
 by his playmates. But on making inquiry of a red- 
 haired lad, one must have a clear head in the tumult 
 of his direction. I was once lost for several hours on 
 the side of Anthony s Nose above the Hudson be 
 cause I jumbled such advice. And although I made 
 the acquaintance of a hermit who dwelt on the moun 
 tain with a dog and a scarecrow for his garden a 
 fellow so like him in garment and in feature that he 
 seemed his younger and cleaner brother still I did 
 not find the top or see the clear sweep of the Hudson 
 as was promised. 
 
 If it is your habit to inquire of distance upon the 
 road, do not quarrel with conflicting opinion! Judge 
 the answer by the source! Persons of stalwart limb 
 commonly underestimate a distance, whereas those 
 of broken wind and stride stretch it greater than it 
 
58 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 is. But it is best to take all answers lightly. I have 
 heard of a man who spent his rainy evenings on a 
 walking trip in going among the soda clerks and 
 small merchants of the village, not for information, 
 but to contrast their ignorance. Aladdin s wicked 
 uncle, when he inquired direction to the mountain of 
 the genii s cave, could not have been so misdirected. 
 Shoemakers, candy-men and peddlers of tinware if 
 such modest merchants existed also on the curb in 
 those magic days must have been of nicer knowl 
 edge or old Kazrac would never have found the lamp. 
 In my friend s case, on inquiry, a certain hotel at 
 which we aimed was both good and bad, open and 
 shut, burned and unburned. 
 
 There is a legend of the Catholic Church about a 
 certain holy chapel that once leaped across the Alps. 
 It seems gross superstition, yet although I belong 
 to a protesting church, I assert its likelihood. For 
 I solemnly affirm that on a hot afternoon I chased 
 a whole village that skipped quite as miraculously 
 before me across the country. It was a village of 
 stout leg and wind and, as often as I inquired, it still 
 kept seven miles ahead. Once only I gained, by 
 trotting on a descent. Not until night when the vil 
 lage lay down to rest beside a quiet river did I finally 
 overtake it. And the next morning I arose early in 
 order to be off first upon my travels, and so keep the 
 lively rascal in the rear. 
 
 In my country walks I usually carry a book in the 
 
ON GOING AFOOT 59 
 
 pocket opposite to my lunch. I seldom read it, but 
 it is a comfort to have it handy. I am told that at 
 one of the colleges, students of smaller application, 
 in order that they may truthfully answer as to the 
 length of time they have spent upon their books, do 
 therefore literally sit upon a pile of them, as on a 
 stool, while they engage in pleasanter and more 
 secular reading. I do not examine this story closely, 
 which rises, doubtless, from the jealousy of a rival 
 college. Rather, I think that these students perch 
 upon the books which presently they must read, on 
 a wise instinct that this preliminary contact starts 
 their knowledge. And therefore a favorite volume, 
 even if unopened in the pocket, does nevertheless by 
 its proximity color and enhance the enjoyment of 
 the day. I have carried Howell, who wrote the 
 "Familiar Letters," unread along the countryside. A 
 small volume of Boswell has grown dingy in my 
 pocket. I have gone about with a copy of Addison 
 with long S s, but I read it chiefly at home when my 
 feet are on the fender. 
 
 I had by me once as I crossed the Devon moors a 
 volume of "Richard Feverel." For fifteen miles I 
 had struck across the upland where there is scarcely a 
 house in sight nothing but grazing sheep and wild 
 ponies that ran at my approach. Sometimes a marshy 
 stream flowed down a shallow valley, with a curl of 
 smoke from a house that stood in the hollow. At the 
 edge of this moorland, I came into a shady valley 
 
60 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 that proceeded to the ocean. My feet were pinched 
 and tired when I heard the sound of water below the 
 road. I pushed aside the bushes and saw a stream 
 trickling on the rocks. I thrust my head into a pool 
 until the water ran into my ears, and then sat with 
 my bare feet upon the cool stones where the runnel 
 lapped them, and read "Richard Feverel." To this 
 day, at the mention of the title, I can hear the pleas 
 ant brawl of water and the stirring of the branches 
 in the wind that wandered down the valley. 
 
 Hazlitt tells us in a famous passage with what 
 relish he once read "The New Eloise" on a walking 
 trip. "It was on the 10th of April, 1798," he writes, 
 "that I sat down to a volume of the New Eloise, at 
 the inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a 
 cold chicken." I am quite unfamiliar with the book, 
 yet as often as I read the essay which is the best 
 of Hazlitt I have been teased to buy it. Perhaps 
 this springs in part from my own recollection of 
 Llangollen, where I once stopped on a walking trip 
 through Wales. The town lies on the river Dee at 
 the foot of fertile hills patched with fences, on whose 
 top there stand the ruins of Dinas Bran, a fortress 
 of forgotten history, although it looks grimly towards 
 the English marches as if its enemies came thence. 
 Thrown across the river there is a peaked bridge of 
 gray stone, many centuries old, on which the village 
 folk gather at the end of day. I dined on ale and 
 mutton of such excellence that, for myself, a cold 
 
ON GOING AFOOT 61 
 
 volume of the census if I had fallen so low must 
 have remained agreeably in memory. I recall that 
 a street-organ stopped beneath the window and 
 played a merry tune or perhaps the wicked ale was 
 mounting and I paused in my onslaught against 
 the mutton to toss the musician a coin. 
 
 I applaud those who, on a walking trip, arise and 
 begin their journey in the dawn, but although I am 
 eager at night to make an early start, yet I blink and 
 growl when the morning comes. I marvel at the poet 
 who was abroad so early that he was able to write of 
 the fresh twilight on the world "Where the san 
 dalled Dawn like a Greek god takes the hurdles of 
 the hills" but for my own part I would have slept 
 and missed the sight. But an early hour is best, de 
 spite us lazybones, and to be on the road before the 
 dew is gone and while yet a mist arises from the 
 hollows is to know the journey s finest pleasure. 
 
 Persons of early hours assert that they feel a fine 
 exaltation. I am myself inclined to think, however, 
 that this is not so much an exaltation that arises from 
 the beauty of the hour, as from a feeling of superior 
 ity over their sleeping and inferior comrades. It is 
 akin to the displeasing vanity of those persons who 
 walk upon a boat with easy stomach while their com 
 panions lie below. I would discourage, therefore, 
 persons that lean toward conceit from putting a foot 
 out of bed until the second call. On the other hand, 
 those who are of a self-depreciative nature should get 
 
CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 up with the worm and bird. A man of my own 
 acquaintance who was sunk in self-abasement for 
 many years, was roused to a salutary conceit by no 
 other tonic. 
 
 And it is certain that to be off upon a journey with 
 a rucksack strapped upon you at an hour when the 
 butcher boy takes down his shutters is a high pleasure. 
 Off you go through the village with swinging arms. 
 Off you go across the country. A farmer is up before 
 you and you hear his reaper across the field, and the 
 neighing of his horses at the turn. Where the hill 
 falls sharp against the sky, there he stands outlined, 
 to wipe the sweat. And as your nature is, swift or 
 sluggish thoughts go through your brain plots and 
 vagrant fancies, which later your pencil will not 
 catch. It is in these earliest hours while the dew still 
 glistens that little lyric sentences leap into your mind. 
 Then, if at all, are windmills giants. 
 
 There are cool retreats where you may rest at 
 noon, but Stevenson has written of these. "You 
 come," he writes, "to a milestone on a hill, or some 
 place where deep ways meet under trees ; and off goes 
 the knapsack, and down you sit to smoke a pipe in 
 the shade. You sink into yourself, and the birds 
 come round and look at you; and your smoke dis 
 sipates upon the afternoon under the blue dome of 
 heaven; and the sun lies warm upon your feet, and 
 the cool air visits your neck and turns aside your open 
 
ON GOING AFOOT 
 
 shirt. If you are not happy, you must have an evil 
 
 conscience." 
 
 And yet a good inn at night holds even a more 
 
 tranquil joy. M and I, who frequently walk 
 
 upon a holiday, traversed recently a mountain road 
 to the north of West Point. During the afternoon 
 we had scrambled up Storm King to a bare rock 
 above the Hudson. It was just such an outlook as 
 Rip found before he met the outlandish Dutchmen 
 with their ninepins and flagon. We lay here above 
 a green world that was rimmed with mountains, and 
 watched the lagging sails and puffs of smoke upon 
 the river. It was late afternoon when we descended 
 to the mountain road that runs to West Point. 
 During all the day there had been distant rumbling 
 of thunder, as though a storm mustered in a far-off 
 valley, or perhaps the Dutchmen of the legend still 
 lingered at their game, but now as the twilight fell 
 the storm came near. It was six o clock when a sign 
 board informed us that we had seven miles to go, and 
 already the thunder sounded with earnest purpose. 
 Far below in the dusk we saw the lights of West 
 Point. On a sudden, while I was still fumbling for 
 my poncho which was rolled inside my rucksack, the 
 storm burst upon us. We put up the umbrella and 
 held the poncho against the wind and driving rain. 
 But the wind so whisked it about and the rain was so 
 eager to find the openings that presently we were 
 drenched. In an hour we came to West Point. 
 
64 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 Luckily the cook was up, and she served us a hot 
 dinner in our rooms with the washstand for a table. 
 When we started there was a piece of soap in the 
 dish, but I think we ate it in our hunger. I recall 
 that there was one course that foamed up like custard 
 and was not upon the bill. It was a plain room with 
 meager furniture, yet we fell asleep with a satisfac 
 tion beyond the Cecils in their lordly beds. I stirred 
 once when there was a clamor in the hall of guests 
 returning from a hop at the Academy a prattle of 
 girls voices then slept until the sun was up. 
 
 But my preference in lodgings is the low sagging 
 half-timbered building that one finds in the country 
 towns of England. It has leaned against the street 
 and dispensed hospitality for three hundred years. 
 It is as old a citizen as the castle on the hill. It is an 
 inn where Tom Jones might have spent the night, or 
 any of the rascals out of Smollett. Behind the wicket 
 there sits a shrewish female with a cold eye towards 
 your defects, and behind her there is a row of bells 
 which jangle when water is wanted in the rooms. 
 Having been assigned a room and asked the hour of 
 dinner, you mount a staircase that rises with a 
 squeak. There is a mustiness about the place, which 
 although it is unpleasant in itself, is yet agreeable 
 in its circumstance. A long hall runs off to the back 
 of the house, with odd steps here and there to throw 
 you. Your room looks out upon a coach-yard, and 
 as you wash you overhear a love-passage down below. 
 
ON GOING AFOOT 65 
 
 In the evening you go forth to see the town. If it 
 lies on the ocean, you walk upon the mole and watch 
 the fisher folk winding up their nets, or sitting with 
 tranquil pipes before their doors. Maybe a booth has 
 been set up on the parade that runs along the ocean, 
 and a husky fellow bids you lay out a sixpence for 
 the show, which is the very same, he bawls, as was 
 played before the King and the Royal Family. This 
 speech is followed by a fellow with a trombone, who 
 blows himself very red in the face. 
 
 But rather I choose to fancy that it is an inland 
 town, and that there is a quieter traffic on the streets. 
 Here for an hour after dinner, while darkness settles, 
 you wander from shop to shop and put your nose 
 upon the glass, or you engage the lamplighter as he 
 goes his rounds, for any bit of news. 
 
 Once in such a town when the night brought rain, 
 for want of other employment, I debated divinity 
 with a rigid parson, and until a late hour sat in the 
 thick curtain of his attack. It was at an inn of one 
 of the midland counties of England, a fine old 
 weathered building, called "The King s Arms." In 
 the tap for I thrust my thirsty head inside was an 
 array of old pewter upon the walls, and two or three 
 prints of prize fighters of former days. But it was 
 in the parlor the parson engaged me. In the corner 
 of the room there was a timid fire of the kind usually 
 met in English inns imprisoned behind a grill that 
 had been set up stoutly to confine a larger and 
 
66 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 rowdier fire. My antagonist was a tall lank man of 
 pinched ascetic face and dark complexion, with 
 clothes brushed to shininess, and he belonged to a 
 brotherhood that lived in one of the poorer parts of 
 London along the wharves. His sojourn at the inn 
 was forced. For two weeks in the year, he explained, 
 each member was cast out of the conventual buildings 
 upon the world. This was done in penance, as the 
 members of more rigid orders in the past were 
 flagellants for a season. So here for a whole week 
 had he been sitting, for the most part in rainy 
 weather, busied with the books that the inn afforded 
 advertising booklets of the beauties of the Alps 
 diagrams of steamships and peeking out of doors 
 for a change of sky. 
 
 It was a matter of course that he should engage 
 me in conversation. He was as lonesome for a chance 
 to bark as a country dog. Presently when I dis 
 sented from some point in his creed, he called me a 
 heretic, and I with gentlest satire asked him if the 
 word yet lived. But he was not angry, and he told 
 me of his brotherhood. It had a branch in America, 
 and he bade me, if ever I met any of its priests, to 
 convey to them his warm regards. As for America, 
 it was, he said, too coldly ethical, and needed most a 
 spiritual understanding; to which judgment I as 
 sented. I wonder now whether the war will bring 
 that understanding. Maybe, unless blind hatred 
 smothers it. 
 
ON GOING AFOOT 67 
 
 This priest was a mixture of stern and gentle 
 qualities, and seemed to be descended from those 
 earlier friars that came to England in cord and gown, 
 and went barefoot through the cities to minister 
 comfort and salvation to the poor and wretched. 
 When the evening was at last spent, by common 
 consent we took our candles on the landing, where, 
 after he inculcated a final doctrine of his church with 
 waving finger, he bade me good night, with a wish of 
 luck for my journey on the morrow, and sought his 
 room. 
 
 My own room lay down a creaking hallway. When 
 undressed, I opened my window and looked upon the 
 street. All lights were out. At last the rain had 
 ceased, and now above the housetops across the way, 
 through a broken patch of cloud, a star appeared 
 with a promise of a fair tomorrow. 
 
On Livelihoods. 
 
 SOMEWHERE in his letters, I think, Steven 
 son pronounces street paving to be his favorite 
 occupation. I fancy, indeed, and I have ran 
 sacked his life, that he never applied himself to its 
 practice for an actual livelihood. That was not 
 necessary. Rather, he looked on at the curb in a 
 careless whistling mood, hands deep in the pockets 
 of his breeks, in a lazy interval between plot and 
 essay. The sunny morning had dropped its golden 
 invitation through his study* windows, and he has 
 wandered forth to see the world. Let my heroes for 
 thus I interpret him at his desk as the sunlight beck 
 oned let my heroes kick their heels in patience! 
 Let villains fret inside the inkpot ! Down, sirs, down, 
 into the glossy magic pool, until I dip you up! 
 Pirates for surely such miscreants lurked among 
 his papers let pirates, he cries, save their red oaths 
 until tomorrow! My hat! My stick! 
 
 It was thus, then, as an amateur that Stevenson 
 looked on street paving the even rows of cobbles, 
 the nice tapping to fit the stones against the curb, 
 the neat joint around the drain. And yet, unpardon- 
 ably, he neglects the tarpot; and this seems the very 
 soul of the business, the finishing touch almost 
 culinary, as when a cook pours on a chocolate sauce. 
 
ON LIVELIHOODS 69 
 
 I remember pleasantly when our own street was 
 paved. There had been laid a waterpipe, deep down 
 where the earth was yellow surely gold was near 
 and several of us young rascals climbed in and out 
 in the twilight when work was stopped. By fits we 
 were both mountaineers and miners. There was an 
 agreeable gassy smell as if we neared the lower 
 regions. Here was a playground better than the 
 building of a barn, even with its dizzy ladders and the 
 scaffolding around the chimney. Or we hid in the 
 great iron pipes that lay along the gutters, and fol 
 lowed our leader through them home from school. 
 But when the pipes were lowered into place and the 
 surface was cobbled but not yet sanded, then the 
 tarpot yielded gum for chewing. At any time after 
 supper a half dozen of us blacker daubs against the 
 darkness might have been seen squatting on the 
 stones, scratching at the tar. Blackjack, bought at 
 the corner, had not so full a flavor. But one had to 
 chew forward in the mouth lightly, lest the tar 
 adhere forever to the teeth. 
 
 And yet I am not entirely in accord with Steven 
 son in his preference. 
 
 And how is it, really, that people fall into their 
 livelihoods? What circumstance or necessity drives 
 them? Does choice, after all, always yield to a con 
 trary wind and run for any port? Is hunger always 
 the helmsman? How many of us, after due appraisal 
 of ourselves, really choose our own parts in the 
 
70 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 mighty drama? first citizen or second, with our 
 shrill voices for a moment above the crowd first 
 citizen or second brief choristers, except for vanity, 
 against a painted scene. How runs the rhyme? 
 rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; doctor, 
 lawyer, merchant, chief! And a robustious fellow 
 with great voice, and lace and sword, strutting for 
 ward near the lights. 
 
 Meditating thus, I frequently poke about the city 
 in the end of afternoon "when the mind of your man 
 of letters requires some relaxation." I peer into shop 
 windows, not so much for the wares displayed as for 
 glimpses of the men and women engaged in their 
 disposal. I watch laborers trudging home with the 
 tired clink of their implements and pails. I gaze 
 into cellarways where tailor and cobbler sit bent 
 upon their work needle and peg, their world and 
 through fouled windows into workrooms, to learn 
 which livelihoods yield the truest happiness. For it 
 is, on the whole, a whistling rather than a grieving 
 world, and like little shouts among the hills is laughter 
 echoed in the heart. 
 
 I can well understand how one can become a baker 
 or even a small grocer with a pencil behind his ear. 
 I could myself honestly recommend an apple an 
 astrachan for sauces or, in the season, offer aspar 
 agus with something akin to enthusiasm. Cran 
 berries, too, must be an agreeable consort of the 
 autumn months when the air turns frosty. I would 
 
ON LIVELIHOODS 71 
 
 own a cat with a dusty nose to rub along the barrels 
 and sleep beneath the stove. I would carry dried 
 meats in stock were it only for the electric slicing 
 machine. And whole cheeses! Or to a man of 
 romantic mind an old brass shop may have its lure. 
 To one of musty turn, who would sit apart, there is 
 something to be said for the repair of violins and 
 cellos. At the least he sweetens discord into melody. 
 But I would not willingly keep a second-hand 
 bookshop. It is too cluttered a business. There is 
 too free a democracy between good and bad. It was 
 Dean Swift who declared that collections of books 
 made him melancholy, "where the best author is as 
 much squeezed and as obscure as a porter at a coro 
 nation." Nor is it altogether reassuring for one who 
 is himself by way of being an author to view the 
 certain neglect that awaits him when attics are 
 cleared at last. There is too leathery a smell upon 
 the premises, a thick deposit of mortality. I draw 
 a deep breath when I issue on the street, grateful for 
 the sunlight and the wind. However, I frequently 
 put my head in at Pratt s around the corner, some 
 times by chance when the family are assembled for 
 their supper in one of the book alcoves. They have 
 swept back a litter of historians to make room for 
 the tray of dishes. To cut them from the shop they 
 have drawn a curtain in front of their nook, but I can 
 hear the teapot bubbling on the counter. There is, 
 also, a not unsavory smell which, if my old nose 
 
CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 retains its cunning, is potato stew, fetched up from 
 the kitchen. If you seek Gibbon now, Pratt s face 
 will show like a withered moon between the curtains 
 and will request you to call later when the dishes have 
 been cleared. 
 
 No one works in cleaner produce than carpenters. 
 They are for the most part a fatherly whiskered 
 tribe and they eat their lunches neatly from a pail, 
 their backs against the wall, their broad toes up 
 turned. I look suspiciously on painters, however, 
 who present themselves for work like slopped and 
 shoddy harlequins, and although I have myself passed 
 a delightful afternoon painting a wooden fence at the 
 foot of the garden and been scraped afterwards I 
 would not wish to be of their craft. 
 
 But perhaps one is of restless habit and a peri 
 patetic occupation may be recommended. For a 
 bachelor of small expense, at a hazard, a wandering 
 fruit and candy cart offers the venture and chance 
 of unfamiliar journeys. There is a breed of lollypop 
 on a stick that shows a handsome profit when the 
 children come from school. Also, at this minute, I 
 hear below me on the street the flat bell of the scissors- 
 grinder. I know not what skill is required, yet it 
 needs a pretty eye and even foot. The ragman takes 
 to an ancestral business and chants the ancient song 
 of his fathers. When distance has somewhat muffled 
 its nearer sharpness, the song bears a melody un 
 paralleled among tradesmen s cries. Window glass, 
 
ON LIVELIHOODS 73 
 
 too, is hawked pleasantly from house to house and 
 requires but a knife and putty. In the spring the 
 vegetable vender, standing in his wagon, utters 
 melodious sounds that bring the housewives to their 
 windows. Once, also, by good luck, I fell into 
 acquaintance with a fellow who peddled brooms and 
 dustpans along the countryside. He was hung both 
 front and back with cheap commodities a necklace 
 of scrubbing brushes tins jangling against his 
 knees. A very kitchen had become biped. A pantry 
 had gone on pilgrimage. Except for dogs, which 
 seemed maddened by his strange appearance, it was, 
 he informed me, an engaging livelihood for a man 
 who chafed indoors. Or for one of dreamy disposi 
 tion the employment of a sandwich man, with bill 
 boards fore and aft, offers a profitable repose. Some 
 times several of these philosophers journey together 
 up the street in a crowded hour, one behind another 
 with slow introspective step, as befits their high 
 preoccupation. 
 
 Or one has an ear, and the street-organ commends 
 itself. Observe the musician at the corner, hat in 
 hand and smiling! Let but a curtain stir and his eye 
 will catch it. He hears a falling penny as twere any 
 nightingale. His tunes are the herald of the gaudy 
 spring. His are the dancing measures of the sun 
 light. And is anyone a surer judge of human nature? 
 He allows dyspeptics to slink along the fence. Those 
 of bilious aspect may go their ways unchallenged. 
 
74 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 Spare me those, he says, who have not music in their 
 souls : they are fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. 
 It was with a flute that the poet Goldsmith starved 
 his way through France. Yet the flute is a cold un- 
 stirring instrument. He would have dined the oftener 
 had he pitched upon a street-organ. 
 
 But in this Christmas season there is a man goes 
 up and down among the shoppers blowing shrill 
 tunes upon a pipe. A card upon his hat announces 
 that it is music makes the home and that one of his 
 marvelous implements may be bought for the trifling 
 and altogether insignificant sum of ten cents. A 
 reticule across his stomach bulges with his pipes. He 
 seems to manipulate the stops with his fingers, but 
 I fancy that he does no more than sing into the larger 
 opening. Yet his gay tune sounds above the traffic. 
 
 I have wondered where such seasonal professions 
 recruit themselves. The eyeglass man still stands at 
 his corner with his tray. He is, moreover, too sodden 
 a creature to play upon a pipe. Nor is there any 
 dwindling of shoe-lace peddlers. The merchants of 
 popcorn have not fallen off in number, and peanuts 
 hold up strong. Rather, these Christmas musicians 
 are of the tribe which at other festivals sell us little 
 flags and bid us show our colors. They come from 
 country fairs and circuses. All summer long they 
 bid us gather for the fat man, or they cry up the 
 beauties of a Turkish harem. If some valiant fellow 
 in a painted tent is about to swallow glass, they are 
 
ON LIVELIHOODS 75 
 
 his horn and drum to draw the crowd. I once knew 
 a side-show man who bent iron bars between his teeth 
 and who summoned stout men from his audience to 
 swing upon the bar, but I cannot believe that he has 
 discharged the bawling rascal at his door. I rather 
 choose to think that the piper was one of those self 
 same artists who, on lesser days, squeeze comic rubber 
 faces in their fingers, or make the monkey climb its 
 predestined stick. 
 
 Be this as it may, presently the piper hit on a per 
 suasive tune and I abandoned all thought of the 
 Noah s ark my errand of the morning for my 
 nephew and joined the crowd that followed him. 
 Hamelin Town was come again. But street violins 
 I avoid. They suggest mortgages and unpaid rent. 
 
 But with the world before him why should a man 
 turn dentist ? He must have been a cruel fellow from 
 his rattle. When did his malicious ambition first 
 sprout up towards molars and bicuspids? Or who 
 would scheme to be a plumber? He is a cellarer 
 alas, how shrunk from former days ! Or consider the 
 tailor! Perhaps you recall Elia s estimate. "Do you 
 ever see him," he asks, "go whistling along the foot 
 path like a carman, or brush through a crowd like a 
 baker, or go smiling to himself like a lover?" 
 
 Certainly I would not wish to be a bookkeeper and 
 sit bent all day over another s wealth. I would not 
 want to bring in on lifted fingers the meats which 
 another eats. Nor would I choose to be a locksmith, 
 
76 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 which is a kind of squint-eyed business, up two dismal 
 stairs and at the rear. A gas lamp flares at the turn. 
 A dingy staircase mounts into a thicker gloom. The 
 locksmith consorts with pawnbrokers, with cheap 
 sign-makers and with disreputable doctors; yet he is 
 not of them. For there adheres to him a sort of 
 romance. He is a creature of another time, set in 
 our midst by the merest chance. The domestic cat, 
 descended from the jungle, is not more shrunk. Keys 
 have fallen on evil days. Observe the mighty row of 
 them hung discarded along his boxes ! Each one is fit 
 to unlock a castle. Warwick itself might yield to 
 such a weight of metal rusty now, disused, quite out 
 of fashion, displaced by a race of dwarfs. In the old 
 prints, see how the London prentice runs with his 
 great key in the dawn to take down his master s shut 
 ter! In a musty play, observe the jailor at the dun 
 geon door! Without massive keys jingling at the 
 belt the older drama must have been a weakling. 
 Only lovers, then, dared to laugh at locksmiths. But 
 now locksmiths sit brooding on the past, shriveled to 
 mean uses, ready for paltry kitchen jobs. 
 
 And the undertaker, what shall we say of him? 
 That black coat with the flower! That mournful 
 smile! That perfect grief! And yet, I am told, 
 undertakers, after hours, go singing home to supper, 
 and spend their evenings at the movies like us rougher 
 folk. It was David Copperfield, you recall, who 
 dined with an undertaker and his family in the 
 
ON LIVELIHOODS 77 
 
 room, no doubt, next to the coffin storage and he 
 remarked at the time how cheerfully the joint went 
 round. One of this sober cloth, moreover, has con 
 fided to me that they let themselves loose, above all 
 professions, in their reunions and conventions. If 
 an unusual riot issues from the door and a gay fellow 
 goes walking on the table it is sure that either 
 lawyers or undertakers sit inside. 
 
 For myself, if I were to become a merchant, I 
 would choose a shop at a four-corners in the country, 
 and I would stock from shoe-laces to plows. There 
 is no virtue in keeping store in the city. It is merely 
 by favor that customers show themselves. Candidly, 
 your competitor can better supply their wants. This 
 is not so at the four-corners. Nor is anyone a more 
 influential citizen than a country merchant. He sets 
 the style in calicoes. He judges between check and 
 stripe. His decision against a high heel flattens the 
 housewives by an inch. But if I kept such a country 
 store, I would provide an open fire and, when the 
 shadows lengthened, an easy chair or two for gossips. 
 
 I was meditating lately on these strange prefer 
 ences in livelihoods and was gazing through the city 
 windows for any clue when I was reminded of a 
 tempting scheme that Wee Jessie a delightful Scots 
 woman of my acquaintance has planned for several 
 of us. 
 
 We are to be traveling merchants for a season, with 
 a horse and wagon or a motor. My own preference 
 
78 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 is a motor, and already I see a vehicle painted in 
 bright colors and opening up behind as spacious as 
 a waffle cart. There will be windows all around for 
 the display of goods. It is not quite fixed what we 
 shall sell. Wee Jessie leans toward bonnets and little 
 millinery odds and ends. I am for kitchen tins. 
 
 M inclines toward drygoods, serviceable fabrics. 
 
 It is thought that we shall live on the roof while on 
 tour, with a canvas to draw on wet nights. We shall 
 possess a horn on which Wee Jessie once practiced 
 in her youth to gather up the crowd when we enter 
 a village. 
 
 Fancy us, therefore, my dear sir, as taking the 
 road late this coming spring in time to spread the 
 summer s fashions. And if you hear our horn at 
 twilight in your village a tune of more wind than 
 melody, unless Jessie shall cure her imperfections 
 know that on the morrow, by the pump, we shall 
 display our wares. 
 
The Tread of the Friendly Giants. 
 
 When our Babe he goeth walking in his garden, 
 Around his tinkling feet the sunbeams play. 
 
 IT has been my fortune to pass a few days where 
 there lives a dear little boy of less than three. 
 My first knowledge of him every morning is the 
 smothered scuffling through the partition as he 
 reluctantly splashes in his bath. Here, unless he 
 mend his caution, I fear he will never learn to play 
 the porpoise at the Zoo. Then there is a wee tapping 
 at my door. It is a fairy sound as though Mustard- 
 seed were in the hall. Or it might be Pease-blossom 
 rousing up Cobweb in the play, to repel the red- 
 hipped humble-bee. It is so slight a tapping that 
 if I sleep with even one ear inside the covers I will 
 not hear it. 
 
 The little lad stands in the dim passage to greet 
 me, fully dressed, to reproach me with my tardiness. 
 
SO CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 He is a mite of a fellow, but he is as wide awake and 
 shiny as though he were a part of the morning and 
 had been wrought delicately out of the dawn s first 
 ray. Indeed, I choose to fancy that the sun, being 
 off hurriedly on broader business, has made him his 
 agent for the premises. Particularly he assists in this 
 passage at my bedroom door where the sleepy Night, 
 which has not yet caught the summons, still stretches 
 and nods beyond the turn. It is so dark here on a 
 winter s morning when the nursery door is shut that 
 even an adventuring sunlight, if it chanced to clamber 
 through the window, would blink and falter in the 
 hazard of these turns. But the sun has sent a sub 
 stitute better than himself: for is there not a shaft 
 of light along the floor? It can hardly fall from the 
 window or anywhere from the outside world. 
 
 The little lad stands in the passage demanding that 
 I get up. "Get up, lazybones!" he says. Pretty 
 language to his elders! He speaks soberly, halting 
 on each syllable of the long and difficult word. He 
 is so solemn that the jest is doubled. And now he 
 runs off, jouncing and stiff-legged to his nursery. 
 I hear him dragging his animals from his ark, telling 
 them all that they are lazybones, even his barking 
 dog and roaring lion. Noah, when he saw on that 
 first morning that his ark was grounded on Ararat, 
 did not rouse his beasts so early to leave the ship. 
 
 Later I meet the lad at breakfast, locked in his 
 high chair. In these riper hours of day there is less 
 
TREAD OF THE FRIENDLY GIANTS 81 
 
 of Cobweb in his composition. He is now every inch 
 a boy. He raps his spoon upon his tray. He hurls 
 food in the general direction of his mouth. If an 
 ear escape the assault it is gunnery beyond the 
 common. He is bibbed against misadventure. This 
 morning he yearns loudly for muffins, which he calls 
 "bums." He chooses those that are unusually brown 
 with a smudge of the cooking-tin, and these he calls 
 "dirty bums." 
 
 Such is my nephew a round-cheeked, blue-eyed 
 rogue who takes my thumb in all his fingers when 
 we go walking. His jumpers are slack behind and 
 they wag from side to side in an inexpressibly funny 
 manner, but this I am led to believe springs not from 
 any special genius but is common to all children. 
 It is only recently that he learned to walk, for al 
 though he was forward with his teeth and their early 
 sprouting ran in gossip up the street, yet he lagged 
 in locomotion. Previously he advanced most surely 
 on his seat his slider, as he called it throwing out 
 his legs and curling them in under so as to draw him 
 after. By this means he attained a fine speed upon 
 a slippery floor, but he chafed upon a carpet. His 
 mother and I agreed that this was quite an unusual 
 method and that it presaged some rare talent for his 
 future, as the scorn of a rattle is said to predict a 
 judge. It was during one of these advances across 
 the kitchen floor where the boards are rough that an 
 accident occurred. As he excitedly put it, with a 
 
CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 fitting gesture to the rear, he got a sliver in his slider. 
 But now he goes upon his feet with a waddle like a 
 sailor, and he wags his slider from side to side. 
 
 Sometimes we play at hide-and-seek and we pop 
 out at one another from behind the sofa. He lacks 
 ingenuity in this, for he always hides in the same 
 place. I have tempted him for variety to stow him 
 self in the woodbox. Or the pantry would hold him 
 if he squeezed in among the brooms. Nor does my 
 ingenuity surpass his, for regularly in a certain order 
 I shake the curtains at the door and spy under the 
 table. I stir the wastebasket and peer within the 
 vases, although they would hardly hold his shoe. 
 Then when he is red-hot to be found and is already 
 peeking impatiently around the sofa, at last I cry out 
 his discovery and we begin all over again. 
 
 I play ball with him and bounce it off his head, a 
 game of more mirth in the acting than in the telling. 
 Or we squeeze his animals for the noises that they 
 make. His lion in particular roars as though lungs 
 were its only tenant. But chiefly I am fast in his 
 friendship because I ride upon his bear. I take the 
 door at a gallop. I rear at the turn. I fall off in 
 my most comical fashion. Sometimes I manage to 
 kick over his blocks; at which we call it a game, and 
 begin again. He has named the bear in my honor. 
 
 We start all of our games again just as soon as we 
 have finished them. That is what a game is. And if it 
 is worth playing at all, it is worth endless repetition. 
 
TREAD OF THE FRIENDLY GIANTS 83 
 
 If I strike a rich deep tone upon the Burmese gong, 
 I must continue to strike upon it until I can draw his 
 attention to something else. Once, the cook, hearing 
 the din, thought that I hinted for my dinner. Being 
 an obliging creature, she fell into such a flurry and 
 so stirred her pans to push the cooking forward, that 
 presently she burned the meat. 
 
 Or if I moo like a cow, I must moo until sunset. 
 I rolled off the sofa once to distract him when the 
 ugly world was too much with him. Immediately he 
 brightened from his complaint and demanded that 
 I do it once more. And lately, when a puppy bounced 
 out of the house next door and, losing its footing, 
 rolled heels over head to the bottom of the steps, at 
 once he pleaded for an encore. To him all the 
 world s a stage. 
 
 My nephew observes me closely to see what kind 
 of fellow I am. I study him, too. He watches me 
 over the top of his mug at breakfast and I stare back 
 at him over my coffee cup. If I wrinkle my nose, he 
 wrinkles his. If I stick out my tongue, he sticks his 
 out, too. He answers wink with wink. When I pet 
 his woolly lamb, however, he seems to wonder at my 
 absurdity. When I wind up his steam engine, cer 
 tainly he suspects that I am a novice. He shows a 
 disregard of my castles, and although I build them 
 on the windy vantage of a chair, with dizzy battle 
 ments topping all the country, he brushes them into 
 ruin. 
 
84 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 Sometimes I fancy that his glance is mixed with 
 scorn, and that he considers my attempts to amuse 
 him as rather a silly business. I wonder what he 
 thinks about when he looks at me seriously. I can 
 not doubt his wisdom. He seems to resemble a 
 philosopher who has traveled to us from a distant 
 world. If he cast me a sentence from Plato, I would 
 say, "Master, I listen." Is it Greek he speaks, or a 
 dark language from a corner of the sky? He has a 
 far-off look as though he saw quite through these 
 superficial affairs of earth. His eyes have borrowed 
 the color of his wanderings and they are as blue as 
 the depths beyond the moon. And I think of another 
 child, somewhat older than himself, whose tin sol 
 diers these many years are rusted, a thoughtful silent 
 child who was asked, once upon a time, what he did 
 when he got to bed. "Gampaw," he replied, "I lies 
 and lies, Gampaw, and links and links, til I know 
 mos everysin ." The snow of a few winters, the sun 
 of summer, the revolving stars and seasons until 
 this lad now serves in France. 
 
 My nephew, although he too roams these distant 
 spaces of philosophic thought and brings back strange 
 unexpected treasure, has not arrived at the age of 
 mere terrestrial exploration. He is quite ignorant of 
 his own house and has no curiosity about the back 
 stairs the back stairs that go winding darkly from 
 the safety of the kitchen. Scarcely is the fizzing of 
 dinner lost than a new strange world engulfs one. 
 
TREAD OF THE FRIENDLY GIANTS 85 
 
 He is too young to know that a doorway in the dark 
 is the portal of adventure. He does not know the 
 mystery and the twistings of the cellar, or the shadows 
 of the upper hallway and the dim hollows that grow 
 and spread across the twilight. 
 
 Dear lad, there is a sunny world beyond the garden 
 gate, cities and rolling hills and far-off rivers with 
 white sails going up and down. There are wide 
 oceans, and ships with tossing lights, and islands set 
 with palm trees. And there are stars above your roof 
 for you to wonder at. But also, nearer home, there 
 are gentle shadows on the stairs, a dim cellar for the 
 friendly creatures of your fancy, and for your exalted 
 mood there is a garret with dark corners. Here, on 
 a braver morning, you may push behind the trunks 
 and boxes and come to a land unutterable where the 
 furthest Crusoe has scarcely ventured. Or in a more 
 familiar hour you may sit alongside a window high 
 above the town. Here you will see the milkman on 
 his rounds with his pails and long tin dipper. And 
 these misty kingdoms that open so broadly on the 
 world are near at hand. They are yours if you dare 
 to go adventuring for them. 
 
 Soon your ambition will leap its nursery barriers. 
 No longer will you be content to sit inside this quiet 
 room and pile your blocks upon the floor. You will 
 be off on discovery of the long trail that lies along 
 the back hall and the pantry where the ways are dark. 
 You will wander in search of the caverns that lie 
 
86 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 beneath the stairs when the night has come. You 
 will trudge up steps and down for any lurking ocean 
 on which to sail your pirate ships. Already I see you 
 gazing with wistful eyes into the spaces beyond the 
 door into the days of your great adventure. In 
 your thought is the patter and scurry of new crea 
 tion. It is almost fairy time for you. The tread of 
 the friendly giants, still far off, is sounding in the 
 dark. . . . 
 
 Dear little lad, in this darkness may there be no 
 fear! For these shadows of the twilight which too 
 long have been chased like common miscreants with 
 lamp and candle are really friendly beings and they 
 wait to romp with you. Because thieves have walked 
 in darkness, shall darkness be called a thief? Rather, 
 let the dark hours take their repute from the count 
 less gracious spirits that are abroad the quieter 
 fancies that flourish when the light has gone the 
 gentle creatures that leave their hiding when the sun 
 has set. When a rug lies roughened at close of day, 
 it is said truly that a fairy peeps from under to learn 
 if at last the house is safe. And they hide in the 
 hallway for the signal of your coming, yet so timid 
 that if the fire is stirred they scamper beyond the 
 turn. They huddle close beneath the stairs that they 
 may listen to your voice. They come and go on tip 
 toe when the curtain sways, in the hope that you will 
 follow. With their long thin shadowy fingers they 
 beckon for you beneath the sofa. 
 
TREAD OF THE FRIENDLY GIANTS 87 
 
 The time is coming when you can no longer resist 
 their invitation, when you will leave your woolly 
 lamb and your roaring lion on this dull safe hearth 
 and will go on pilgrimage. The back stairs sit 
 patient in the dark for your hand upon the door. 
 The great dim garret that has sat nodding for so 
 many years will smile at last at your coming. It has 
 been lonely so long for the glad sound of running 
 feet and laughter. It has been childless so many 
 years. 
 
 But once children s feet played there and romped 
 through the short winter afternoons. A rope hung 
 from post to post and furnished forth a circus. Here 
 giant swings were hazarded. Here children hung 
 from the knees until their marbles and other wealth 
 dropped from their pockets. And for less ambitious 
 moments there were toys 
 
 The little toy dog is covered with dust, 
 
 But sturdy and stanch he stands ; 
 
 And the little toy soldier is red with rust, 
 
 And his musket moulds in his hands. 
 
 Time was when the little toy dog was new, 
 
 And the soldier was passing fair; 
 
 And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue 
 
 Kissed them and put them there. 
 
 And now Little Boy Blue again climbs the long 
 stairs. He stretches up on tiptoe to turn the door 
 knob at the top. He listens as a prudent explorer 
 should. Cook rattles her tins below, but it is a far- 
 
88 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 off sound as from another world. Somewhere, doubt 
 less, the friendly milkman s bell goes jingling up the 
 street. There is a distant barking of familiar dogs. 
 Will it not be better to return to the safe regions and 
 watch the traffic from the window? But here, beck 
 oning, is the great adventure. 
 
 The brave die is cast. He advances with out 
 stretched arms into the darkness. Suddenly, behind 
 him, the door swings shut. The sound of cooking- 
 tins is lost. Silence. Silence, except for branches 
 scratching on the roof. But the garret hears the 
 sound of feet, and it rouses itself and rubs its dusky 
 eyes. 
 
 But when darkness thickens and the sunlight has 
 vanished from the floor, then comes the magic hour. 
 The garret then tears from its eyes the blind bandage 
 of the day. Strange creatures lift their heads. And 
 now, as you wait expectant, there comes a mysterious 
 sound from the darkest corner. Is it a mouse that 
 stirs? Rather, it seems a far-off sound, as though a 
 blind man, tapping with his stick, walked on the 
 margin of the world. The noise comes near. It gains 
 in volume. It is close at hand. Dear lad, you have 
 come upon the magic hour. It is the tread of the 
 friendly giants that is sounding in the dark. . . . 
 
On Spending a Holiday. 
 
 AT a party lately a worn subject came under 
 discussion. 
 Our host lives in a triangular stone-paved 
 courtyard tucked off from the thoroughfare but with 
 the rattle of the elevated railway close at hand. The 
 building is of decent brick, three stories in height, 
 and it exhibits to the courtyard a row of identical 
 doorsteps. The entrance to the courtyard is a swing 
 ing shutter between buildings facing on the street, 
 and it might seem a mystery like the apple in the 
 dumpling how the building inside squeezed through 
 so narrow an entrance. Yet here it is, with a rubber 
 plant in one corner and a trellis for imaginary vines 
 in the other. 
 
 In this courtyard, Pomander Walk might be 
 acted along the stoops. For a necessary stage prop 
 erty you recall, of course, the lamplighter with his 
 ladder in the second act! there is a gas lamp of old 
 design in the middle of the enclosure, up near the 
 footlights, as it were. From the stoops the main 
 comedy might proceed, with certain business at the 
 upper windows the profane Admiral with the tim 
 ber leg popping his head out of one, the mysterious 
 fat man in some sort the villain of the piece 
 putting his head out of another to woo the buxom 
 
90 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 widow at a third. And then the muffin man! In 
 the twilight when the lamp is lighted and the heroine 
 at last is in the hero s arms, there would be a pleasant 
 crunching of muffins at all the windows as the curtain 
 falls. 
 
 But I shall not drop even a hint as to the location 
 of this courtyard. Many persons think that New 
 York City is but a massive gridiron, and they are 
 ignorant of the nooks and quirks and angles of the 
 lower town. Enough that the Indian of a modest 
 tobacconist guards the swinging shutter of the en 
 trance to the courtyard. 
 
 Here we sat in the very window I had designed for 
 the profane Admiral, and talked in the quiet interval 
 between trains. 
 
 One of our company a man whom I shall call 
 Flint was hardy enough to say that he never em 
 ployed his leisure in going to the country that a 
 walk about the city streets was his best refreshment. 
 Flint s livelihood is cotton. He is a dumpish sort 
 of person who looks as if he needed exercise, but he 
 has a sharp clear eye. At first his remark fell on us 
 as a mere perversity, as of one who proclaims a 
 humorous whim. And yet he adhered tenaciously 
 to his opinion, urging smooth pavements against 
 mud, the study of countless faces against the song of 
 birds and great buildings against cliffs. 
 
 Another of our company opposed him in this 
 Colum, who chafes as an accountant. Colum is a 
 
ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 91 
 
 gentle dreamy fellow who likes birds. All winter he 
 saves his tobacco tins which, in his two weeks vaca 
 tion in the country, he sets up in trees as birdhouses. 
 He confesses that he took up with a certain brand 
 of tobacco because its receptacle is popular with 
 wrens. Also he cultivated a taste for waffles which 
 at first by a sad distortion of nature he lacked for 
 no other reason except that syrup may be bought in 
 pretty log-cabin tins particularly suited for bluebirds. 
 If you chance to breakfast with him, he urges the 
 syrup on you with pleasant and insistent hospitality. 
 With satisfaction he drains a can. By June he has 
 a dozen of these empty cabins on the shelf alongside 
 his country boots. Time was when he was lean of 
 girth as becomes an accountant, who is hinged 
 dyspeptically all day across his desk but by this 
 agreeable stowage he has now grown to plumpness. 
 When in the country Colum rises early in order to 
 stretch the pleasures of the day, and he walks about 
 before breakfast from tree to tree to view his feath 
 ered tenants. He has even acquired, after much 
 practice, the knack of chirping a hissing conjunc 
 tion of the lips and teeth which he is confident wins 
 the friendly attention of the birds. 
 
 Flint heard Colum impatiently, and interrupted 
 before he was done. "Pooh!" he said. "There s mud 
 in the country, and not much of any plumbing, and 
 in the morning it s cold until you light a fire." 
 
 "Of course," said Colum. "But I love it. Perhaps 
 
CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 you remember, Flint, the old willow stump out near 
 the road. I put a Barking Dog on top of it, and now 
 there s a family of wrens inside." 
 
 "Nonsense," said Flint. "There is too much cli 
 mate in the country much more than in town. It s 
 either too hot or too cold. And it s lonely. As for 
 you, Colum, you re sentimental about your bird- 
 houses. And you dislike your job. You like the 
 country merely because it is a symbol of a holiday. 
 It is freedom from an irksome task. It means a 
 closing of your desk. But if you had to live in the 
 country, you would grumble in a month s time. Even 
 a bullfrog and he is brought up to it, poor wretch 
 croaks at night." 
 
 Colum interrupted. "That s not true, Flint. I 
 know I d like it to live on a farm and keep chickens. 
 Sometimes in winter, or more often in spring, I can 
 hardly wait for summer and my two weeks. I look 
 out of the window and I see a mirage trees and 
 hills." Colum sighed. "It s quite wonderful, that 
 view, but it unsettles me for my ledger." 
 
 "That s it," broke in Flint. "Your sentimentality 
 spoils your happiness. You let two weeks poison the 
 other fifty. It s immoral." 
 
 Colum was about to retort, when he was antici 
 pated by a new speaker. It was Quill, the journalist, 
 who has long thin fingers and indigestion. At meals 
 he pecks suspiciously at his plate, and he eats food 
 substitutes. Quill runs a financial supplement, or 
 
ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 93 
 
 something of that kind, to a daily paper. He always 
 knows whether Steel is strong and whether Copper 
 is up or down. If you call on him at his office, he 
 glances at you for a moment before he knows you. 
 Yet in his slippers he grows human. 
 
 "I like the country, too," he interposed, "and no 
 one ever said that I am sentimental." He tapped 
 his head. "I m as hard as nails up here." Quill 
 cracked his knuckles in a disagreeable habit he has, 
 and continued: "I have a shack on the West Shore, 
 and I go there week-ends. My work is so confining 
 that if I didn t get to the country once in a while, I 
 would play out in a jiffy. I m a nervous frazzle a 
 nervous frazzle by Saturday noon. But I lie on 
 the grass all Sunday, and if nobody snaps at me and 
 I am let alone, by Monday morning I am fit again." 
 
 "You must be like Antaeus." 
 
 This remark came from Wurm, our host. Wurm 
 is a bookish fellow who wears great rimmed glasses. 
 He spends much of his time in company thinking up 
 apposite quotations and verifying them. He has 
 worn out two Bartlett s. Wurm is also addicted to 
 maps and dictionaries, and is a great reader of special 
 articles. Consequently his mind is a pound for stray 
 collarless facts; or rather, in its variety of contents, 
 it more closely resembles a building contractor s 
 back yard odd salvage rejected doors a job of 
 window-frames a pile of bricks for chipping dis 
 carded plumbing broken junk gathered here and 
 
94 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 there. Mr. Aust himself, a building contractor who 
 once lived on our street a man of no broad fame 
 quite local surely unknown to you did not collect 
 so wide a rubbish. 
 
 However, despite these qualities, Wurm is rather 
 a pleasant and harmless bit of cobweb. For a liveli 
 hood, he sits in a bank behind a grill. At noon he 
 eats his lunch in his cage, and afterwards with a 
 rubber band he snaps at the flies. In the hunting 
 season he kills in a day as many as a dozen of these 
 pests and ranges them in his pen tray. On Saturday 
 afternoon he rummages in Malkan s and the second 
 hand bookshops along Fourth Avenue. To see 
 Wurm in his most characteristic pose, is to see him 
 on a ladder, with one leg outstretched, far off his bal 
 ance, fumbling for a title with his finger tips. Surely, 
 in these dull alcoves, gravity nods on its job. Then 
 he buys a sour red apple at the corner and pelts home 
 to dinner. This is served him on a tin tray by his 
 stout landlady who comes puffing up the stairs. It 
 is a bit of pleasant comedy that whatever dish is 
 served happens to be the very one of which he was 
 thinking as he came out of the bank. By this inno 
 cent device he is popular with his landlady and she 
 skims the milk for him. 
 
 Wurm rapped his pipe bowl on the arm of his 
 chair. "You must be like Antaeus," he replied. 
 
 "Like what?" asked Flint. 
 
 "Antseus the fellow who wrestled with Her- 
 
ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 95 
 
 cules. Each time that Antaeus was thrown against 
 the earth his strength was doubled. He was finally 
 in the way of overcoming Hercules, when Hercules 
 by seizing him around the middle lifted him off the 
 ground. By this strategy he deprived him of all con 
 tact with the earth, and presently Anteus weakened 
 and was vanquished." 
 
 "That s me," said Quill, the journalist. "If I 
 can t get back to my shack on Sunday, I feel that 
 Hercules has me, too, around the middle." 
 
 "Perhaps I can find the story," said Wurm, his eye 
 running toward the bookshelves. 
 
 "Don t bother," said Flint. 
 
 There was now another speaker Flannel Shirt, 
 as we called him who had once been sated with 
 formal dinners and society, and is now inclined to 
 cry them down. He leans a bit toward socialism and 
 free verse. He was about to praise the country for 
 its freedom from sordidness and artificiality, when 
 Flint, who had heard him before, interrupted. 
 
 "Rubbish!" he cried out. "All of you, but in dif 
 ferent ways, are slaves to an old tradition kept up by 
 Wordsworth, who would himself, doubtless, have 
 moved to London except for the steepness of the 
 rents. You all maintain that you like the country, 
 yet on one excuse or another you live in the city and 
 growl about it. There isn t a commuter among you. 
 Honest folk, these commuters, with marrow in their 
 bones a steak in a paper bag the sleet in their faces 
 
96 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 on the ferryboat. I am the only one who admits that 
 he lives in the city because he prefers it. The country 
 is good enough to read about I like it in books 
 but I choose to sit meantime with my feet on a city 
 fender." 
 
 Here Wurm broke in again. "I see, Flint," he 
 said, "that you have been reading Leslie Stephen." 
 
 Flint denied it. 
 
 "Well, anyway, you have quoted him. Let me 
 read you a bit of his essay on Country Books. 
 
 Flint made a grimace. "Wurm always has a 
 favorite passage." 
 
 Wurm went to a shelf and took down a volume. 
 He blew off the dust and smoothed its sides. 
 "Listen to this!" he said. "Picked up the volume at 
 Schulte s, on the twenty-five cent table. *A love of 
 the country is taken, " he read, " I know not why, 
 to indicate the presence of all the cardinal vir 
 tues. . . . We assert a taste for sweet and innocent 
 pleasures and an indifference to the feverish excite 
 ments of artificial society. I, too, like the coun 
 try, . . . (you ll like this, Flint) but I confess to 
 be duly modest that I love it best in books. In real 
 life I have remarked that it is frequently damp and 
 rheumatic, and most hated by those who know it 
 best. . . . Though a cockney in grain, I love to lean 
 upon the farmyard gate; to hear Mrs. Poyser give 
 a bit of her mind to the squire; to be lulled into a 
 placid doze by the humming of Dorlecote Mill ; to sit 
 
ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 97 
 
 down in Dandle Dinmont s parlour ... or to drop 
 into the kitchen of a good old country inn, and to 
 smoke a pipe with Tom Jones or listen to the simple- 
 minded philosophy of Parson Adams/ 
 
 "You hit on a good one then," said Flint. "And 
 now as I was saying " 
 
 Wurm interposed. "Just a moment, Flint! You 
 think that that quotation supports your side of the 
 discussion. Not at all. It shows merely that some 
 times we get greater reality from books than we get 
 from life. Leslie Stephen liked the real country, 
 also. In his holidays he climbed the Swiss moun 
 tains wrote a book about them it s on that top 
 shelf. Don t you remember how he loved to roll 
 stones off a cliff ? And as a pedestrian he was almost 
 as famous as George Borrow walked the shirt off 
 his back before his college trustees and all that sort 
 of thing. But he got an even sharper reality from 
 books. He liked the city, too, but in many a mood, 
 there s no doubt about it, he preferred to walk to 
 Charing Cross with Doctor Johnson in a book, 
 rather than to jostle on the actual pavement outside 
 his door." 
 
 "Speed up, Wurm!" This from Quill, the jour 
 nalist. "Inch along, old caterpillar!" 
 
 "As far as I am concerned," Wurm continued, "I 
 would rather go with Charles and Mary Lamb to see 
 The Battle of Hexham in their gallery than to any 
 show in Times Square. I love to think of that fine 
 
98 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 old pair climbing up the stairs, carefully at the turn, 
 lest they tread on a neighbor s heels. Then the 
 pleasant gallery, with its great lantern to light their 
 expectant faces!" 
 
 Wurm s eyes strayed again wistfully to his shelves. 
 Flint stayed him. "And so you think that it is pos 
 sible to see life completely in a mirror." 
 
 "By no means," Wurm returned. "We must see 
 it both ways. Nor am I, as you infer, in any sense 
 like the Lady of Shalott. A great book cannot be 
 compared to a mirror. There is no genius in a mirror. 
 It merely reflects the actual, and slightly darkened. 
 A great book shows life through the medium of an 
 individuality. The actual has been lifted into truth. 
 Divinity has passed into it through the unobstructed 
 channel of genius." 
 
 Here Flint broke in. "Divinity genius the 
 Swiss Alps The Battle of Hexham what have they 
 to do with Quill s shack out in Jersey or Colum s 
 dirty birdhouses? You jump the track, Wurm. 
 When everybody is heading for the main tent, you 
 keep running to the side-shows." 
 
 Quill, the journalist, joined the banter. "You re 
 mind me, Wurm I hate to say it of what a sea 
 captain once said to me when I tried to loan him a 
 book. ReadinY he said, readin rots the mind. 
 
 It was Colum s turn to ask a question. "What do 
 you do, Flint," he asked, "when you have a holiday?" 
 
 "Me? Well, I don t run off to the country as if 
 
ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 99 
 
 the city were afire and my coat-tails smoked. And 
 I don t sentimentalize on the evils of society. And 
 I don t sit and blink in the dark, and moon around 
 on a shelf and wear out books. I go outdoors. I 
 walk around and look at things shop windows and 
 all that, when the merchants leave their curtains up. 
 I walk across the bridges and spit off. Then there s 
 the Bronx and the Battery, with benches where one 
 may make acquaintances. People are always more 
 communicative when they look out on the water. 
 The last time I sat there an old fellow told me about 
 himself, his wife, his victrola and his saloon. I talk 
 to a good many persons, first and last, or I stand 
 around until they talk to me. So many persons wear 
 blinders in the city. They don t know how wonderful 
 it is. Once, on Christmas Eve, I pretended to shop 
 on Fourteenth Street, just to listen to the crowd on 
 its final round mother s carpet sweeper, you under 
 stand, or a drum for the heir. A crowd on Christmas 
 is different it s gayer reckless it s an exalted 
 Saturday night. Afterwards I heard Midnight Mass 
 at the Russian Cathedral. Then there are always 
 ferryboats the band on the boat to Staten Island 
 God! What music! Tugs and lights. I would like 
 to know a tug intimately. If more people were 
 like tugs we d have less rotten politics. Wall Street 
 on a holiday is fascinating. No one about. Desolate. 
 But full of spirits." 
 
 Flint took a fresh cigar. "Last Sunday morning 
 
100 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 I walked in Central Park. There were all manner 
 of toy sailboats on the pond big and little thirty 
 of them at the least tipping and running in the 
 breeze. Grown men sail them. They set them on a 
 course, and then they trot around the pond and wait 
 for them. Presently I was curious. A man upward 
 of fifty had his boat out on the grass and was adjust 
 ing the rigging. 
 
 That s quite a boat/ I began. 
 
 " It s not a bad tub, he answered. 
 
 Do you hire it from the park department? I 
 asked. 
 
 " No! with some scorn. 
 Where do you buy them? 
 
 " We don t buy them. 
 
 " Then how? I started. 
 
 " We make em nights. 
 
 "He resumed his work. The boat was accurately 
 and beautifully turned hollow inside with a deck 
 of glossy wood. The rudder was controlled by finest 
 tackle and hardware. Altogether, it was as delicately 
 wrought as a violin. 
 
 1 It s this way! its builder and skipper laid 
 down his pipe There are about thirty of us boys 
 who are dippy about boats. We can t afford real 
 boats, so we make these little ones. Daytimes I am 
 an interior decorator. This is a thirty-six. Next 
 winter if my wife will stand the muss (My God! 
 How it litters up the dining-room!) I am going to 
 
ON SPENDING A HOLWAY \ W1 
 
 build a forty-two. All of the boys bring out a new 
 boat each spring! The old fellow squinted at his 
 mast and tightened a cord. Then he continued. If 
 you are interested, come around any Sunday morning 
 until the pond is frozen. And if you want to try 
 your hand at a boat this winter, just ask any of us 
 boys and we will help you. Your first boat or two 
 will be sad Ju - das! But you will learn. 
 
 Flint was interrupted by Quill. "Isn t that rather 
 a silly occupation for grown men?" 
 
 "It s not an occupation," said Flint. "It s an avo 
 cation, and it isn t silly. Any one of us would enjoy 
 it, if he weren t so self-conscious. And it s more 
 picturesque than golf and takes more skill. And 
 what courtesy! These men form what is really a 
 club a club in its primitive and true sense. And I 
 was invited to be one of them." 
 
 Flannel Shirt broke in. "By George, that was 
 courtesy. If you had happened on a polo player at 
 his club a man not known to you he wouldn t have 
 invited you to come around and bring your pony for 
 instruction." 
 
 "It s not an exact comparison, is it, Old Flannel 
 Shirt?" 
 
 "No, maybe not." 
 
 There was a pause. It was Flint who resumed. 
 "I rather like to think of that interior decorator litter 
 ing up his dining-room every night clamps and glue- 
 pots on the sideboard hardly room for the sugar- 
 
10% CmM^EY-POT PAPERS 
 
 bowl lumber underneath and then bringing out a 
 new boat in the spring." 
 
 Wurm looked up from the couch. "Stevenson," 
 he said, "should have known that fellow. He would 
 have found him a place among his Lantern Bearers." 
 
 Flint continued. "From the pond I walked down 
 Fifth Avenue." 
 
 "It s Fifth Avenue," said Flannel Shirt, "every 
 thing up above Fifty-ninth Street and what it 
 stands for, that I want to get away from." 
 
 "Easy, Flannel Shirt," said Flint. "Fifth Avenue 
 doesn t interest me much either. It s too lonely. 
 Everybody is always away. The big stone buildings 
 aren t homes: they are points of departure, as some 
 body called them. And they were built for kings 
 and persons of spacious lives, but they have been sub 
 let to smaller folk. Or does no one live inside? You 
 never see a curtain stir. There is never a face at a 
 window. Everything is stone and dead. One might 
 think that a Gorgon had gone riding on a bus top, 
 and had thrown his cold eye upon the house fronts." 
 Flint paused. "How can one live obscurely, as these 
 folk do, in the twilight, in so beautiful a shell? Even 
 a crustacean sometimes shows his nose at his door. 
 And yet what a wonderful street it would be if per 
 sons really lived there, and looked out of their win 
 dows, and sometimes, on clear days, hung their 
 tapestries and rugs across the outer walls. Actually," 
 
ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 103 
 
 added Flint, "I prefer to walk on the East Side. It 
 is gayer." 
 
 "There is poverty, of course," he went on after a 
 moment, "and suffering. But the streets are not 
 depressing. They have fun on the East Side. There 
 are so many children and there is no loneliness. If 
 the street is blessed with a standpipe, it seems de 
 signed as a post for leaping. Any vacant wall if 
 the street is so lucky serves for a game. There is 
 baseball on the smooth pavement, or if one has a piece 
 of chalk, he can lay out a kind of hopscotch not 
 stretched out, for there isn t room, but rolled up like 
 a jelly cake. One must hop to the middle and out 
 again. Or perhaps one is an artist and with a crayon 
 he spends his grudge upon an enemy these drawings 
 can be no likeness of a friend. Or love guides the 
 chalky fingers. And all the time slim-legged girls 
 sit on curb and step and act as nursemaids to the 
 younger fry." 
 
 "But, my word, what smells!" 
 
 "Yes, of course, and not very pleasant smells. 
 Down on these streets we can learn what dogs think 
 of us. But every Saturday night on Grand Street 
 there is a market. I bought a tumbler of little nuts 
 from an old woman. They aren t much good to eat 
 wee nuts, all shell and they still sit in the kitchen 
 getting dusty. It was raining when I bought them 
 and the woman s hair was streaked in her face, but she 
 didn t mind. There were pent roofs over all the carts. 
 
104 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 Everything on God s earth was for sale. On the cart 
 next to my old woman s, there was hardware 
 sieves, cullenders kitchen stuff. And n the next, 
 wearing gear, with women s stockings hung on a rope 
 at the back. A girl came along carrying a pair of 
 champagne-colored shoes, looking for stockings to 
 match. Quite a belle. Somebody s girl. Quill, go 
 down there on a Saturday night. It will make a 
 column for your paper. I wonder if that girl found 
 her stockings. A black-eyed Italian. 
 
 "But what I like best are the windows on the East 
 Side. No one there ever says that his house is his 
 castle. On the contrary it is his point of vantage 
 his outlook his prospect. His house front never 
 dozes. Windows are really windows, places to look 
 out of not openings for household exhibits orna 
 mental lamps or china things at every window there 
 is a head somebody looking on the world. There is 
 a pleasant gossip across the fire-escapes a recipe 
 for onions a hint of fashion a cure for rheuma 
 tism. The street bears the general life. The home 
 is the street, not merely the crowded space within four 
 walls. The street is the playground and the club 
 the common stage, and these are the galleries and 
 boxes. We come again close to the beginning of 
 the modern theatre an innyard with windows round 
 about. The play is shinny in the gutters. Venders 
 come and go, selling fruit and red suspenders. An 
 
ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 105 
 
 ice wagon clatters off, with a half-dozen children on 
 its tailboard." 
 
 Flint flecked his ashes on the floor. "I wonder," 
 he said at length, "that those persons who try to tempt 
 these people out of the congested city to farms, don t 
 see how falsely they go about it. They should repro 
 duce the city in miniature a dozen farmhouses must 
 be huddled together to make a snug little town, where 
 all the children may play and where the women, as 
 they work, may talk across the windows. They must 
 build villages like the farming towns of France. 
 
 "But where can one be so stirred as on the wharves? 
 From here even the narrowest fancy reaches out to 
 the four watery corners of the earth. No nose is so 
 green and country-bred that it doesn t sniff the spices 
 of India. Great ships lie in the channel camouflaged 
 with war. If we could forget the terror of the sub 
 marine, would not these lines and stars and colors 
 appear to us as symbols of the strange mystery of 
 the far-off seas? 
 
 "Or if it is a day of sailing, there are a thousand 
 barrels, oil maybe, ranged upon the wharf, standing 
 at fat attention to go aboard. Except for numbers 
 it might appear although I am rusty at the legend 
 that in these barrels Ali Baba has hid his forty thieves 
 for roguery when the ship is out to sea. Doubtless 
 if one knocked upon a top and put his ear close upon 
 a barrel, he would hear a villain s guttural voice 
 inside, asking if the time were come. 
 
106 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 "Then there are the theatres and parks, great 
 caverns where a subway is being built. There are 
 geraniums on window-sills, wash hanging on dizzy 
 lines (cotton gymnasts practicing for a circus) , a roar 
 of traffic and shrill whistles, men and women eating 
 always eating. There has been nothing like this in 
 all the ages. Babylon and Nineveh were only vil 
 lages. Carthage was a crossroads. It is as though 
 all the cities of antiquity had packed their bags and 
 moved here to a common spot." 
 
 "Please, Flint," this from Colum, "but you forget 
 that the faces of those who live in the country are 
 happier. That s all that counts." 
 
 "Not happier less alert, that s all duller. For 
 contentment, I ll wager against any farmhand the 
 old woman who sells apples at the corner. She pol 
 ishes them on her apron with with spit. There is 
 an Italian who peddles ice from a handcart on our 
 street, and he never sees me without a grin. The folk 
 who run our grocery, a man and his wife, seem happy 
 all the day. No! we misjudge the city and we have 
 done so since the days of Wordsworth. If we prized 
 the city rightly, we would be at more pains to make 
 it better to lessen its suffering. We ought to go 
 into the crowded parts with an eye not only for the 
 poverty, but also with sympathy for its beauty its 
 love of sunshine the tenderness with which the elder 
 children guard the younger its love of music its 
 dancing its naturalness. If we had this sympathy 
 
ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY 107 
 
 we could help ourselves, first and after that, 
 maybe, the East Side." 
 
 Flint arose and leaned against the chimney. He 
 shook an accusing finger at the company. "You, 
 Colum, ruin fifty weeks for the sake of two. You, 
 Quill, hypnotize yourself into a frazzle by Saturday 
 noon with unnecessary fret. You peck over your 
 food too much. A little clear unmuddled thinking 
 would straighten you out, even if you didn t let the 
 ants crawl over you on Sunday afternoon. Old 
 Flannel Shirt is blinded by his spleen against society. 
 As for Wurm, he doesn t count. He s only a harm 
 less bit of mummy- wrapping." 
 
 "And what are you, Flint?" asked Quill. 
 
 "Me? A rational man, I hope." 
 
 "You you are an egotist. That s what you are." 
 
 "Very well," said Flint. "It s just as you say." 
 
 There was a red flash from the top of the Metro 
 politan Tower. Flint looked at his watch. "So?" 
 he said, "I must be going." 
 
 And now that our party is over and I am home at 
 last, I put out the light and draw open the curtains. 
 Tomorrow it is to be a holiday I had planned to 
 climb in the Highlands, for I, too, am addicted to the 
 country. But perhaps perhaps I ll change my plan 
 and stay in town. I ll take a hint from Flint. I ll 
 go down to Delancey Street and watch the chaffering 
 and buying. What he said was true. He overstated 
 his position, of course. Most propagandists do, being 
 
108 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 swept off in the current of their swift conviction. 
 One should like both the city and the country; and 
 the liking for one should heighten the liking for the 
 other. Any particular receptiveness must grow to 
 he a general receptiveness. Yet, in the main, cer 
 tainly, Flint was right. I ll try Delancey Street, I 
 concluded, just this once. 
 
 Thousands of roofs lie below me, for I live in a 
 tower as of Teufelsdrockh. And many of them 
 shield a bit of grief darkened rooms where sick folk 
 lie rooms where hope is faint. And yet, as I believe, 
 under these roofs there is more joy than grief more 
 contentment and happiness than despair, even in 
 these grievous times of war. If Quill here frets him 
 self into wakefulness and Colum chafes for the 
 coming of the summer, also let us remember that in 
 the murk and shadows of these rooms there are, at 
 the least, thirty sailors from Central Park one old 
 fellow in particular who, although the hour is late, 
 still putters with his boat in the litter of his dining- 
 room. Glue-pots on the sideboard! Clamps among 
 the china, and lumber on the hearth! And down on 
 Grand Street, snug abed, dreaming of pleasant con 
 quest, sleeps the dark-eyed Italian girl. On a chair 
 beside her are her champagne boots, with stockings 
 to match hung across the back. 
 
Runaway Studies. 
 
 IN my edition of "Elia," illustrated by Brock, 
 whose sympathetic pen, surely, was nibbed in days 
 contemporary with Lamb, there is a sketch of a 
 youth reclining on a window-seat with a book fallen 
 open on his knees. He is clad in a long plain garment 
 folded to his heels which carries a hint of a cathedral 
 choir but which, doubtless, is the prescribed costume 
 of an English public school. This lad is gazing 
 through the casement into a sunny garden for the 
 artist s vague stippling invites the suspicion of grass 
 and trees. Or rather, does not the intensity of his 
 regard attest that his nimble thoughts have jumped 
 the outmost wall? Already he journeys to those 
 peaks and lofty towers that fringe the world of 
 youth a dizzy range that casts a magic border on his 
 first wide thoughts, to be overleaped if he seek to 
 tread the stars. 
 
 And yet it seems a sleepy afternoon. Flowers nod 
 upon a shelf in the idle breeze from the open casement. 
 On the warm sill a drowsy sunlight falls, as if the 
 great round orb of day, having labored to the top of 
 noon, now dawdled idly on the farther slope. A cat 
 dozes with lazy comfort on the window-seat. Surely, 
 this is the cat if the old story be believed the 
 
110 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 sleepiest of all her race, in whose dull ear the mouse 
 dared to nest and breed. 
 
 This lad, who is so lost in thought, is none other 
 than Charles Lamb, a mere stripling, not yet grown 
 to his black small-clothes and sober gaiters, a shrill 
 squeak of a boy scarcely done with his battledore. 
 And here he sits, his cheek upon his palm, and dreams 
 of the future. 
 
 But Lamb himself has written of this window-seat. 
 Journeying northward out of London in that won 
 derful middle age of his in which the Elia papers were 
 composed journeying northward he came once on 
 the great country house where a part of his boyhood 
 had been spent. It had been but lately given to the 
 wreckers, "and the demolition of a few weeks," he 
 writes, "had reduced it to an antiquity." 
 
 "Had I seen those brick-and-mortar knaves at their 
 process of destruction," he continues, "at the pluck 
 ing of every pannel I should have felt the varlets at 
 my heart. I should have cried out to them to spare 
 a plank at least out of that cheerful store-room, in 
 whose hot window-seat I used to sit and read Cow- 
 ley, with the grass-plat before, and the hum and flap 
 pings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted it 
 about me it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer 
 returns. ..." 
 
 I confess to a particular enjoyment of this essay, 
 with its memory of tapestried bedrooms setting forth 
 upon their walls "the unappeasable prudery of 
 
RUNAWAY STUDIES 111 
 
 Diana" under the peeping eye of Aetseon; its echoing 
 galleries once so dreadful when the night wind caught 
 the candle at the turn; its hall of family portraits. 
 But chiefly it is this window-seat that holds me the 
 casement looking on the garden and its southern sun 
 baked wall the lad dreaming on his volume of 
 Cowley, and leaping the garden border for the stars. 
 These are the things that I admit most warmly to my 
 affection. 
 
 It is not in the least that I am a lover of Cowley, 
 who seems an unpleasantly antiquated author. I 
 would choose, instead, that the youthful Elia were 
 busy so early with one of his favorite Elizabethans. 
 He has himself hinted that he read "The Vicar of 
 Wakefield" in later days out of a tattered copy from 
 a circulating library, yet I would willingly move the 
 occasion forward, coincident to this. And I suspect 
 that the artist Brock is also indifferent to Cowley: 
 for has he not laid two other volumes handy on the 
 shelf for the sure time when Cowley shall grow dull? 
 Has he not even put Cowley flat down upon his face, 
 as if, already neglected, he had slipped from the lad s 
 negligent fingers as if, indeed, Elia s far-striding 
 meditation were to him of higher interest than the stiff 
 measure of any poet? 
 
 I recall a child, dimly through the years, that lay 
 upon the rug before the fire to read his book, with his 
 chin resting on both his hands. His favorite hour 
 was the winter twilight before the family came 
 
CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 together for their supper, for at that hour the lamp 
 lighter went his rounds and threw a golden string of 
 dots upon the street. He drove an old thin horse and 
 he stood on the seat of the cart with up-stretched 
 taper. But when the world grew dark the flare of 
 the fire was enough for the child to read, for he lay 
 close against the hearth. And as the shadows 
 gathered in the room, there was one story chiefly, of 
 such intensity that the excitement of it swept through 
 his body and out into his waving legs. Perhaps its 
 last copy has now vanished off the earth. It dealt 
 with a deserted house on a lonely road, where chains 
 clanked at midnight. Lights, too, seemingly not of 
 earth, glimmered at the windows, while groans such 
 was the dark fancy of the author issued from a 
 windy tower. But there was one supreme chapter 
 in which the hero was locked in a haunted room and 
 saw a candle at a chink of the wall. It belonged to 
 the villain, who nightly played there a ghostly antic 
 to frighten honest folk from a buried treasure. 
 
 And in summer the child read on the casement of 
 the dining-room with the window up. It was the 
 height of a tall man from the ground, and this gave 
 it a bit of dizziness that enhanced the pleasure. This 
 sill could be dully reached from inside, but the ap 
 proach from the outside was riskiest and best. For 
 an adventuring mood this window was a kind of 
 postern to the house for innocent deception, beyond 
 the eye of both the sitting-room and cook. Some- 
 
RUNAWAY STUDIES 113 
 
 times it was the bridge of a lofty ship with a pilot 
 going up and down, or it was a lighthouse to mark a 
 channel. It was as versatile as the kitchen step- 
 ladder which on Thursday afternoons when the 
 cook was out unbent from its sober household duties 
 and joined him as an equal. But chiefly on this sill 
 the child read his books on summer days. His cousins 
 sat inside on chairs, starched for company, and read 
 safe and dimpled authors, but his were of a vagrant 
 kind. There was one book, especially, in which a lad 
 not much bigger than himself ran from home and 
 joined a circus. A scolding aunt was his excuse. 
 And the child on the sill chafed at his own happy 
 circumstance which denied him these adventures. 
 
 In a dark room in an upper story of the house 
 there was a great box where old books and periodicals 
 were stored. No place this side of Cimmeria had 
 deeper shadows. Not even the underground stall of 
 the neighbor s cow, which showed a gloomy window 
 on the garden, gave quite the chill. It was only on 
 the brightest days that the child dared to rummage 
 in this box. The top of it was high and it was blind 
 fumbling unless he stood upon a chair. Then he bent 
 over, jack-knife fashion, until the upper part of 
 him all above the legs disappeared. In the ob 
 scurity his head being gone it must have seemed 
 that Solomon lived upon the premises and had carried 
 out his ugly threat in that old affair of the disputed 
 child. Then he lifted out the papers in particular 
 
114 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 a set of Leslie s Weekly with battle pictures of the 
 Civil War. Once he discovered a tale of Jules 
 Verne a journey to the center of the earth and he 
 spread its chapters before the window in the dusty 
 light. 
 
 But the view was high across the houses of the city 
 to a range of hills where tall trees grew as a hedge 
 upon the world. And it was the hours when his book 
 lay fallen that counted most, for then he built poems 
 in his fancy of ships at sea and far-off countries. 
 
 It is by a fine instinct that children thus neglect 
 their books, whether it be Cowley or Circus Dick. 
 When they seem most truant they are the closest 
 rapt. A book at its best starts the thought and sends 
 it off as a happy vagrant. It is the thought that runs 
 away across the margin that brings back the richest 
 treasure. 
 
 But all reading in childhood is not happy. It 
 chanced that lately in the long vacation I explored 
 a country school for boys. It stood on the shaded 
 street of a pretty New England village, so perched 
 on a hilltop that it looked over a wide stretch of lower 
 country. There were many marks of a healthful out 
 door life a football field and tennis courts, broad 
 lawns and a prospect of distant woodland for a holi 
 day excursion. It was on the steps of one of the 
 buildings used for recitation that I found a tattered 
 dog-eared remnant of The Merchant of Venice. So 
 much of its front was gone that at the very first 
 
RUNAWAY STUDIES 115 
 
 of it Shylock had advanced far into his unworthy 
 schemes. Evidently the book, by its position at the 
 corner of the steps, had been thrown out immediately 
 at the close of the final class, as if already it had been 
 endured too long. 
 
 In the stillness of the abandoned school I sat for 
 an hour and read about the choosing of the caskets. 
 The margins were filled with drawings one possibly 
 a likeness of the teacher. Once there was a figure in 
 a skirt straight, single lines for legs Jack s girl 
 scrawled in evident derision of a neighbor student s 
 amatory weakness. There were records of baseball 
 scores. Railroads were drawn obliquely across the 
 pages, bending about in order not to touch the words, 
 with a rare tunnel where some word stood out too 
 long. Here and there were stealthy games of tit- 
 tat-toe, practiced, doubtless, behind the teacher s 
 back. Everything showed boredom with the play. 
 What mattered it which casket was selected! Let 
 Shylock take his pound of flesh! Only let him whet 
 his knife and be quick about it! All s one. It s at 
 best a sad and sleepy story suited only for a winter s 
 day. But now spring is here spring that is the king 
 of all the seasons. 
 
 A bee comes buzzing on the pane. It flies off in 
 careless truantry. The clock ticks slowly like a lazy 
 partner in the teacher s dull conspiracy. Outside 
 stretches the green world with its trees and hills 
 
116 
 
 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 and moving clouds. There is a river yonder with 
 swimming-holes. A dog barks on a distant road. 
 
 Presently the lad s book slips from his negligent 
 fingers. He places it face down upon the desk. It 
 lies disregarded like that volume of old Cowley one 
 hundred years ago. His eyes wander from the black 
 board where the Merchant s dry lines are scanned and 
 marked. 
 
 r r r r r 
 
 In sooth, I know not why I am so sad. 
 
 And then ... his thoughts have clambered 
 through the window. They have leaped across the 
 schoolyard wall. Still in his ears he hears the jogging 
 of the Merchant but the sound grows dim. Like 
 that other lad of long ago, his thoughts have jumped 
 the hills. Already, with giddy stride, they are 
 journeying to the profound region of the stars. 
 
On Turning Into Forty. 
 
 THE other day, without any bells or whistles, 
 I slipped off from the thirties. I felt the same 
 sleepiness that morning. There was no ap 
 parent shifting of the grade. 
 
 I am conscious, maybe, that my agility is not what 
 it was fifteen years ago. I do not leap across the 
 fences. But I am not yet comic. Yonder stout man 
 waddles as if he were a precious bombard. He strains 
 at his forward buttons. Unless he mend his appetite, 
 his shoes will be lost below his waistcoat. Already 
 their tops and hulls, like battered caravels, disappear 
 beneath his fat horizon. With him I bear no fellow 
 ship. But although nature has not stuffed me with 
 her sweets to this thick rotundity; alas, despite of 
 tubes and bottles, no shadowy garden flourishes on 
 my top waving capillary grasses and a prim path 
 between the bush. Rather, I bear a general parade 
 and smooth pleasance open to the glimpses of the 
 moon. 
 
 And so at last I have turned into the forties. I 
 remember now how heedlessly I had remarked a small 
 brisk clock ticking upon the shelf as it counted the 
 seconds paying out to me, as it were, for my pleas 
 ure and expense, the brief coinage of my life. I had 
 heard, also, unmindful of the warning, a tall and 
 
118 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 solemn clock as I lay awake, marking regretfully the 
 progress of the night. And I had been told that 
 water runs always beneath the bridge, that the deepest 
 roses fade, that Time s white beard keeps growing 
 to his knee. These phrases of wisdom I had heard 
 and others. But what mattered them to me when 
 my long young life lay stretched before me? Nor did 
 the revolving stars concern me nor the moon, spring 
 with its gaudy brush, nor gray-clad winter. Nor did 
 I care how the wind blew the swift seasons across the 
 earth. Let Time s horses gallop, I cried. Speed! 
 The bewildering peaks of youth are forward. The 
 inn for the night lies far across the mountains. 
 
 But the seconds were entered on the ledger. At 
 last the gray penman has made his footing. The 
 great page turns. I have passed out of the thirties. 
 
 I am not given to brooding on my age. It is only 
 by checking the years on my fingers that I am able 
 to reckon the time of my birth. In the election booth, 
 under a hard eye, I fumble the years and invite sus 
 picion. Eighteen hundred and seventy-eight, I think 
 it was. But even this salient fact this milepost on 
 my eternity I remember most quickly by the recol 
 lection of a jack-knife acquired on my tenth birthday. 
 By way of celebration on that day, having selected 
 the longest blade, I cut the date 1888 in the 
 kitchen woodwork with rather a pretty flourish when 
 the cook was out. The swift events that followed the 
 discovery the dear woman paddled me with a great 
 
ON TURNING INTO FORTY 119 
 
 spoon through the door fastened the occurrence in 
 my memory. 
 
 It was about the year of the jack-knife that there 
 lived in our neighborhood a bad boy whose name was 
 Elmer. I would have quite forgotten him except 
 that I met him on the pavement a few weeks ago. He 
 was the bully of our street a towering rogue with 
 red hair and one suspender. I remember a chronic 
 bandage which he shifted from toe to toe. This lad 
 was of larger speech than the rest of us and he could 
 spit between his teeth. He used to snatch the caps 
 of the younger boys and went off with our baseball 
 across the fences. He was wrapped, too, in mystery, 
 and it was rumored softly from ear to ear that 
 once he had been arrested and taken to the station- 
 house. 
 
 And yet here he was, after all these years, not a 
 bearded brigand with a knife sticking from his boot, 
 but a mild undersized man, hat in hand, smiling at 
 me with pleasant cordiality. His red hair had faded 
 to a harmless carrot. From an overtopping rascal 
 he had dwindled to my shoulder. It was as strange 
 and incomprehensible as if the broken middle-aged 
 gentleman, my familiar neighbor across the street who 
 nods all day upon his step, were pointed out to me as 
 Captain Kidd retired. Can it be that all villains 
 come at last to a slippered state? Does Dick Turpin 
 of the King s highway now falter with crutch along 
 a garden path? And Captain Singleton, now that 
 
CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 his last victim has walked the plank does he doze 
 on a sunny bench beneath his pear tree? Is no 
 blood or treasure left upon the earth ? Do all rascals 
 lose their teeth? "Good evening, Elmer," I said, "it 
 has been a long time since we have met." And I left 
 him agreeable and smiling. 
 
 No, certainly I do not brood upon my age. Except 
 for a gift I forget my birthday. It is only by an 
 effort that I can think of myself as running toward 
 middle age. If I meet a stranger, usually, by a 
 pleasant deception, I think myself the younger, and 
 because of an old-fashioned deference for age I bow 
 and scrape in the doorway for his passage. 
 
 Of course I admit a suckling to be my junior. A 
 few days since I happened to dine at one of the 
 Purple Pups of our Greenwich Village. At my table, 
 which was slashed with yellow and blue in the fashion 
 of these places, sat a youth of seventeen who engaged 
 me in conversation. Plainly, even to my blindness, 
 he was younger than myself. The milk was scarcely 
 dry upon his mouth. He was, by his admission across 
 the soup, a writer of plays and he had received al 
 ready as many as three pleasant letters of rejection. 
 He flared with youth. Strange gases and opinion 
 burned in his speech. His breast pocket bulged with 
 manuscript, for reading at a hint. 
 
 I was poking at my dumpling when he asked me 
 if I were a socialist. No, I replied. Then perhaps 
 I was an anarchist or a Bolshevist, he persisted. 
 
ON TURNING INTO FORTY 
 
 N-no, I answered him, sadly and slowly, for I fore 
 saw his scorn. He leaned forward across the table. 
 Begging my pardon for an intrusion in my affairs, 
 he asked me if I were not aware that the world was 
 slipping away from me. God knows. Perhaps. I 
 had come frisking to that restaurant. I left it broken 
 and decrepit. The youngster had his manuscripts 
 and his anarchy. He held the wriggling world by its 
 futuristic tail. It was not my world, to be sure, but 
 it was a gay world and daubed with color. 
 
 And yet, despite this humiliating encounter, I feel 
 quite young. Something has passed before me that 
 may be Time. The summers have come and gone. 
 There is snow on the pavement where I remember 
 rain. I see, if I choose, the long vista of the years, 
 with diminishing figures, and tin soldiers at the start. 
 Yet I doubt if I am growing older. To myself I 
 seem younger than in my twenties. In the twenties 
 we are quite commonly old. We bear the whole 
 weight of society. The world has been waiting so 
 long for us and our remedies. In the twenties we 
 scorn old authority. We let Titian and Keats go 
 drown themselves. We are skeptical in religion, and 
 before our unrelenting iron throne immortality and 
 all things of faith plead in vain. Although I can 
 show still only a shabby inventory, certainly I would 
 not exchange myself for that other self in the twenties. 
 I have acquired in these last few years a less narrow 
 sympathy and a belief that some of my colder reasons 
 
CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 may be wrong. Nor would I barter certain knacks 
 of thoughts serious and humorous for the renewed 
 ability to leap across a five-foot bar. I am less fearful 
 of the world and its accidents. I have less embarrass 
 ment before people. I am less moody. I tack and 
 veer less among my betters for some meaner profit. 
 Surely I am growing younger. 
 
 I seem to remember reading a story in which a 
 scientist devised a means of reversing the direction 
 of the earth. Perhaps an explosion of gases back 
 fired against the east. Perhaps he built a monstrous 
 lever and contrived the moon to be his fulcrum. Any 
 way, here at last was the earth spinning backward in 
 its course the spring preceding winter the sun 
 rising in the west one o clock going before twelve- 
 soup trailing after nuts the seed-time following 
 upon the harvest. And so it began to appear so 
 ran the story that human life, too, was reversed. 
 Persons came into the world as withered grandames 
 and as old gentlemen with gold-headed canes, and 
 then receded like crabs backward into their maturity, 
 then into their adolescence and babyhood. To return 
 from a protracted voyage w r as to find your younger 
 friends sunk into pinafores. But the story was really 
 too ridiculous. 
 
 But in these last few years no doubt I do grow 
 younger. The great camera of the Master rolls its 
 moving pictures backward. Perhaps I am only 
 thirty-eight now that the direction is reversed. 
 
ON TURNING INTO FORTY 
 
 I wonder what you thought, my dear X , when 
 
 we met recently at dinner. We had not seen one 
 another very often in these last few years. Our paths 
 have led apart and we have not been even at shouting 
 distance across the fields. It is needless to remind 
 you, I hope, that I once paid you marked attention. 
 It began when we were boy and girl. Our friends 
 
124 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 talked, you will recall. You were then less than a 
 year younger than myself, although no doubt you 
 have since lost distance. What a long time I spent 
 upon my tie and collar a stiff high collar that 
 almost touched my ears! Some other turn of for 
 tune s wheel circumstance a shaft of moonlight 
 (we were young, my dear) a white frock your 
 acquiescence who knows? 
 
 I jilted you once or twice for other girls nothing 
 formal, of course but only when you had jilted me 
 three or four times. We once rowed upon a river at 
 night. Did I take your hand, my dear? If I listen 
 now I can hear the water dripping from the oar. 
 There was darkness and stars and youth (your 
 self, white-armed, the symbol of its mystery). Yes, 
 perhaps I am older now. 
 
 Was it not Byron who wrote? 
 
 I am ashes where once I was fire, 
 And the soul in my bosom is dead ; 
 What I loved I now merely admire, 
 And my heart is as gray as my head. 
 
 I cannot pretend ever to have had so fierce a passion, 
 but at least my fire still burns and with a cheery blaze. 
 But you will not know this love of mine unless, of 
 course, you read this page and even so, you can only 
 suspect that I write of you, because, my dear, to be 
 quite frank, I paid attention to several girls beside 
 yourself. 
 
ON TURNING INTO FORTY 
 
 Yes, they say that I have come to the top of the 
 hill and that henceforth the view is back across my 
 shoulder. I am counseled that with a turn of the 
 road I had hest sit with my back to the horses, for 
 the mountains are behind. A little while and the 
 finer purple will be showing in the west. Yet a little 
 while, they say, and the bewildering peaks of youth 
 will be gray and cold. 
 
 Perhaps some of the greener pleasures are mine 
 no longer. Certainly, last night I went to the Winter 
 Garden, but left bored after the first act; and I had 
 left sooner except for climbing across my neighbors. 
 I suppose there are young popinjays who seriously 
 affirm that Ziegfeld s Beauty Chorus is equal to the 
 galaxy of loveliness that once pranced at Weber and 
 Field s when we came down from college on Saturday 
 night. At old Coster and Rial s there was once a 
 marvelous beauty who swung from a trapeze above 
 the audience and scandalously undressed herself down 
 to the fifth encore and her stockings. And, really, 
 are there plays now as exciting as the Prisoner of 
 Zenda, with its great fight upon the stairs three 
 men dead and the tables overturned Red Rudolph, 
 in the end, bearing off the Princess? Heroes no 
 longer wear cloak and sword and rescue noble ladies 
 from castle towers. 
 
 And Welsh rabbit, that was once a passion and the 
 high symbol of extravagance, in these days has lost 
 its finest flavor. In vain do we shake the paprika 
 
126 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 can. Pop-beer and real beer, its manly cousin, have 
 neither of them the old foaming tingle when you come 
 off the water. Yes, already, I am told, I am on the 
 long road that leads down to the quiet inn at the 
 mountain foot. I am promised, to be sure, many wide 
 prospects, pleasant sounds of wind and water, and 
 friendly greetings by the way. There will be a stop 
 here and there for refreshments, a pause at the turn 
 where the world shows best, a tightening of the brake. 
 Get up, Dobbin! Go long! And then, tired and 
 nodding, at last, we shall leave the upland and enter 
 the twilight where all roads end. 
 
 A pleasant picture, is it not a grandfather in a 
 cap yourself, my dear sir, hugging your cold shins in 
 the chimney corner? Is it not a brave end to a stir 
 ring business? Life, you say, is a journey up and 
 down a hill aspirations unattained and a mild re 
 gret, castles at dawn, a brisk wind for the noontide, 
 and at night, at best, the lights of a little village, the 
 stir of water on the stones, and silence. 
 
 Is this true ? Or do we not reiterate a lie ? I deny 
 old age. It is a false belief, a bad philosophy dim 
 ming the eyes of generations. Men and women may 
 wear caps, but not because of age. In each one s 
 heart, if he permit, a child keeps house to the very 
 end. If Welsh rabbit lose its flavor, is it a sign of 
 decaying power? I have yet to know that a relish 
 for Shakespeare declines, or the love of one s friends, 
 or the love of truth and beauty. Youth does not view 
 
ON TURNING INTO FORTY 
 
 the loftiest peaks. It is at sunset that the tallest 
 castles rise. 
 
 My dear sir you of seventy or beyond if no rim 
 of mountains stretches up before you, it is not your 
 age that denies you but the quality of your thought. 
 It has been said of old that as a man thinks so he is, 
 but who of us has learned the lesson? 
 
 The journey has neither a beginning nor an end. 
 Now is eternity. Our birth is but a signpost on the 
 road our going hence, another post to mark transi 
 tion and our progress. The oldest stars are brief 
 lamps upon our way. We shall travel wisely if we 
 see peaks and castles all the day, and hold our child 
 hood in our hearts. Then, when at last the night has 
 come, we shall plant our second post upon a windy 
 height where it will be first to catch the dawn. 
 

 On the Difference Between Wit 
 and Humor. 
 
 I AM not sure that I can draw an exact line 
 between wit and humor. Perhaps the distinction 
 is so subtle that only those persons can decide 
 who have long white beards. But even an ignorant 
 man, so long as he is clear of Bedlam, may have an 
 opinion. 
 
 I am quite positive that of the two, humor is the 
 more comfortable and more livable quality. Hu 
 morous persons, if their gift is genuine and not a 
 mere shine upon the surface, are always agreeable 
 
WIT AND HUMOR 
 
 companions and they sit through the evening best. 
 They have pleasant mouths turned up at the corners. 
 To these corners the great Master of marionettes has 
 fixed the strings and he holds them in his nimblest 
 fingers to twitch them at the slightest jest. But the 
 mouth of a merely witty man is hard and sour until 
 the moment of its discharge. .Nor is the flash from a 
 witty man always comforting, whereas a humorous 
 man radiates a general pleasure and is like another 
 candle in the room. 
 
 I admire wit, but I have no real liking for it. It 
 has been too often employed against me, whereas , 
 humor is always an ally. It never points an imperti 
 nent finger into my defects. Humorous persons do 
 not sit like explosives on a fuse. They are safe and 
 easy comrades. But a wit s tongue is as sharp as a 
 donkey driver s stick. I may gallop the faster for its 
 proddjng, yet the touch behind is too persuasive for 
 any comfort. 
 
 Wit is a lean creature with sharp inquiring nose, 
 whereas humor has a kindly eye and comfortable 
 , girth. Wit, if it be necessary, uses malice to score a 
 point- like a cat it is quick to jump but humor 
 keeps the peace in an easy chair. Wit has a better 
 voice in a solo, but humor comes into the chorus best. 
 Wit is as sharp as a stroke of lightning, whereas 
 humor is diffuse like sunlight. Wit keeps the season s 
 fashions and is precise in the phrases and judgments 
 of the day, but humor is concerned with homely 
 
 
130 ft/ CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 eternal things. Wit wears silk, but humor in home 
 spun endures the wind. Wit sets a snare, whereas 
 humor goes off whistling without a victim in its mind. 
 Wit is sharper company at table, but humor serves 
 better in mischance and in the rain. When it tumbles/ 
 wit is sour, but humor goes uncomplaining without 
 its dinner. Humor laughs at another s jest and holds 
 its sides, while wit sits wrapped in study for a lively 
 answer. But it is a workaday world in which we 
 live, where we get mud upon our boots and come 
 weary to the twilight it is a world that grieves and 
 suffers from many wounds in these years of war : and 
 therefore as I think of my acquaintance, it is those 
 who are humorous in its best and truest meaning 
 rather than those who are witty who give the more 
 profitable companionship. 
 
 And then, also, there is wit that is not wit. As~ 
 someone has written: 
 
 Nor ever noise for wit on me could pass, 
 When thro the braying I discern d the ass. 
 
 I sat lately at dinner with a notoriously witty per 
 son (a really witty man) whom our hostess had 
 introduced to provide the entertainment. I had read 
 many of his reviews of books and plays, and while I 
 confess their wit and brilliancy, I had thought them 
 to be hard and intellectual and lacking in all that 
 broader base of humor which aims at truth. His 
 writing catching the bad habit of the time is too 
 
WIT AND HUMOR 131 
 
 ready to proclaim a paradox and to assert the unusual, 
 to throw aside in contempt the valuable haystack in 
 a fine search for a paltry needle. His reviews are ^ 
 seldom right as most of us see the right but they 
 sparkle and hold one s interest for their perversity 
 and unexpected turns. 
 
 In conversation I found him much as I had found 
 him in his writing although, strictly speaking, it was 
 not a conversation, which requires an interchange of 
 word and idea and is turn about. A conversation 
 should not be a market where one sells and another 
 buys. Rather, it should be a bargaining back and 
 forth, and each person should be both merchant and 
 buyer. My rubber plant for your victrola, each 
 offering what he has and seeking his deficiency. It 
 was my friend B"" 1 who fairly put the case when fyL 
 he said that he liked so much to talk that he was 
 willing to pay for his audience by listening in his turn. 
 
 But this was a speech and a lecture. He loosed on 
 us from the cold spigot of his intellect a steady flow 
 of literary allusion a practice which he professes to 
 hold in scorn and wit and epigram. He seemed 
 torn from the page of Meredith. He talked like ink. 
 I had believed before .that only people in books could 
 talk as he did, and then only when their author had 
 blotted and scratched their performance for a seventh 
 time before he sent it to the printer. To me it was 
 an entirely new experience, for my usual acquaint 
 ances are good common honest daytime woollen folk 
 
188 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 and they seldom average better than one bright thing 
 in an evening. 
 
 At first I feared that there might be a break in his 
 flow of speech which I should be obliged to fill. Once, 
 when there was a slight pause a truffle was engaging 
 him I launched a frail remark; but it was swept off 
 at once in the renewed torrent. And seriously it does 
 not seem fair. If one speaker insists to change the 
 figure on laying all the cobbles of a conversation, 
 he should at least allow another to carry the tarpot 
 and fill in the chinks. When the evening was over, 
 although I recalled two or three clever stories, which 
 I shall botch in the telling, I came away tired and 
 dissatisfied, my tongue dry with disuse. 
 
 Now I would not seek that kind of man as a com 
 panion with whom to be becalmed in a sailboat, and 
 I would not wish to go to the country with him, least 
 of all to the North Woods or any place outside of 
 civilization. I am sure that he would sulk if he were 
 deprived of an audience. He would be crotchety at 
 breakfast across his bacon. Certainly for the woods 
 a humorous man is better company, for his humor 
 in mischance comforts both him and you. A hu 
 morous man and here lies the heart of the matter 
 a humorous man has the high gift of regarding an 
 annoyance in the very stroke of it, as another man 
 shall regard it when the annoyance is long past. If 
 a humorous person falls out of a canoe he knows the 
 
WIT AND HUMOR 133 
 
 exquisite jest while his head is still bobbing in the 
 cold "water. A witty man, on the contrary, is sour 
 until he is changed and dry : but in a week s time when 
 company is about, he will make a comic story of it. 
 
 My friend A with whom I went once into the 
 
 Canadian woods has genuine humor, and no one can 
 be a more satisfactory comrade. I do not recall that - 
 he said many comic things, and at bottom he was 
 serious as the best humorists are. But in him there 
 was a kind of joy and exaltation that lasted through 
 out the day. If the duffle were piled too high and fell 
 about his ears, if the dinner was burned or the tent 
 blew down in a driving storm at night, he met these 
 mishaps as thou|fh they were the very things he had 
 come north to get, as though without them the trip 
 would have lacked its spice. This is an easy phi 
 losophy in retrospect but hard when the wet canvas 
 falls across you and the rain beats in. - A. laughed 
 at the very moment of disaster as another man will 
 laugh later in an easy chair. I see him now swinging 
 his axe for firewood to dry ourselves when we were 
 spilled in a rapids ; and again, while pitching our tent - 
 on a sandy beach when another storm had drowned 
 us. And there is a certain cry of his (dully, Wow! 
 on paper) expressive to the initiated of all things 
 gay, which could never issue from the mouth of a 
 merely witty man. 
 
 Real humor is primarily human or divine, to be 
 
134 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 exact and after that j;he fun may follow naturally 
 - in its order. Not long ago I saw Louis Jouvet of 
 the French Company play Sir Andrew Ague- Cheek. 
 It was a most humorous performance of the part, and 
 the reason is that the actor made no primary effort 
 to be funny. It was the humanity of his playing, 
 making his audience love him first of all, that pro 
 voked the comedy. His long thin legs were comical 
 if and so was his drawling talk, but the very heart and 
 essence was this love he started in his audience. Poor 
 fellow! how delightfully he smoothed the feathers in 
 his hat! How he feared to fight the duel! It was 
 easy to love such a dear silly human fellow. A merely 
 witty player might have drawn as many laughs, but 
 there would not have been the catching at the heart. 
 As for books and the wit or humor of their pages, 
 it appears that wit fades, whereas humor lasts. 
 Humor uses permanent nutgalls. But is there any 
 thing more melancholy than the wit of another 
 generation? In the first place, this wit is intertwined 
 with forgotten circumstance. It hangs on a fashion- 
 on the style of a coat. It arose from a forgotten bit 
 of gossip. In the play of words the sources of the 
 pun are lost. It is like a local jest in a narrow coterie, 
 barren to an outsider. Sydney Smith was the most 
 celebrated wit of his day, but he is dull reading now. 
 Blackwood s at its first issue was a witty daring sheet, 
 but for us the pages are stagnant. I suppose that no 
 one now laughs at the witticisms of Thomas Hood. 
 
WIT AND HUMOR 135 
 
 Where are the wits of yesteryear? Yet the humor of 
 Falstaff and Lamb and Fielding remains and is a 
 reminder to us that humor, to be real, must be 
 founded on humanity and on truth. 
 
On Going to a Party. 
 
 ALTHOUGH I usually enjoy a party when 
 I have arrived, I seldom anticipate it with 
 pleasure. I remain sour until I have hung 
 my hat. I suspect that my disorder is general and 
 that if any group of formal diners could be caught 
 in preparation midway between their tub and over 
 shoes, they would be found a peevish company who 
 might be expected to snap at one another. Yet look 
 now at their smiling faces! With what zest they 
 crunch their food! How cheerfully they clatter on 
 their plates ! Who would suspect that yonder smiling 
 fellow who strokes his silky chin was sullen when he 
 fixed his tie; or that this pleasant babble comes out 
 of mouths that lately sulked before their mirrors? 
 I am not sure from what cause my own crustiness 
 
ON GOING TO A PARTY 137 
 
 proceeds. I am of no essential unsociability. Nor 
 is it wholly the masquerade of unaccustomed clothes. 
 I am deft with a bow-knot and patient with my 
 collar. It may be partly a perversity of sex, inas 
 much as we men are sometimes "taken" by our women 
 folk. But chiefly it comes from an unwillingness to 
 pledge the future, lest on the very night my own 
 hearth appear the better choice. Here we are, with 
 legs stretched for comfort toward the fire easy and 
 unbuttoned. Let the rain beat on the glass! Let 
 chimneys topple! Let the wind whistle to its shrill 
 companions of the North! But although I am led 
 growling and reluctant to my host s door with 
 stiffened paws, as it were, against the sill I usually 
 enjoy myself when I am once inside. To see me 
 across the salad smiling at my pretty neighbor, no 
 one would know how churlish I had been on the 
 coming of the invitation. 
 
 I have attended my share of formal dinners. I 
 
 have dined with the magnificent H s and their 
 
 Roman Senator has announced me at the door; al 
 though, when he asked my name in the hall, I thought 
 at first in my ignorance that he gave me directions 
 about my rubbers. No one has faced more forks and 
 knives, or has apportioned his implements with nicer 
 discrimination among the meats. Not once have I 
 been forced to stir my after-dinner coffee with a soup 
 spoon. And yet I look back on these grand occasions 
 with contentment chiefly because they are past. I 
 
138 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 am in whole agreement with Cleopatra when she 
 spoke slightingly of her salad days surely a fashion 
 able afternoon affair at a castle on the river Nile 
 when, as she confessed, she was young and green in 
 judgment. 
 
 It is usually a pleasure to meet distinguished per 
 sons who, as a rule, are friendly folk who sit in peace 
 and comfort. But if they are lugged in and set up 
 stiffly at a formal dinner they are too much an 
 exhibition. In this circumstance they cannot be 
 natural and at their best. And then I wonder how 
 they endure our abject deference and flabby sur 
 render to their opinions. Would it not destroy all 
 interest in a game of bowling if the wretched pins 
 fell down before the hit were made? It was lately 
 at a dinner that our hostess held in captivity three of 
 these celebrated lions. One of them was a famous 
 traveler who had taken a tiger by its bristling beard. 
 The second was a popular lecturer. The third was 
 in distemper and crouched quietly at her plate. The 
 first two are sharp and bright and they roared to 
 expectation. But I do not complain when lions take 
 possession of the cage, for it reduces the general 
 liability of talk, and a common man, if he be indus 
 trious, may pluck his bird down to the bone in peace. 
 
 A formal reception is even worse than a dinner. 
 One stands around with stalled machinery. Good 
 stout legs, that can go at a trot all day, become now 
 weak and wabbly. One hurdles dispiritedly over 
 
ON GOING TO A PARTY 139 
 
 trailing skirts. One tries in conversation to think of 
 the name of a play he has just seen, but it escapes 
 him. It is, however, so nearly in his grasp, that it 
 prevents him from turning to another topic. Benson, 
 the essayist, also disliked formal receptions and he 
 quotes Prince Hal in their dispraise. "Prithee, Ned," 
 says the Prince and I fancy that he has just led a 
 thirsty Duchess to the punchbowl, and was now in 
 the very act of escaping while her face was buried in 
 the cup "Prithee, Ned," he says, "come out of this 
 fat room, and lend me thy hand to laugh a little!" 
 And we can imagine these two enfranchised rogues, 
 easy at heart, making off later to their Eastcheap 
 tavern, and the passing of a friendly cup. But now, 
 alas, today, all of the rooms of the house are fat and 
 thick with people. There is a confusion of tongues 
 as when work on the tower of Babel was broken off. 
 There is no escape. If it were one s good luck to be 
 a waiter, one could at least console himself that it was 
 his livelihood. 
 
 The furniture has been removed from all the rooms 
 in order that more persons may be more uncomfort 
 able. Or perhaps the chairs and tables, like rats in a 
 leaky ship, have scuttled off, as it were, now that 
 fashion has wrecked the home. A friend of mine, 
 
 J , resents these entertainments. No sooner, 
 
 recently, did he come into such a bare apartment 
 where, in happier days his favorite chair had stood, 
 than he hinted to the guests that the furniture had 
 
HO CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 been sold to meet the expenses of the day. This sorry 
 jest lasted him until, on whispering to a servant, he 
 learned that the chairs had been stored in an upper 
 hall. At this he proposed that the party reassemble 
 above, where at least they might sit down arid be 
 
 comfortable. When I last saw J that evening he 
 
 was sitting at the turn of the stairs behind an exotic 
 shrubbery, where he had found a vagrant chair that 
 had straggled behind the upper emigration. 
 
 The very envelope that contains a formal invitation 
 bears a forbidding look. It is massive and costly to 
 the eye. It is much larger than a letter, unless, per 
 haps, one carries on a correspondence with a giant 
 from Brobdingnag. You turn it round and round 
 with sad premonition. The very writing is coldly im 
 personal without the pinch of a more human hand. It 
 practices a chill anonymity as if it contains a warrant 
 for a hanging. At first you hope it may be merely 
 an announcement from your tailor, inasmuch as com 
 merce patterns its advertisements on these social 
 forms. I am told that there was once a famous 
 man a distinguished novelist who so disliked for 
 mal parties but was so timid at their rejection that 
 he took refuge in the cellar whenever one of these 
 forbidding documents arrived, until he could forge a 
 plausible excuse ; for he believed that these colder and 
 more barren rooms quickened his invention. The 
 story goes that once when he was in an unusually 
 timid state he lacked the courage to break the seal and 
 
ON GOING TO A PARTY 
 
 so spent an uneasy morning upon the tubs, to the 
 inconvenience of the laundress who thought that he 
 fretted upon the plot. At last, on tearing off the 
 envelope, he found to his relief that it was only a 
 notice for a display of haberdashery at a fashionable 
 shop. In his gratitude at his escape he at once sought 
 his desk and conferred a blushing heiress on his hero. 
 
 But perhaps there are persons of an opposite mind 
 who welcome an invitation. Even the preliminary 
 rummage delights them when their clothes are sent 
 for pressing and their choice wavers among their 
 plumage. For such persons the superscription on 
 the envelope now seems written in the spacious hand 
 of hospitality. 
 
 But of informal dinners and the meeting of friends 
 we can all approve without reserve. I recall, once 
 upon a time, four old gentlemen who met every week 
 for whist. Three of them were of marked eccen 
 tricity. One of them, when the game was at its pitch, 
 reached down to the rungs of his chair and hitched it 
 first to one side and then to the other, mussing up the 
 rugs. The second had the infirmity of nodding his 
 head continuously. Even if he played a trivial three 
 spot, he sat on the decision and wagged his beard up 
 and down like a judge. The third sucked his teeth 
 and thereby made hissing noises. Later in the even 
 ing there would be served buttermilk or cider, and 
 the sober party would adjourn at the gate. But 
 there were two young rascals who practiced these 
 
CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 eccentricities and after they had gone to bed, for the 
 exquisite humor of it, they nodded their heads, too, 
 and sucked their teeth with loud hissing noises. 
 
 No one entertains more pleasantly than the S - 
 family and no one is more informal. If you come on 
 the minute for your dinner, it is likely that none of 
 the family is about. After a search J - is found 
 in a flannel shirt in his garden with a watering-can. 
 "Hello!" he says in surprise. "What time is it? 
 Have you come already for dinner?" 
 
 "For God s sake," you reply for I assume you 
 to be of familiar and profane manners "get up and 
 wash yourself! Don t you know that you are giving 
 a party?" 
 
 J- - affects to be indignant. "Who is giving this 
 party, anyway?" he asks. "If it s yours, you run it!" 
 And then he leads you to the house, where you abuse 
 each other agreeably as he dresses. 
 
 Once a year on Christmas Eve they give a general 
 party. This has been a custom for a number of years 
 and it is now an institution as fixed as the night itself. 
 Invitations are not issued. At most a rumor goes 
 abroad to the elect that nine o clock is a proper time 
 to come, when the children, who have peeked for 
 Santa Glaus up the chimney, have at last been put to 
 bed. There is a great wood fire in the sitting-room 
 and, by way of andirons, two soldiers of the Continen 
 tal Army keep up their endless march across the 
 hearth. The fireplace is encircled by a line of leather 
 
ON GOING TO A PARTY 11>3 
 
 cushions that rest upon the floor, like a window-seat 
 that has undergone amputation of all its legs. 
 
 But the center of the entertainment is a prodigious 
 egg-nog that rises from the dining table. I do not 
 know the composition of the drink, yet my nose is 
 much at fault if it includes aught but eggs and 
 whiskey. At the end of the table J - stands with 
 his mighty ladle. It is his jest each year for always 
 there is a fresh stranger who has not heard it it is 
 his jest that the drink would be fair and agreeable 
 to the taste if it were not for the superfluity of eggs 
 which dull the mixture. 
 
 No one, even of a sour prohibition, refuses his 
 entreaty. My aunt, who speaks against the Demon, 
 once appeared at the party. She came sniffing to the 
 table. "Ought I to take it, John?" she asked. 
 
 "Mildest thing you ever drank," said John, and 
 he ladled her out a cup. 
 
 My aunt smelled it suspiciously. 
 
 "It s eggs," said John. 
 
 "Eggs?" said my aunt, "What a funny smell they 
 have !" She said this with a facial expression not un 
 like that of Little Red Ridinghood, when she first saw 
 the old lady with the long nose and sharp eyes. 
 
 "Nothing bad, I hope," said John. 
 
 "N-no," said my aunt slowly, and she took a sip. 
 
 "Of course the eggs spoil it a little," said John. 
 
 "It s very good," said my aunt, as she took another 
 sip. 
 
144 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 Then she put down her glass, but only when it was 
 empty. "John," she said, "y u are a rogue. You 
 would like to get me tipsy." And at this she moved 
 out of danger. Little Red Ridinghood escaped the 
 wolf as narrowly. But did Little Red Ridinghood 
 escape ? Dear me, how one forgets ! 
 
 But in closing I must not fail to mention an old 
 lady and gentleman, both beyond eighty, who have 
 always attended these parties. They have met old 
 age with such trust and cheerfulness, and they are so 
 eager at a jest, that no one of all the gathering fits 
 the occasion half so well. And to exchange a word 
 with them is to feel a pleasant contact with all the 
 gentleness and mirth that have lodged with them 
 during the space of their eighty years. The old 
 gentleman is an astronomer and until lately, when he 
 moved to a newer quarter of the town, he had behind 
 his house in a proper tower a telescope, through which 
 he showed his friends the moon. But in these last 
 few years his work has been entirely mathematical 
 and his telescope has fallen into disorder. His work 
 finds a quicker comment among scientists of foreign 
 lands than on his own street. 
 
 It is likely that tonight he has been busy with the 
 computation of the orbit of a distant star up to the 
 very minute when his wife brought in his tie and 
 collar. And then arm and arm they have set out for 
 the party, where they will sit until the last guest has 
 gone. 
 
ON GOING TO A PARTY U5 
 
 Alas, when the party comes this Christmas, only 
 one of these old people will be present, for the other 
 with a smile lately fell asleep. 
 
On a Pair of Leather Suspenders. 
 
 NOT long since I paid a visit to New Haven 
 before daylight of a winter morning. I had 
 hoped that my sleeper from Washington 
 might be late and I was encouraged in this by the 
 trainman who said that the dear old thing commonly 
 went through New Haven at breakfast time. But 
 it was barely three o clock when the porter plucked 
 at me in my upper berth. He intruded, happily, on 
 a dream in which the train came rocking across the 
 comforter. 
 
 Three o clock, if you approach it properly through 
 the evening, is said to have its compensations. There 
 are persons (with a hiccough) who pronounce it the 
 shank of the evening, but as an hour of morning it 
 has few apologists. "It is the early bird that catches 
 the worm; but this should merely set one thinking 
 
ON A PAIR OF LEATHER SUSPENDERS 147 
 
 before he thrusts out a foot into the cold morning, 
 whether he may justly consider himself a bird or a 
 worm. If no glad twitter rises to his lips in these 
 early hours, he had best stay unpecked inside his 
 coverlet. 
 
 It is hard to realize that other two-legged creatures 
 like myself are habitually awake at this hour. In a 
 wakeful night I may have heard the whistles and the 
 clank of far-off wheels, and I may have known dimly 
 that work goes on; yet for the most part I have 
 fancied that the world, like a river steamboat in a 
 fog, is tied at night to its shore: or if it must go 
 plunging on through space to keep a schedule, that 
 here and there a light-merely is set upon a tower-to 
 warn the planets. 
 
 A locomotive was straining at its buttons, and from 
 the cab a smoky engineer looked down on me. A 
 truck load of boxes rattled down the platform. 
 Crates of affable familiar hens were off upon a 
 journey, bragging of their families. Men with flar 
 ing tapers tapped at wheels. - The waiting-room, too, 
 kept, as it were, one eye open to the night. The 
 coffee-urn steamed on the lunch counter, and sand 
 wiches sat inside their glass domes and looked darkly 
 on the world. 
 
 It was the hour when "the tired burglar seeks his 
 bed." -I had thought of dozing in a hotel chair until 
 breakfast, but presently a flood appeared in the 
 
148 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 persons of three scrub women. The fountains of the 
 great deep were opened and the waters prevailed. 
 
 It still lacked an hour or so of daylight. I remem 
 bered that there used to be a humble restaurant and 
 kitchen on wheels to the vulgar, a dog-wagon up 
 toward York Street. This wagon, once upon a time, 
 had appeased our appetites when we had been late 
 for chapel and Commons. As an institution it was 
 so trite that once we made of it a fraternity play. I 
 faintly remember a pledge to secrecy sworn by the 
 moon and the seven wandering stars but neverthe 
 less I shall divulge the plot. It was a burlesque 
 tragedy in rhyme. Some eighteen years ago, it seems, 
 Brabantio, the noble Venetian Senator, kept this 
 same dog-wagon he and his beautiful daughter 
 Desdemona. Here came Othello, lago and Cassio of 
 the famous class of umpty-ump. 
 
 The scene of the drama opens with Brabantio 
 flopping his dainties on the iron, chanting to himself 
 a lyric in praise of their tender juices. Presently 
 Othello enters and when Brabantio s back is turned 
 he makes love to Desdemona a handsome fellow, 
 this Othello, with the manner of a hero and curled 
 moustachios. Exit Othello to a nine o clock, Ladd 
 on Confusions. Now the rascal lago enters myself! 
 with flowing tie. He hates Othello. He glowers 
 like a villain and soliloquizes : 
 
 In order that my vengeance I may plot 
 Give me a dog, and give it to me hot ! 
 
ON A PAIR OF LEATHER SUSPENDERS 149 
 
 That was the kind of play. Finally, Desdemona is 
 nearly smothered but is returned at last to Othello s 
 arms. lago meets his deserts. He is condemned to 
 join A K E, a rival fraternity. But the warm 
 heart of Desdemona melts and she intercedes to save 
 him from this horrid end. In mercy behind the 
 scenes his head is chopped off. Then all of us, 
 heroines and villains, sat to a late hour around the 
 fire and told one another how the real stage thirsted 
 for us. We drank lemonade mostly but we sang of 
 beer one song about 
 
 Beer, beer, glorious beer! 
 Fill yourself right up to here! 
 
 accompanied with a gesture several inches above the 
 head. As the verses progressed it was customary to 
 stand on chairs and to reach up on tiptoe to show the 
 increasing depth. 
 
 But the dog- wagon has now become a gilded un 
 familiar thing, twice its former size and with stools 
 for a considerable company. I questioned the pro 
 prietor whether he might be descended from the noble 
 Brabantio, but the dull fellow gave no response. The 
 wagon has passed to meaner ownership. 
 
 Across the street Vanderbilt Hall loomed indis 
 tinctly. To the ignorant it may be necessary to 
 explain that its courtyard is open to Chapel Street, 
 but that an iron grill stretches from wing to wing and 
 keeps out the town. (This grill is high enough for 
 
150 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 Hagenbeck, and; it used to be a favorite game with 
 us to play animal behind it for the street s amuse 
 ment. At the hour when the crowd issued from the 
 matinee at the Hyperion Theatre, our wittiest stu 
 dents paced on all fours up and down behind this 
 grill and roared for raw beef. E - was the wag of 
 the building and he could climb up to a high place and 
 scratch himself like a monkey an entertainment of 
 more humor than elegance. ^Elated with success, he 
 and a companion later chartered a street-organ a 
 doleful one-legged affair and as man and monkey 
 they gathered pennies out Orange Street.; 
 
 I turned into the dark Campus by Osborn Hall. 
 It is as ugly a building as one could meet on a week s 
 journey, and yet by an infelicity all class pictures 
 are taken on its steps. Freshman courses are given 
 in the basement a French class once in particular. 
 Sometimes, when we were sunk dismally in the ir 
 regular verbs, bootblacks and old-clothes men stopped 
 on the street and grinned down on us. And all the 
 dreary hour, as we sweated with translation, above 
 us on the pavement the feet and happy legs of the 
 enfranchised went by the window. 
 
 Yale is a bad jumble of architecture. It is amazing 
 how such incongruous buildings can lodge together. 
 (Did not the Old Brick Row cry out when Durfee was 
 built? Surely the Gothic library uttered a protest 
 against its newer adjunct. And are the Bicentennial 
 buildings so beautiful? At best we have exchanged 
 
ON A PAIR OF LEATHER SUSPENDERS 151 
 
 the fraudulent wooden ramparts of Alumni Hall for 
 the equally fraudulent inside columns of these newer 
 buildings. It is a mercy that there is no style and 
 changing fashion in elm trees. As Viola might have 
 remarked about the Campus: it were excellently 
 done, if God did all. 
 
 Presently in the dark I came on the excavations 
 for the Harkness quadrangle. So at last Commons 
 was gone. In that old building we ate during our 
 impoverished weeks. I do not know that we saved 
 much, for we were driven to extras, but the reckoning 
 was deferred. There was a certain tutti-frutti ice 
 cream, rich in ginger, that has now vanished from the 
 earth. Or chocolate eclairs made the night stand out. 
 I recall that one could seldom procure a second help 
 ing of griddlecakes except on those mornings when 
 there were ants in the syrup. Also, I recall that 
 sometimes there was a great crash of trays at the 
 pantry doors, and almost at the instant two old 
 Goodies, harnessed ready with mops and pails, ran 
 out and sponged up the wreckage. 
 
 And Pierson Hall is gone, that was once the center 
 of Freshman life. Does anybody remember The 
 Voice? It was a weekly paper issued in the interest 
 of prohibition. I doubt if we would have quarreled 
 with it for this, but it denounced Yale and held up 
 in contrast the purity of Oberlin. Oberlin! And 
 therefore we hated it, and once a week we burned its 
 issue in the stone and plaster corridors of Pierson. 
 
152 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 There was once a residence at the corner of York 
 and Library where Freshmen resided. The railing 
 of the stairs wabbled. The bookcase door lacked a 
 hinge. Three out of four chairs were rickety. The 
 bath-tub, which had been the chemical laboratory for 
 some former student, was stained an unhealthy color. 
 If ever it shall appear that Harlequin lodged upon 
 the street, here was the very tub where he washed his 
 clothes. Without caution the window of the bed 
 room fell out into the back yard. But to atone for 
 these defects, up through the scuttle in the hall there 
 was an airy perch upon the roof. Here Freshmen 
 might smoke their pipes in safety a privilege denied 
 them on the street and debate upon their affairs. 
 Who were hold-off men! Who would make BovXifl 
 Or they invented outrageous names for the faculty, 
 My dear Professor Blank, could you hear yourself 
 described by these young cubs through their tobacco 
 smoke, your learned ears, so alert for dactyl and 
 spondee, would grow red. 
 
 Do Scott s boys, I wonder, still gather clothes for 
 pressing around the Campus? Do they still sell 
 tickets sixteen punches for a dollar five punches 
 to the suit? On Monday mornings do colored 
 laundresses push worn baby-carts around to gather 
 what we were pleased to call the "dirty filth"? And 
 do these same laundresses push back these selfsame 
 carts later in the week with "clean filth" aboard? Are 
 stockings mended in the same old way, so that the 
 
ON A PAIR OF LEATHER SUSPENDERS 153 
 
 toes look through the open mesh? Have college 
 sweeps learned yet to tuck in the sheets at the foot? 
 Do old-clothes men Fish-eye? Do you remember 
 him? do old-clothes men still whine at the corner, 
 and look you up and down in cheap appraisal? Pop 
 Smith is dead, who sold his photograph to Freshmen, 
 but has he no successor?/ How about the old fellow 
 who sold hot chestnuts at football games "a nickel 
 a bush" a rare contraction meant to denote a 
 bushel in reality fifteen nuts and fifteen worms. 
 Does George Felsburg still play the overture at 
 Poli s, reading his newspaper the while, and do comic 
 actors still jest with him across the footlights? 
 
 Is it still ethical to kick Freshmen on the night of 
 Omega Lambda Chi? Is "nigger baby" played on 
 the Campus any more? The loser of this precious 
 game, in the golden days, leaned forward against the 
 wall with his coat-tails raised, while everybody took 
 a try at him with a tennis ball. And, of course, no one 
 now plays "piel." A youngster will hardly have 
 heard of the game. It was once so popular that all 
 the stone steps about the college showed its marks. 
 And next year we heard that the game had spread to 
 Harvard. 
 
 Do students still make for themselves oriental 
 corners with Bagdad stripes and Turkish lamps? 
 Do the fair fingers of Farmington and Northampton 
 still weave the words " Neath the Elms" upon sofa 
 pillows? Do Seniors still bow the President down the 
 
154 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 aisle of Chapel? Do students still get out their Greek 
 with "trots"? It was the custom for three or four 
 lazy students to gather together and summon up a 
 newsy to read the trot, while they, lolling with pipes 
 on their Morris chairs, fumbled with the text and in 
 terlined it against a loss of memory. Let the fair- 
 haired goddess Juno speak! Ulysses, as he pleases, 
 may walk on the shore of the loud-sounding sea. 
 Thereafter in class one may repose safely on his inter 
 lineation and snap at flies with a rubber band. This 
 method of getting a lesson was all very well except 
 that the newsy halted at the proper name. A device 
 was therefore hit on of calling all the gods and heroes 
 by the name of Smith. Homeric combat then ran 
 like this : the heart of Smit was black with anger and 
 he smote Smit upon the brazen helmet. And the 
 world grew dark before his eyes, and he fell forward 
 like a tower and bit the dust and his armor clanked 
 about him. But at evening,, from a far-off mountain 
 top the white-armed goddess Smit-Smit (Pallas- 
 Athena) saw him, and she felt compash compassion 
 for him. 
 
 And I suppose that students still sing upon the 
 fence. There was a Freshman once, in those early 
 nights of autumn when they were still a prey to 
 Sophomores, who came down Library Street after 
 his supper at Commons. He wondered whether the 
 nights of hazing were done and was unresolved 
 whether he ought to return to his room and sit close. 
 
ON A PAIR OF LEATHER SUSPENDERS 155 
 
 Presently he heard the sound of singing. It came 
 from the Campus, from the fence. He was greener 
 than most Freshmen and he had never heard men 
 sing in four-part harmony. With him music had 
 always been a single tune, or at most a lost tenor 
 fumbled uncertainly for the pitch. Any grunt had 
 been a bass. And so the sound ravished him. In the 
 open air and in the dark the harmony was unpar 
 alleled. He stole forward, still with one eye open for 
 Sophomores, and crouched in the shadowy angle of 
 North Middle. Now the song was in full chorus and 
 the branches of the elms swayed to it, and again a 
 bass voice sang alone and the others hummed a low 
 accompaniment. 
 
 Occasionally, across the Campus, someone in pass 
 ing called up to a window, "Oh, Weary Walker, stick 
 out your head!" And then, after a pause, satirically, 
 when the head was out, "Stick it in again!" On the 
 stones there were the sounds of feet feet with lazy 
 purpose loud feet down wooden steps, bound for 
 pleasure. At the windows there were lights, where 
 dull thumbs moved down across a page. Let A equal 
 B to find our Z. And let it be quick about it, before 
 the student nod! And to the Freshman, crouching 
 in the shadow, it seemed at last that he was a part of 
 this life, with its music, its voices, its silent elms, the 
 dim buildings with their lights, the laughter and the 
 glad feet sounding in the dark. 
 
156 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 I came now, rambling on this black wintry morn 
 ing, before the sinister walls of Skull and Bones. 
 
 I sat on a fence and contemplated the building. 
 It is as dingy as ever and, doubtless, to an under 
 graduate, as fearful as ever. What rites and cere 
 monies are held within these dim walls! What awful 
 celebrations! The very stones are grim. The chain 
 outside that swings from post to post is not as other 
 chains, but was forged at midnight. The great door 
 has a black spell upon it. It was on such a door, iron- 
 bound and pitiless, that the tragic Ygraine beat in 
 vain for mercy. 
 
 It is a breach of etiquette for an undergraduate 
 in passing even to turn and look at Bones. Its name 
 may not be mentioned to a member of the society, 
 and one must look furtively around before pronounc 
 ing it. Now as I write the word, I feel a last vibration 
 of the fearful tremor. 
 
 Seniors compose its membership fifteen or so, and 
 membership is ranked as the highest honor of the 
 college. But in God s name, what is all this pother? 
 Are there not already enough jealousies without this 
 one added? Does not college society already fall 
 into enough locked coteries without this one? No 
 matter how keen is the pride of membership, it does 
 not atone for the disappointments and the heart 
 burnings of failure. It is hinted obscurely for expia 
 tion that it and its fellow societies do somehow confer 
 a benefit on the college by holding out a reward for 
 
ON A PAIR OF LEATHER SUSPENDERS 157 
 
 hard endeavor. This is the highest goal. I distrust 
 the wisdom of the judges. There is an honester 
 repute to be gained in the general estimate of one s 
 fellows. These societies cut an unnatural cleavage 
 across the college. They are the source of dishonest 
 envy and of mean lick-spittling. For three years, 
 until the election is announced, there is much playing 
 for position. A favored fellow, whose election is 
 certain, is courted by others who stand on a slippery 
 edge, because it is known that in Senior elections one 
 is rated by his association. And is it not prepos 
 terous that fifteen youngsters should set themselves 
 above the crowd, wear obscure jewelry and wrap 
 themselves in an empty and pretentious mystery? 
 
 But what has this rambling paper to do with a pair 
 of leather suspenders? Nothing. Nothing much. 
 Only, after a while, just before the dawn, I came in 
 front of the windows of a cheap haberdasher. And 
 I recalled how I had once bought at this very shop 
 a pair of leather suspenders. They were the only 
 ones left it was hinted that Seniors bought them 
 largely and they were a bargain. The proprietor 
 blew off the dust and slapped them and dwelt upon 
 their merits. They would last me into middle age 
 and were cheap. There was, I recall, a kind of tricky 
 differential between the shoulders to take up the slack 
 on either side. Being a Freshman I was prevailed 
 upon, and I bought them and walked to Morris Cove 
 while they creaked and fretted. And here was the 
 
158 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 very shop, arising in front of me as from times before 
 the flood. With it there arose, too, a recollection of 
 my greenness and timidity. And mingled with all 
 the hours of happiness of those times there were 
 hours, also, of emptiness and loneliness hours when, 
 newcome to my surroundings, for fear of rebuff I 
 walked alone. 
 
 The night still lingers. These dark lines of wall 
 and tree and tower are etched by Time -with memories 
 to burn the pattern. The darkness stirs strangely, 
 like waters in the solemn bowl when a witch reads off 
 the future. But the past is in this darkness, and the 
 December wind this night has roused up the summer 
 winds of long ago. In that cleft is the old window. 
 Here are the stairs, wood and echoing with an almost 
 forgotten tread. A word, a phrase, a face, shows for 
 an instant in the shadows. Here, too, in memory, is 
 a pageantry of old custom with its songs and uproar, 
 victory with its fires and dance. 
 
 Forms, too, I see bent upon their books, eager or 
 dull, with intent or sleepy finger on the page. And 
 I hear friendly cries and the sound of many feet 
 across the night. 
 
 Dawn at last a faint light through the elms. 
 From the Chapel tower the bells sound the hour and 
 strike their familiar melody. Dawn. And now the 
 East in triumphal garment scatters my memories, 
 born of night, before its flying wheel. 
 
Boots for Runaways. 
 
 NOT long ago, having come through upon the 
 uppers of my shoes, I wrapped the pair in a 
 bit of newspaper and went around the corner 
 into Sixth Avenue to find a cobbler. This is not 
 difficult, for there are at least three cobblers to the 
 block, all of them in basements four or five steps below 
 the sidewalk. Cobblers and little tailors who press 
 and repair clothing, small grocers and delicatessen 
 venders these are the chief commerce of the street. 
 I passed my tailor s shop, which is next to the corner. 
 He is a Russian Jew who came to this country before 
 the great war. Every Thursday, when he takes away 
 my off suit, I ask him about the progress of the Revo 
 lution. At first I found him hopeful, yet in these 
 last few months his opinions are a little broken. His 
 
160 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 shop consists of a single room, with a stove to heat 
 his irons and a rack for clothes, It is so open to the 
 street that once when it was necessary for me to 
 change trousers he stood between me and the window 
 with one foot against the door by way of moratorium 
 on his business. His taste in buttons is loud. Those 
 on my dinner coat are his choice great round jewels 
 that glisten in the dark. 
 
 Next to my tailor, except for a Chinese laundry 
 with a damp celestial smell, is a delicatessen shop with 
 a pleasant sound of French across the counter. Here 
 are sausages, cut across the middle in order that no 
 one may buy the pig, as it were, in its poke. Potato 
 salad is set out each afternoon in a great bowl with 
 a wooden spoon sticking from its top. Then there is 
 a baked bean, all brown upon the crust, which is 
 housed with its fellows in a cracked baking dish and 
 is not to be despised. There is also a tray of pastry 
 with whipped cream oozing agreeably from the joints, 
 and a pickle vat as corrective to these sweets. But 
 behind the shop is the bakery and I can watch a whole 
 some fellow, with his sleeves tucked up, rolling pasties 
 thin on a great white table, folding in nuts and jellies 
 and cutting them deftly for the oven. 
 
 Across the street there resides a mender of musical 
 instruments. He keeps dusty company with violins 
 and basses that have come to broken health. When 
 a trombone slips into disorder, it seeks his sanitarium. 
 Occasionally, as I pass, I catch the sound of a twang- 
 
BOOTS FOR RUNAWAYS 161 
 
 ing string, as if at last a violin were convalescent. 
 Or I hear a reedy nasal upper note, and I know that 
 an oboe has been mended of its complaint and that 
 in these dark days of winter it yearns for a woodside 
 stream and the return of spring. It seems rather a 
 romantic business tinkering these broken instruments 
 into harmony. 
 
 Next door there is a small stationer a bald-headed 
 sort of business, as someone has called it. Ruled 
 paper for slavish persons, plain sheets for bold 
 Bolshevists. 
 
 Then comes our grocer. There is no heat in the 
 place except what comes from an oil stove on which 
 sits a pan of steaming water. Behind the stove with 
 his twitching ear close against it a cat lies at all hours 
 of the day. There is an engaging smudge across his 
 nose, as if he had been led off on high adventure to 
 the dusty corners behind the apple barrel. I bend 
 across the onion crate to pet him, and he stretches his 
 paws in and out rhythmically in complete content 
 ment. He walks along the counter with arched back 
 and leans against our purchases. 
 
 Next our grocer is our bootblack, who has set up 
 a sturdy but shabby throne to catch the business off 
 the "L." How majestically one sits aloft here with 
 outstretched toe, for all the world like the Pope 
 offering his saintly toe for a sinner s kiss. The robe 
 pontifical, the triple crown! Or, rather, is this not 
 a secular throne, seized once in a people s rising? 
 
162 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 Here is a use for whatever thrones are discarded by 
 this present war. Where the crowd is thickest at 
 quitting time perhaps where the subway brawls 
 below Fourteenth Street there I would set the 
 German Kaiser s seat for the least of us to clamber on. 
 
 I took my shoes out of their wrapper. The cobbler 
 is old and wrinkled and so bent that one might think 
 that Nature aimed to contrive a hoop of him but had 
 botched the full performance. He scratched my 
 name upon the soles and tossed them into the pile. 
 There were big and little shoes, some with low square 
 heels and others with high thin heels as if their wear 
 ers stood tiptoe with curiosity. It is a quality, they 
 say, that marks the sex. On the bench were bits of 
 leather, hammers, paring-knives, awls, utensils of 
 every sort. 
 
 On arriving home I found an old friend awaiting 
 
 me. B has been engaged in a profitable business 
 
 for fifteen years or so and he has amassed a consider 
 able fortune. Certainly he deserves it, for he has been 
 at it night and day and has sacrificed many things to 
 it. He has kept the straight road despite all truant 
 beckoning. But his too close application has cramped 
 his soul. His organization and his profits, his balance 
 sheets and output have seemed to become the whole 
 of him. 
 
 But for once I found that B was in no hurry 
 
 and we talked more intimately than in several years. 
 I discovered soon that his hard busyness was no more 
 
BOOTS FOR RUNAWAYS 163 
 
 than a veneer and that his freer self still lived, but 
 in confinement. At least he felt the great lack in his 
 life, which had been given too much to the piling up 
 of things, to the sustaining of position getting and 
 spending. Yet he could see no end. He was caught 
 in the rich man s treadmill, only less horrible than 
 that of the poor man with its cold and hunger. 
 
 Afterwards, when he had gone, I fell into a survey 
 of certain other men of my acquaintance. Some few 
 of them are rich also, and they heap up for themselves 
 a pile of material things until they stifle in the midst. 
 They run swiftly and bitterly from one appointment 
 to another in order that they may add a motor to 
 their stable. If they lie awake at night, they plan 
 a new confusion for the morrow. They are getting 
 and spending always. They have been told many 
 times that some day they will die and leave their 
 wealth, yet they labor ceaselessly to increase their 
 pile. It is as if one should sweat and groan to load 
 a cart, knowing that soon it goes off on another road. 
 And yet not one of these persons will conceive that 
 I mean him. He will say that necessity keeps him at 
 it. Or he will cite his avocations to prove he is not 
 included. But he plays golf fretfully with his eye 
 always on the score. He drives his motor furiously 
 to hold a schedule. Yet in his youth many of these 
 prosperous fellows learned to play upon a fiddle, and 
 they dreamed on college window-seats. They had 
 
164 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 time for friendliness before they became so busy hold 
 ing this great world by its squirming tail. 
 
 Or perhaps they are not so very wealthy. If so, 
 they work the harder. To support their wives and 
 children? By no means. To support the pretense 
 that they are really wealthy, to support a neighbor s 
 competition. It is this competition of house and 
 goods that keeps their noses on the stone. Expendi 
 ture always runs close upon their income, and their 
 days are a race to keep ahead. 
 
 I was thinking rather mournfully of the hard and 
 unnecessary condition of these persons, when I fell 
 asleep. And by chance, these unlucky persons, my 
 boots and my cobbler, even the oboe mender, all of 
 them somehow got mixed in my dream. 
 
 It seems that there was a cobbler once, long ago, 
 who kept a shop quite out of the common run and 
 marvelous in its way. It stood in a shadowy city over 
 whose dark streets the buildings toppled, until spiders 
 spun their webs across from roof to roof. And to 
 this cobbler the god Mercury himself journeyed to 
 have wings sewed to his flying shoes. High patron 
 age. And Atalanta, too, came and held out her swift 
 foot for the fitting of a running sandal. But perhaps 
 the cobbler s most famous customer was a well-known 
 giant who ordered of him his seven-league boots. 
 These boots, as you may well imagine, were of pro 
 digious size, and the giant himself was so big that 
 when he left his order he sat outside on the pavement 
 
nflSlS 
 
166 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 and thrust his stockinged foot in through the window 
 for the cobbler to get his measure. 
 
 I was laughing heartily at this when I observed 
 that a strange procession was passing by the cobbler s 
 door. First there was a man who was burdened with 
 a great tinsel box hung with velvet, in which were six 
 plush chairs. After him came another who was 
 smothered with rugs and pictures. A third carried 
 upon his back his wife, a great fat creature, who 
 glittered with jewels. Behind him he dragged a 
 dozen trunks, from which dangled brocades and 
 laces. This was all so absurd that in my mirth I 
 missed what followed, but it seemed to be a long line 
 of weary persons, each of whom staggered under the 
 burden of an unworthy vanity. 
 
 As I laughed the night came on a dull hot night 
 of summer. And in the shop I saw the cobbler on his 
 bench, an old and wrinkled man like a dwarf in a 
 fairy tale. There was a sign now above his door. 
 "Boots for Runaways," it read. About its margin 
 were pictures of many kinds of boots a shoe of a 
 child who runs to seek adventure, Atalanta s sandals, 
 and sturdy boots that a man might wear. 
 
 And now I saw a man coming in the dark with 
 tired and drooping head. In both hands he clutched 
 silver pieces that he had gathered in the day. When 
 he was opposite the cobbler s shop, the great sign 
 caught his eye. He wagged his head as one who 
 
BOOTS FOR RUNAWAYS 167 
 
 comes upon the place he seeks. "Have you boots 
 for me?" he asked, with his head thrust in the door. 
 
 "For everyone who needs them," was the cobbler s 
 answer. 
 
 "My body is tired," the man replied, "and my soul 
 is tired." 
 
 "For what journey do you prepare?" the cobbler 
 asked. 
 
 The man looked ruefully at his hands which were 
 still tightly clenched with silver pieces. 
 
 "Getting and spending," said the cobbler slowly. 
 
 "It has been my life." As the man spoke he banged 
 with his elbow on his pocket and it rattled dully with 
 metal. 
 
 "Do you want boots because you are a coward?" 
 the cobbler asked. "If so, I have none to sell." 
 
 "A coward?" the man answered, and he spoke 
 deliberately as one in deep thought. "All my life 
 I have been a coward, fearing that I might not keep 
 even with my neighbors. Now, for the first time, I 
 am brave." 
 
 He kicked off his shoe and stretched out his foot. 
 The cobbler took down from its nail his tape line and 
 measured him. And the twilight deepened and the 
 room grew dark. 
 
 And the man went off cheerily. And with great 
 strides he went into the windy North. But to the 
 South in a slow procession, I saw those others who 
 bore the weary burden of their wealth, staggering 
 
168 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 beneath their load of dull possessions their opera 
 boxes, their money-chests and stables, their glittering 
 houses, their trunks of silks and laces, and on their 
 backs their fat wives shining in the night with jewels. 
 
On Hanging a Stocking at 
 Christmas. 
 
 AS Christmas is, above all, a holiday for chil 
 dren, it is proper in its season to consider 
 with what regard they hold its celebration. 
 But as no one may really know the secrets of child 
 hood except as he retains the recollection of his own, 
 it is therefore in the well of memory that I must dip 
 my pen. The world has been running these many 
 years with gathering speed like a great wheel upon 
 a hill, and I must roll it backward to the heights to 
 see how I fared on the night and day of Christmas. 
 
 I can remember that for a month before the day 
 I computed its distance, not only in hours and minutes 
 but even in seconds, until the answer was scrawled 
 across my slate. Now, when I multiply 24 x 60 x 60, 
 the resulting 86,400 has an agreeable familiarity as 
 the amount I struck off each morning. At bedtime 
 on Christmas Eve I had still 36,000 impatient sec 
 onds yet to wait, for I considered that Christmas 
 really started at six o clock in the morning. 
 
 There was, of course, a lesser celebration on Christ 
 mas Eve when we hung our stockings. There were 
 six of them, from mother s long one to father s short 
 one. Ours, although built on womanish lines, lacked 
 the greater length and they were, consequently, in- 
 
170 CHIMNEY -POT PAPERS 
 
 ferior for the purpose of our greed; but father s were 
 woefully short, as if fashioned to the measure of his 
 small expectancy. Even a candy cane came peeping 
 from the top, as if curiosity had stirred it to look 
 around. 
 
 Finally, when the stockings were hung on the 
 knobs of the mantel, we went up the dark stairs to 
 bed. At the landing we saw the last glimmer from 
 the friendly sitting-room. The hall clock ticked 
 solemnly in the shadow below with an air of firmness, 
 as much as to say that it would not be hurried. Fret 
 as we might, those 36,000 seconds were not to be 
 jostled through the night. 
 
 In the upper hall we looked from a window upon 
 the snowy world. Perhaps we were too old to believe 
 in Santa Glaus, but even so, on this magic night might 
 not a skeptic be at fault might there not be a chance 
 that the discarded world had returned to us? Once 
 a year, surely, reason might nod and drowse. Per 
 haps if we put our noses on the cold glass and peered 
 hard into the glittering darkness, we might see the 
 old fellow himself, muffled to his chin in furs, going 
 on his yearly errands. It was a jingling of sleigh 
 bells on the street that started this agreeable sus 
 picion, but, alas, when the horse appeared, manifestly 
 by his broken jogging gait he was only an earthly 
 creature and could not have been trusted on the roof. 
 Or the moon, sailing across the sky, invited the 
 thought that tonight beyond the accustomed hour and 
 
HANGING A STOCKING AT CHRISTMAS 171 
 
 for a purpose it would throw its light across the roofs 
 to mark the chimneys. 
 
 Presently mother called up from the hall below. 
 Had we gone to bed? Reluctantly now we began to 
 thumb the buttons. Off came our clothes, both shirts 
 together tonight for better speed in dressing. And 
 all the night pants and drawers hung as close neigh 
 bors, one within the other, with stockings dangling 
 at the ends, for quick resumption. We slipped 
 shivering into the cold sheets. Down below the bed, 
 by special permission, stood the cook s clock, wound 
 up tight for its explosion at six o clock. 
 
 Then came silence and the night. . . . 
 
 Presently, all of a sudden, Brrr--! There arose a 
 deafening racket in the room. Had the reindeer 
 come afoul of the chimney? Had the loaded sleigh 
 crashed upon the roof? Were pirates on the stairs? 
 We awoke finally, and smothered the alarm in the 
 pillows. A match ! The gas ! And now a thrill went 
 through us. Although it was still as black as ink 
 outside, at last the great day of all the year had come. 
 
 It was, therefore, before the dawn that we stole 
 downstairs in our stockings dressed loosely and 
 without too great precision in our hurry. Buttons 
 that lay behind were neglected, nor did it fret us if a 
 garment came on twisted. It was a rare tooth that 
 felt the brush this morning, no matter how it was 
 coddled through the year. 
 
 We carried our shoes, but this was not entirely in 
 
CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 consideration for the sleeping house. Rather, our 
 care proceeded from an enjoyment of our stealth; for 
 to rise before the dawn when the lamps were still 
 lighted on the street and issue in our stockings, was 
 to taste adventure. It had not exactly the zest of 
 burglary, although it was of kin: nor was it quite 
 like the search for buried treasure which we played 
 on common days: yet to slink along the hallway on 
 a pitch-black Christmas morning, with shoes dangling 
 by the strings, was to realize a height of happiness 
 unequaled. 
 
 Quietly we tiptoed down the stairs on whose steep 
 rail we had so often slid in the common light of day, 
 now so strangely altered by the shadows. Below in 
 the hall the great clock ticked, loudly and with satis 
 faction that its careful count was done and its seconds 
 all despatched. There was a gurgle in its throat 
 before it struck the hour, as some folk clear their 
 throats before they sing. 
 
 As yet there was not a blink of day. The house 
 was as black as if it practiced to be a cave, yet an 
 instinct instructed us that now at least darkness was 
 safe. There were frosty patterns on the windows of 
 the sitting-room, familiar before only on our bedroom 
 windows. Here in the sitting-room arose dim shapes 
 which probably were its accustomed furniture, but 
 which to our excited fancy might be sleds and veloci 
 pedes. 
 
HANGING A STOCKING AT CHRISTMAS 173 
 
 We groped for a match. There was a splutter that 
 showed red in the hollow of my brother s hand. 
 
 After the first glad shock, it was our habit to rum 
 mage in the general midden outside our stockings. 
 If there was a drum upon the heap, should not first 
 a tune be played softly lest it rouse the house? Or 
 if a velocipede stood beside the fender, surely the 
 restless creature chafed for exercise and must be 
 ridden a few times around the room. Or perhaps a 
 sled leaned against the chair (it but rested against 
 the rigors of the coming day) and one should feel its 
 runners to learn whether they are whole and round, 
 for if flat and fixed with screws it is no better than a 
 sled for girls with feet tucked up in front. On such 
 a sled, no one trained to the fashions of the slide 
 would deign to take a belly- slammer, for the larger 
 boys would cry out with scorn and point their 
 sneering mittens. 
 
 The stocking was explored last. It was like a grab- 
 bag, but glorified and raised to a more generous level. 
 On meaner days shriveled grab-bags could be got at 
 the corner for a penny if such mild fortune fell your 
 way mere starvelings by comparison and to this 
 shop you had often trotted after school when learning 
 sat heaviest on your soul. If a nickel had accrued to 
 you from the sale of tintags, it was better, of course, 
 to lay it out in pop; but with nothing better than a 
 penny, there was need of sharp denial. How you 
 lingered before the horehound jar! Coltsfoot, too, 
 
174 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 was but a penny to the stick and pleased the palate. 
 Or one could do worse than licorice. But finally you 
 settled on a grab-bag. You roused an old woman 
 from her knitting behind the stove and demanded that 
 a choice of grab-bags be placed before you. Then, 
 like the bearded phrenologist at the side-show of the 
 circus, you put your fingers on them to read their 
 humps. Perhaps an all-day sucker lodged inside 
 a glassy or an agate marbles best for pugging or 
 a brass ring with a ruby. 
 
 Through the year these bags sufficed, but the 
 Christmas stocking was a deeper and finer mystery. 
 In the upper leg were handkerchiefs from grand 
 mother whose thoughts ran prudentially on noses 
 mittens and a cap useful presents of duller pur 
 pose things that were due you anyway and would 
 have come in the course of time. But down in the 
 darker meshes of the stocking, when you had turned 
 the corner of the heel, there were the sweet extras of 
 life a mouth-organ, a baseball, a compass and a 
 watch. 
 
 Some folk have a Christmas tree instead of hang 
 ing their stockings, but this is the preference of older 
 folk rather than the preference of children. Such 
 persons wish to observe a child s enjoyment, and this 
 is denied them if the stocking is opened in the dawn. 
 Under a pretense of instruction they sit in an absurd 
 posture under the tree; but they do no more than 
 read the rules and are blind to the obscurer uses of 
 
HANGING A STOCKING AT CHRISTMAS 175 
 
 the toys. As they find occasion, the children run off 
 and play in a quieter room with some old and broken 
 toy. 
 
 Who can interpret the desires of children? They 
 are a race apart from us. At times, for a moment, 
 we bring them to attention; then there is a scurry of 
 feet and they are gone. Although they seem to sit 
 at table with us, they are beyond a frontier that we 
 cannot pass. Their words are ours, but applied to 
 foreign uses. If we try to follow their truant 
 thoughts, like the lame man of the story we limp be 
 hind a shooting star. We bestow on them a blind 
 condescension, not knowing how their imagination 
 outclimbs our own. And we cramp them with our 
 barren learning. 
 
 I assert, therefore, that it is better to find one s 
 presents in the dawn, when there is freedom. In all 
 the city, wherever there are lights, children have 
 taken a start upon the day. Then, although the toys 
 are strange, there is adventure in prying at their 
 uses. If one commits a toy to a purpose undreamed 
 of by its maker, it but rouses the invention to further 
 discovery. Once on a dark and frosty Christmas 
 morning, I spent a puzzling hour upon a coffee- 
 grinder a present to my mother in a delusion that 
 it was a rare engine destined for myself. It might 
 have been a bank had it possessed a slot for coins. 
 A little eagle surmounted the top, yet this was not a 
 sufficient clue. The handle offered the hope that it 
 
176 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 was a music-box, but although I turned it round and 
 round, and noises issued from its body quite foreign 
 to my other toys, yet I could not pronounce it music. 
 With sails it might have been a windmill. I laid it on 
 its side and stood it on its head without conclusion. 
 It was painted red, and that gave it a wicked look, 
 but no other villainy appeared. To this day as often 
 as I pass a coffee-grinder in a grocer s shop I turn its 
 handle in memory of my perplexing hour. And even 
 if one remains unschooled to the uses of the toys, their 
 discovery in the dawn while yet the world lies fast 
 asleep, is far beyond their stale performance that rises 
 with the sun. 
 
 And yet I know of an occurrence, to me pathetic, 
 that once attended such an early discovery. A dis 
 tant cousin of mine a man really not related except 
 by the close bond of my regard was brought up 
 many years ago by an uncle of austere and miserly 
 nature. Such goodness as this uncle had once pos 
 sessed was cramped into a narrow and smothering 
 piety. He would have dimmed the sun upon the 
 Sabbath, could he have reached up tall enough. He 
 had no love in his heart, nor mirth. My cousin has 
 always loved a horse and even in his childhood this 
 love was strong. And so, during the days that led up 
 to Christmas when children speculate upon their de 
 sires and check them on their fingers, he kept asking 
 his uncle for a pony. At first, as you might know, 
 his uncle was stolid against the thought, but finally, 
 
HANGING A STOCKING AT CHRISTMAS 177 
 
 with many winks and nods pleasantries beyond his 
 usual habit he assented. 
 
 Therefore in the early darkness of the day, the 
 child came down to find his gift. First, probably, he 
 went to the stable and climbing on the fence he looked 
 through the windows for an unaccustomed form inside 
 the stalls. Next he looked to see whether the pony 
 might be hitched to the post in front of the house, in 
 the manner of the family doctor. The search failing 
 and being now somewhat disturbed with doubt, he 
 entered his nursery on the slim chance that the pony 
 might be there. The room was dark and he listened 
 on the sill, if he might hear him whinny. Feeling his 
 way along the hearth he came on nothing greater than 
 his stocking which was tied to the andiron. It bulged 
 and stirred his curiosity. He thrust in his hand and 
 coming on something sticky, he put his fingers in his 
 mouth. They were of a delightful sweetness. He 
 now paused in his search for the pony and drawing 
 out a huge lump of candy he applied himself. But 
 the day was near and he had finished no more than 
 half, when a ray of light permitted him to see what 
 he ate. It was a candy horse making good the 
 promise of his uncle. This and a Testament had 
 been stuffed inside his stocking. The Testament was 
 wrapped in tissue, but the horse was bitten to the 
 middle. It had been at best but a poor substitute 
 for what he wanted, yet his love was so broad that 
 it included even a sugar horse; and this, alas, he had 
 
178 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 consumed unknowing in the dark. And even now 
 when the dear fellow tells the story after these many 
 years have passed, and comes to the sober end with 
 the child crying in the twilight of the morning, I 
 realize as not before that there should be no Christ 
 mas kept unless it be with love and mirth. 
 
 It was but habit that we hung our stockings at the 
 chimney the piano would have done as well for I 
 retain but the slightest memory of a belief in Santa 
 Claus: perhaps at most, as I have hinted, a far-off 
 haze of wonder while looking through the window 
 upon the snowy sky at night a fancied clatter 
 on the roof, if I lay awake. And therefore in a 
 chimney there was no greater mystery than was in 
 herent in any hole that went off suspiciously in the 
 dark. There was a fearful cave beneath the steps 
 that mounted from the rear to the front garret. This 
 was wrapped in Cimmerian darkness which is the 
 strongest pigment known and it extended from its 
 mouth beyond the furthest stretch of leg. To the 
 disillusioned, indeed, this cave was harmless, for it 
 merely offset the lower ceiling of the bathroom below ; 
 yet to us it was a cave unparalleled. Little by 
 little we ventured in, until in time we could sit on 
 the snug joists inside with the comfortable feeling of 
 pirates. Presently we hit on the device of hanging 
 a row of shining maple-syrup tins along the wall out 
 side where they were caught by the dusty sunlight, 
 which was thus reflected in on us. By the light of 
 
HANGING A STOCKING AT CHRISTMAS 179 
 
 these dim moons the cave showed itself to be the size 
 of a library table. And here, also, we crouched on 
 dark and cloudy days when the tins were in eclipse, 
 and found a dreadful joy when the wind scratched 
 upon the roof. 
 
 In the basement, also, there was a central hall that 
 disappeared forever under an accumulation of porch 
 chairs and lumber. Here was no light except what 
 came around two turns from the laundry. Even 
 Annie the cook, a bold venturesome person, had 
 never quite penetrated to a full discovery of this hall 
 way. A proper approach into the darkness was on 
 hands and knees, and yet there were barrels and 
 boxes to overcome. Therefore, as we were bred to 
 these broader discoveries, a mere chimney in the 
 sitting-room, which arose safely from the fenders, was 
 but a mild and pleasant tunnel to the roof. 
 
 And if a child believes in Santa Glaus and chim 
 neys, and that his presents are stored in a glittering 
 kingdom across the wintry hills, he will miss the finer 
 pleasure of knowing that they are hidden somewhere 
 in his own house. For myself, I would not willingly 
 forego certain dizzy ascents to the topmost shelves of 
 the storeroom, where, with my head close under the 
 ceiling and my foot braced against the wall, I have 
 examined suspicious packages that came into the 
 house by stealth. As likely as not, at the ringing of 
 the door-bell, we had been whisked into a back room. 
 Presently there was a foot sounding on the stairs and 
 
180 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 across the ceiling. Then we were released. But 
 something had arrived. 
 
 Thereafter we found excitement in rummaging in 
 unlikely places a wary lifting of summer garments 
 laid away, for a peek beneath a journey on one s 
 stomach under the spare-room bed a pilgrimage 
 around the cellar with a flaring candle furtive 
 explorations of the storeroom. And when we came to 
 a door that was locked Aha! Here was a puzzle 
 and a problem! We tried every key in the house, 
 right side up and upside down. Bluebeard s wife, 
 poor creature, if I read the tale aright, was merely 
 seeking her Christmas presents around the house 
 before the proper day. 
 
 The children of a friend of mine, however, have 
 been brought up to a belief in Santa Glaus, and on 
 Christmas Eve they have the pretty custom of filling 
 their shoes with crackers and scraps of bread by way 
 of fodder for the reindeer. When the shoes are found 
 empty in the morning, but with crumbs about as 
 though the hungry reindeer spilled them in their 
 haste it fixes the deception. 
 
 But if one must have a Christmas tree, I recom 
 mend the habit of some friends of mine. In front of 
 their home, down near the fence, is a trim little cedar. 
 T - connects this with electric wires and hangs 
 on it gayly colored lamps. Every night for a week, 
 until the new year, these lights shine across the snow 
 and are the delight of travelers on the road. The 
 
HANGING A STOCKING AT CHRISTMAS 181 
 
 Christmas stars, it seems, for this hallowed season 
 have come to earth. 
 
 We gave the family dinner. On my mother fell 
 the extra labor, but we took the general credit. All 
 the morning the relatives arrived thin and fat. But 
 if one of them bore a package or if his pockets sagged, 
 we showed him an excessive welcome. Sometimes 
 there was a present boxed and wrapped to a mighty 
 bulk. From this we threw off thirty papers and the 
 bundle dwindled, still no gift appeared. In this lay 
 the sweetness of the jest, for finally, when the con 
 tents were shriveled to a kernel, in the very heart of 
 it there lay a bright penny or common marble. 
 
 All this time certain savory whiffs have been blow 
 ing from the kitchen. Twice at least my mother has 
 put her head in at the door to count the relatives. 
 And now when the clock on the mantel strikes two 
 a bronze Lincoln deliberating forever whether he will 
 sign the Emancipation Bill the dining-room door 
 is opened. 
 
 The table was drawn out to prodigious length and 
 was obliquely set across the room. As early as yes 
 terday the extra leaves had been brought from the 
 pantry, and we had all taken part in fitting them 
 together. Not to disturb the larger preparation, our 
 supper and breakfast had been served in the kitchen. 
 And even now to eat in the kitchen, if the table is 
 set before the window and there is a flurry of snow 
 
182 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 outside, is to feel pleasantly the proximity of a great 
 occasion. 
 
 The Christmas table was so long and there were 
 so many of us, that a few of the chairs were caught 
 in a jog of the wall and had no proper approach ex 
 cept by crawling on hands and knees beneath it. Each 
 year it was customary to request my maiden aunt, a 
 prim lady who bordered on seventy and had limbs 
 instead of legs, to undertake the passage. Each year 
 we listened for the jest and shouted with joy when 
 the request was made. There were other jests, too, 
 that were dear to us and grew better with the years. 
 My aunt was reproved for boisterous conduct, and 
 although she sat as silent as a mouse, she was always 
 warned against the cider. Each year, also, as soon 
 as the dessert appeared, there was a demand that a 
 certain older cousin tell the Judge West story. But 
 the jest lay in the demand instead of in the story, for 
 although there was a clamor of applause, the story 
 was never told and it teases me forever. Then another 
 cousin, who journeyed sometimes to New York, 
 usually instructed us in the latest manner of eating 
 an orange in the metropolis. But we disregarded his 
 fashionable instruction, and peeled ours round and 
 round. 
 
 The dinner itself was a prodigious feast. The cook- 
 stove must have rested and panted for a week there 
 after. Before long, Annie got so red bringing in 
 turkeys and cranberry sauce countless plates heaped 
 
HANGING A STOCKING AT CHRISTMAS 183 
 
 and toppling with vegetables and meats that one 
 might think she herself was in process to become a 
 pickled beet and would presently enter on a platter. 
 
 In the afternoon we rested, but at night there was 
 a dance, for which my maiden aunt played the piano. 
 The dear good soul, whose old brown fingers were 
 none too limber, had skill that scarcely mounted to 
 the speed of a polka, but she was steady at a waltz. 
 There was one tune bink a bunk bunk, bink a bunk 
 bunk that went around and around with an agree 
 able monotony even when the player nodded. There 
 was a legend in the family that once she fell asleep in 
 the performance, and that the dancers turned down 
 the lights and left the room; to her amazement when 
 presently she awoke, for she thought she had outsat 
 the party. 
 
 My brother and I had not advanced to the trick 
 of dancing and we built up our blocks in the corner 
 of the room in order that the friskier dancers might 
 kick them over as they passed. Chief in the perform 
 ance was the Judge West cousin who, although 
 whiskered almost into middle age, had a merry heart 
 and knew how to play with children. Sometimes, by 
 consent, we younger fry sat beneath the piano, which 
 was of an old square pattern, and worked the pedals 
 for my aunt, in order that her industry might be un 
 divided on the keys. It is amazing what a variety 
 we could cast upon the waltz, now giving it a muffled 
 
184 
 
 CHIMNEY-POT PAPERS 
 
 sound, and presently offering the dancers a prolonged 
 roaring. 
 
 Midway in the evening, when the atrocities of 
 dinner were but mildly remembered, ice-cream was 
 brought in. It was not hard as at dinner, but had 
 settled to a delicious softness, and could be mushed 
 upon a spoon. Then while the party again proceeded, 
 and my aunt resumed her waltz, we were despatched 
 upstairs. 
 
 On the bed lay our stockings, still tied with string, 
 that had been stuffed with presents in the dawn. But 
 the morning had now sunk into immeasurable dis 
 tance and seemed as remote as Job himself. And all 
 through the evening, as we lay abed and listened to 
 the droning piano below, we felt a spiritual hollow- 
 ness because the great day had passed. 
 

 
 , 
 
 
 1-ioow-g 
 
Chimney-pot papers. 
 
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