 Chapter 1 of Journeys to Baghdad This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org recording by Rita Boutros. Journeys to Baghdad by Charles S. Brooks. Journeys to Baghdad. Are you of that elect who, at certain seasons of the year, perhaps in March when there is timid promise of the spring, or in the days of October when there are winds across the earth and gorgeous panic of fallen leaves, are you of that elect who on such occasion or any occasion else feels starings in you to be quit of whatever prosy work is yours to throw down your book or ledger or your measuring tape if such device marks your service and to go forth into the world? I do count myself of this elect and I will name such stimuli as most set these starings in me and first of all there is a smell compounded out of hemp and tar that works pleasantly to my undoing. Now it happens that there is in the city down by the river where it flows black with city stain as though the toes of commerce had been washed therein, a certain ship chandlery. It is filthy coming on the place for there is reek from the river and staleness from the shops, ancient whiffs no wise and feebled by their longevity. Nestors of their race with span of seventy lusty summers but these smells do not prevail within the chandlery. At first you see nothing but rope besides clothesline and other such familiar and domestic twistings there are great courtages scarce kinsmen to them which will later put to sea and will whistle with shrill enjoyment at their release. There are such hooks swivels blocks and tackles and such confusion of ships devices as would be enough for the building of a sea-tail. It may be fancy that here is treasure island itself shuffled and laid apart in bits like a puzzle picture for genius may be is but a nimbleness of collocation of such hitherto unconsidered trifles. Then you will go aloft where sails are made with sailor men squatting about bronzed fellows rheumatic all with pipes and through all this shop is the smell of hemp and tar. In finer matters I have no nose. It is ridiculous really that this very messenger and forerunner of myself this trumpeter of my coming this binazel fellow in the crow's nest should be so deficient if smells were bears how often I would be bit my nose may serve by way of ornament or for the sniffing of the heavier odors yet will fail in the nice detection of the fainter waftings and olfactory ticklings yet how will it dilate on the odyssean smell of hemp and tar. And I have no explanation of this for I am no sailor. Indeed at sea I am misery itself whenever perchance the ship goes wop with a wiggle between. Such wistful glances have I cast upon the wide freedom of the decks when I leave them on the perilous adventure of dinner. So this relish of hemp and tar must be a legacy from a far off time. A dim adivism to put it as hard as possible for I seem to remember being told that my ancestors were once engaged in buccaneering or other valiant livelihood. But here is a peculiar thing. The chandlery gives me no desire to run away to sea. Rather the smell of the place urges me indeterminately diffusedly to true entry. It offers me no particular chart. It but cuts my moorings for whatever winds are blowing. If there be blood of a pirate in me it is a shame what faded juice it is. It would flow pink on the sticking. In mean contrast to skulls, bowie knives and other red villainy my thoughts will be set toward the mild true entry of trudging for an afternoon in the country. Or it is likely that I'll carry stones for the castle that I have been this long time building. Where the trick of prosody in me I would hew a poem on the spot. Such is my anemia. And yet there is a touch of valiancy too as from the days when my sainted ancestors sailed with their glass beads from Bristol Harbor the desire of visiting the sunset of sailing down on the far side of the last horizon where the world itself falls off and there is sky with swirl of stars beyond. In the spring of each year everyone should go to Baghdad not particularly to Baghdad for I shall not dictate in matter of detail but to any such town that may happen to be so remote that you are not sure when you look it up whether it is on page 47 which is Asia or on page 53 which is Persia. But Baghdad will serve for surely reader you have not forgotten that it was in Baghdad in the surprising rain of Harun al-Rashid that Sinbad the sailor lived. Nor can it have escaped you that scarce a mule's back distance such was the method of computation in those golden days lived that prince of medieval plainclothes men Ali Baba. Historically Baghdad lies in that tract of earth where purple darkens into night. Geographically it lies obliquely downward and is I compute considerably off the southeast corner of my basement. It is such distant proximity doubtless that renders my basement and particularly its wood pile which lies obscurely beyond the laundry such a shadowy grim and altogether mysterious place. If there be any part of the house including certain dark corners of the attic that is fearfully Mesopotamian after nightfall it is that wood pile. Even when I sit above secure with lights if by chance I hear tapings from below such noises are common on a windy night. I know that it is the African magician pounding for the genie the sound echoing through the hollow earth. It is matter of doubt whether the iron bars so usual on basement windows serve chiefly to keep burglars out or whether their greater service is not their defense of western Christianity against the invasion from the east which except for these bars would enter here as by a postern. At a hazard my suspicion would fall on the iron doors that open inwards in the base of chimneys. We have been fondly credulous that there is nothing but ash inside and mere siftings from the fire above. And when on an occasion we reach in with a trowel for a scoop of this wood ash for our roses we laugh at ourselves for our scare of being nabbed. But someday if by way of experiment you will thrust your head within it's a small hole and you will be besmirched beyond anything but a Saturday's reckoning. You will see that the pit goes off in darkness downward. It was but the other evening as we receded about the fire that there came upward from the basement a gibbering squeak. Then the woodpile fell over for so we judged the clatter. Is it fantastic to think that some dark and muffled Persian after his dingy tunneling from the banks of the Tigris had climbed the pile of wood for a breath of night at the window and his foot slipping the pile fell over? Plainly we heard him scuttling back to the ash pit. Be these things as they may when you have arrived in Baghdad and it is best that you travel over land and sea. If you be serious in your zest you will not be satisfied but will journey a thousand miles more at the very least in whatever direction is steepest. And you will turn the flanks of seven mountains with seven villainous peaks thereon. For the very number of them will put a spell on you and you will cross running water that you leave no scent for the world behind. Such journey would be the soul of truantry and you should set out upon the road every spring when the wind comes warm. Now the medieval pilgrimage in its day as you very well know was a most popular institution and the reasons are as plentiful as blackberries. But in the first place and foremost it came always in the spring. It was like a tonic, iron for the blood. There were many men who were not a bit pious who on the first warm day when customers were scarce yawned themselves into a prodigious holiness. Who indeed would resign himself to changing monies or selling doves upon the temple's steps when such appeal was in the air? What cobbler even bent upon his leather whose soul would not mount upon such a summons? Who was it preached the first crusade? There was no marvel in the business. Did he come down our street now that April's here? He would win recruits from every house. I myself would care little whether he were Christian or Mohammedan if only the shrine lay overseas and deep within the twistings of the mountains. If however your true entry is domestic and the scope of the seven seas with glimpse of Baghdad is too broad for your desire then your yearning may direct itself to the spaces just outside your own town. If such myopic true entry is in you there is much to be said for going afoot. In these days when motors are as plentiful as mortgages this may appear but discontented destitution the cry of sour grapes and yet much of the adventuring of life has been gained afoot but walking now has fallen on evil days it needs but an enlistment of words to show its decadence. Tramp is such a word. Time was when it signified a straight back and muscular calves and an appetite and at nightfall maybe pleasant gossip at the hearth on the affairs of distant villages. There was rhythm in the sound but now it means a loafer, a shuffler, a wilted rascal. It is patched, dingy, out at elbows. Take the word vagabond. It ought to be of innocent repute for it is built solely from stuff that means to wander and wandering since the days of Moses has been practiced by the most respectable persons. Yet Noah Webster, a most disinterested old gentleman makes it clear that a vagabond is a vicious scamp who deserves no better than the lock-up. Doubtless Webster if at home would lose his dog did such a one appear. A wayfarer also in former times was but a goer of ways a man afoot, whether on pilgrimage or itinerant with his wares and cart and bell. Does the word not recall the poetry of the older road, the jogging horse, the bush of the tavern, the crowd about the peddler's pack, the musician piping to the open window or the shrine in the hollow, or maybe it summons to you a decked and painted chembissies bellowing his wrath to an in-yard? One would think that the inventor of these scandals was a crutched and limping fellow who, being himself stunted and dwarfed below the waist, was trying to sneer into disuse all walking the world over, or one who is paunched by fat living beyond carrying power, larding the lean earth, fearing lest he sweat himself to death, some false staff who unbuttons him after supper and sleeps on benches afternoon. Rather, these words should connote the strong, the self-reliant, the youthful. He is a tramp, we should say, who relies most on his own legs and resources, who least cushions himself daintily against jar in his neighbor's tonneau, whose eye shines out seldomest from the curb for a lift. The wayfarer must go forth in the open air. He must seek hilltop and wind. He must gather the dust of counties. His prospects must be of broad fields and the smoking chimneys of supper. But the goer of foot must not be conceived as primarily an engine of muscle. He is the best walker who keeps most widely awake in his five senses. Some men might as well walk through a railway tunnel. They are so concerned with the getting there that a black knight hangs over them. They plunge forward with their heads down as though they came of an antique race of road builders. Should there be mileposts, they are busied with them only and they will draw dials from their pokes to time themselves. I fell into this iniquity on a walk in Wales from Bala to Dalgeli. Although I set out leisurely enough with an eye for the lake and hills, before many hours had elapsed, I had acquired the milepost habit and walked as if for a wager. I covered the last twenty miles in less than five hours and when the brown stone village came in sight and I had thumped down the last hill and over the peaked bridge I was a dilapidated and foot sore vagrant and nothing more. To this day Wales for me is the land where once feet have the ugly habit of foregathering in the end of the shoes. Worse still than the athletic walker is he who takes dame care out for a stroll. He forever runs his machinery, plans his business ventures and introduces his warehouse to the countryside. Nor must walking be conceived as merely a means of resting. One should set out refreshed and for this reason morning is the best time. Yours must be an exultant mood. Full many a glorious morning have I seen flatter the mountaintops with sovereign eye. Your brain is off at a speed that was impossible in your lackluster days. You have a flow of thoughts instead of the miserable trickle that ordinarily serves your business purposes and keeps you from under the trolley cars. But all true entry is not in the open air. I know a man who while it is yet winter will get out his rods and fit them together as he sits before the fire. Then he will swing his arm forward from the elbow. The table has become his covert and the rug beyond is his pool. And sometimes even when the rod is not in his hand he will make the motion forward from the elbow and will drop his thumb. It will show that he has jumped the seasons and that he stands to his knees in an August stream. It was but yesterday on my return from work that I witnessed a sight that moved me pleasantly to thoughts of true entry. Now in all points a grocer's wagon is stayed and respectable. Indeed in its adherence to the business of the hour we might use it as a pattern. For six days in the week it concerns itself solely with its errands of mercy. Such woes and running up the kitchen steps with baskets of potatoes. Such poundings on the door. Such golden wealth of melons as it dispenses. Though there may be a kind of gaiety in this yet I'll hazard that in a whole range of quadricycle life no vehicle is more free from any taint of riotous conduct. Mark how it keeps its Sabbath in the shed. Yet here was this sturdy Puritan tied by a rope to a motor car and fairly bounding down the street. It was a worse breach than when Noah was drunk within his tent. Was it an instance of falling into bad company? It was Nim you remember who set Master Slender onto drinking. And I be drunk again, quoth he. I'll be drunk with those that have the fear of God and not with drunken knaves. Or rather did not every separate squeak of the grocer's wagon cry out a truant disposition. After years of repression here was its chance at last. And with what a joyous relic with what a lively clatter with what a hilarious reeling as though in gay defiance of the law of gravity was it using its liberty. Had it been a hearse and a runaway the comedy would not have been better. If I had been younger I would have pelted after and climbed in over the tailboard to share the reckless pitch of its enfranchisement. Then there is a truantry that I mention with hesitation for it comes close to the heart of my desire and in such matter particularly I would not wish to appear a fool to my fellows. The child has this truantry when he plays at Indian for he fashions the universe to his desires but some men too can lift themselves though theirs is an intellectual bootstrap into a life that moves above these denser airs. There's is an intensity that goes deeper than daydreaming although it admits distant kinship through what twilight and shadows do such men climb until night and stardust are about them. There's is the dizzy exultation of him who mounts above the world. Alas in me is no such unfathomable mystery I but trick myself yet I have my moments these stones that I carry on the mountain what of them on what windy ridge do I build my castle? It is shrill and bleak they say on the topmost peaks of the delectable mountains so lower down I have reared its walls. There is no storm in these upland valleys and the sun sits pleasantly on their southern slopes but even if they're beyond folded no broad prospect from the devil to the sunrise there are pleasant cottages in sight and the smoke of many suppers curling up. If you happened to have been a freshman at Yale some eighteen years ago and were at all addicted to canoeing on Lake Whitney and if moreover on coming off the lake they're burned in you a thirst for ginger beer as is common in the gullet of a freshman doubtless you have gone from the boathouse to a certain little white building across the road to gratify your hot desires. When you open the door you're a contemptible person I speak with the vocabulary of a sophomore is proclaimed to all within by the jangling of a bell. After due interval wherein you busy yourself in an inspection of the cakes and buns that beam upon you from a showcase your nose meanwhile being pressed close against the glass for any slight blemish that might deflect your decision for a current in the dough often raises an unsavory suspicion and you'll squint to make the matter sure there will appear through a back door a little old man to minister unto you. You will give no great time to the naming of your drink for the fires are hot in you but will take your bottle to a table. The braver spirits among you will scorn glasses as effeminate and will gulp the liquor straight from the bottle with what wickedest bravado you can muster. Now it is likely that you have done this with a swagger and have called your servitor old top or other playful name. Mark your mistake. You were in the presence if you but knew it of a real author not a Tyro fumbling for self-expression but a man with 30 cereals to his credit. Shall I name the periodical? It was the golden hours I think. Ginger beer and jangling bells were but a fringe upon his darker purpose. His desk was somewhere in the back of the house and there he would rise to all the fury of a South Sea wreck for his genius lay in the broader effects. Even while we simpletons gested feebly and practiced drinking with the open throat which we esteemed would be of service when we had progressed to the heavier art of drinking real beer even as we munched upon his ginger cakes he had left us and was exterminating an army corps in the back room. He was a little man pale and stooped but with a genius for truantry a pilgrim of the Baghdad road. But we move on too high a plane. Most of us are admitted into truantry by the accidents merely of our senses. By way of instance the sniff of a rotten apple will set a man off as on seven-league boots to the valleys of his childhood. The dry rustling of November leaves relights the fires of youth. It was only this afternoon that so slightest circumstance as a ray of light flashing in my eye provided me an agreeable and unexpected truantry. It sent me climbing the mountains of the North and in no less company than that of Brunhilda and a troop of Valkyrs. It is likely enough that none of you have heard of Long Street. As far as I am aware it is not known to general fame. It is typically a back street of the business of a city that is the vantages of its buildings are darkened most often by packing cases and bails. Behind these vantages are metal chutes. To one uninitiated in the ways of commerce it would appear that these openings were patterned for the multi-form enactment of an Amy Robbsart tragedy with such devilish deceit are the chutes laid up against the openings. First the teamster teeters and cajoles the box to the edge of the dray. Then with a sudden push he throws it off down the chute from which it disappears with a booming sound. As I recall it was by some such treachery that Amy Robbsart met her death. Be that as it may all day long great drays go by with earls of luster on their lofty seats prevailing on their horses with stout Elizabethan language. If there comes a tangle in the traffic it is then especially that you will hear a largeness of speech as of spacious and heroic days. During the meaner hours of daylight it is my privilege to occupy a desk and chair at a window that overlooks this street. Of the details of my activity I shall make no mention of such level being far below the flight of these enfranchised hours of night where and I write. But in the pauses of this activity I see below me wagon loads of nails go by and wagon loads of hammers hard after to get a crack at them. Then there will be a truck of saws as though the planking of the world yearned toward amputation. Or maybe at a guess ten thousand rat traps will move on down the street. It's sure they take us for Hamlin Town and are eager to lay their ambushment. There is something rather starring in such prodigious marshalling but I hear you ask what this has to do with true entry. It was near Quinton time yesterday that a dre was discharging cases down a chute. These cases were secured with metal reinforcement and this metal being rubbed bright happened to catch a ray of the sun at such an angle that it was reflected in my eye. This flash which was like lightning in its intensity together with the roar of the falling case transported me. It's monstrous what jumps we take when the fit is on us to the slopes of dim mountains in the night to the heights above Valhalla with the flash of valkers descending and the booming of the case upon the slide God pity me was the music. It was thus that I was sent aloft upon the mountains of the north into the glare of lightning with the cry of valkers above the storm. But presently there was a voice from the street. It's the last case tonight Sam, you lunkhead. It's Quinton time. The light fades on Long Street. The drays have gone home. The earls of Lester drows in their own kitchens or spread whole slices of bread on their broad aristocratic palms. Somewhere in the dimmest recesses of those cluttered buildings ten thousand rat traps await expectant the oncoming of the rats. And in your own basement the shadows having prospered in the twilight it is sure by the beard of the prophet it is sure that the ash pit door is again a jar and that a pair of eyes gleam upon you from the darkness. If on the instant you will crouch behind the laundry tubs and will hold your breath as though a doctor's thermometer were in your mouth you with a cold in the head. It's likely that you will see a Persian climb from the pit shake the ashes off him and make for the vantage of the woodpile where the window being barred he will sigh his soul for the freedom of the night. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Of Journeys to Baghdad This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Rita Butros. Journeys to Baghdad by Charles S. Brooks The worst edition of Shakespeare Reader, if by fortunate chance you have a son of tender years the age is best from the 6th to the 11th summer or in lieu of a son, a nephew only a few years in pants mere shoots of nether garments not yet descending to the knees. Doubtless if such fortunate chance be yours you went on one or more occasions last summer to a circus. If the true holiday spirit be in you and you be of other sort I'll not chronicle you. You will have come early to the scene for a just examination of what mysteries and excitements are set forth in the side shows. Now if you be a man of humane reasoning you will stand lightly on your legs alert to be pulled this way or that as the nepotic wish shall direct whether it be to the fat woman's booth or to the platform where the thin man stands with legs entwined behind his neck in delightful promise of what joy awaits you when you have dropped your nickel in the box and gone inside. To draw your steps it is the showman's privilege to make what blare he pleas upon the sidewalk to puff his cheeks with robust announcement. If by further fortunate chance you are addicted let us say in the quieter hours of winter to writing of any kind and for your joy I pray that this be so whether this writing be in massive volumes or obscure and unpublished beyond its demerit if such has been your addiction you have found doubtless that your case lies much like the fat woman's that it is the show you give before the door that must determine what numbers go within that to be plain with you much thought must be given to the taking of your title it must be a most alluring trumpeting above the din of rival shows. So I have named this article with thought of how I might stir your learned curiosity. I have set scholars words upon my platform thereby to make you think how prodigiously I have stuffed the matter in and all this while my article has to do only with a certain set of Shakespeare in nine calfskin volumes edited by a man named John Bell now long since dead which set happens to have stood for several years upon my shelves also how it was disclosed to me that he was the worst of all editors together with the reasons there too and his final acquittal from the charge John Bell has stood for the most part in unfingered tranquility for I read from a handier single volume only at cleaning times has he been touched and then but in the common misery with all my books against this cleaning which I take to be only a quirk of the female brain I have often urged that the great round earth itself has been subjected to only one flood and that even that was a failure for despite no shrewdness at the gangway villains still persist on it how then shall my books profitably endure a deluge both autumn and spring thereafter when the tempest has spent itself and the waters have returned from off my shelves I'll venture in the room there will be something different in the sniff of the place and it will be marvelously picked up yet I can mend these faults but it does fret me how books will be standing on their heads where certain volumes only singled out to stand upon their heads sure for one and others of our moderns I would suspect the housemaid of expressing in this fashion a sly and just criticism of their inverted beliefs I accused her on one occasion of this subtlety but was met by such a vacant stare that I acquitted her at once however as she leaves my solidest authors also on their heads men beyond the peradventure of such antics I must consider it but a part of her carelessness for which I have warned her twice were it not for her cunning with griddle-cakes to which I am much affected I would have dismissed her before this and now this bell which has ridden out so many of my floods is proclaimed to me a villain we had got beyond the April freshets and there was in consequence a soapy smell about it is clear in my mind that a street organ had started up a gay tune and that there was sounds of gathering feet I was reading at the time in the green rocker by the lamp a life of John Murray by one whose name I have forgotten when my eyes came on the sentence that has shaken me bell it said bell of my own bookshelf of all the editors of Shakespeare was the worst in my agitation I removed my glasses breathed upon the lens and polish them here was one of my familiars accused of something that was doubtless heinous although in what particulars I was at a loss to know it came on me suddenly it was like a whispered scandal sinister in its lack of detail all that I had known of bell was that its publication had dated from the 18th century yet its very age had seemed a patent of respectability if a thing does not rot and smell in a hundred and forty years it would seem to be safe from corruption it were true peacock but here at last from bell was an unsavory whiff my flood had abated only a fortnight since and here was a stowaway escaped bell was proclaimed a villain again had a flood proved itself a failure now I feel no shame in having an outsider like Murray display to me these hidden evils for I owe no inquisitorial duty to my books there are people who will not admit a volume to their shelves until they have thrown it open and laid its contents bare this is the unmanorly conduct of the customs wharf indeed it is such scrutiny doubtless that induces some authors to pack their ideas obscurely thereby to smuggle them however they're being now a scandal on my shelves I must spy into it John Murray wherein I had read the charge had been such a friendly tea and gossip book not the kind to his a scandal at you it was bound in blue cloth and was a heavy book so that I held it on a cushion and this device I recommend to others it was the kind of book that stays open at your place if you leave it for a moment to poke the fire some books will flop a hundred pages to make you thumb them back and forth though whether this be the binder's fault or a devil tree set therein by their authors I am at a loss to say but Shaw would be of this kind flopping and spry to mix you up and in general Shaw's humor is like that of a shell man at a country fair a thimble rigger no matter where you guess that he has placed the bean you will be always wrong even though you swear that you have seen him slip it under it's but his cunning to lead you off but Murray was not that kind it would stand at its post unhitched like a family horse here was the quandary I looked at Belle but God forgive me it was not with the old trustfulness he was on the top shelf but one just in line with the eyes with guilt front winking in the firelight I had set him thus conspicuous with intention because of his calfskin binding quite old and worn a decayed gibbon I had thought proclaims a grandfather a set of British essayists if disordered takes you back of the black walnut to what length then of cultured ancestry must not this Belle give evidence I had bought Belle's second hand on Farringdon Road London from a cart cheap because of volume was missing and now it seemed he was in some sort of villain although shocked I felt a secret joy for somewhat too broadly had Belle smirked his sanctity on me when piety has been flaunting over you you will steal a slim occasion to proclaim a flaw there is much human nature goes to the stoning of a saint in my ignorance I had set the rogue in the company of the decorous Lorna Dune and the gentle ladies of Mrs. Gasco it is not that I admire that chased assembly but it were monstrous even so that I should neighbor them with this spell who as it appeared was no better than a wolf in calf's clothing it was little red riding hood you will recall whom is took a wolf for her grandmother and with what grief do we look on her unhappy end my hand was now raised to drag Belle out by the heels when I reflected that what I had heard might be unfounded gossip mere tattle and that before I turned against an old acquaintance it were well to set an inquiry afoot first however I put him alongside Herbert Spencer if it were Belle's desire to play the grandmother to him he would find him tough meat Belle John I looked him up first in volume A. U. S. to B. I. S. of the encyclopedia without finding him and then successfully in the national biography Belle John was a London bookseller he was born in 1745 published his edition of Shakespeare in 1774 and after this assault with the blood upon him lived fifty years this was reassuring it was then but a bit of wild oats no hanging matter I now went at the question deeply yet I left him a while with the indigestible Herbert it was in 1774 that Belle squirted his dirty ink and the gentleman's magazine for that year appear mutterings from America since called the Boston Tea Party I set this down to bring the time more warmly to your mind for a date alone is but a blurred signpost unless you be a scholar and it is advisedly that I quote from this particular periodical because it's old files can best put the past back upon its legs and set it going there is a kind of history book that sorts the bones and ties them all about with strings that sets the past up and bids it walk yet it will not wag a finger its knees will clap together its chest fall in such books are like the scribblings on a tombstone the ghost below gives not the slightest squeal of life but slap it shut and read what was written hastily at the time on the pages of the gentleman's magazine and it will be as though Gabriel had blown a practice toot among the headstones it is then that you will get the gibbering of returning life so it was in 1774 that Bell put out his version of Shakespeare Bell was not a man of the schools caring not a cracked tinkle for learning it was not to the folios nor to any authority that he turned for the texts of his plays instead he went to Drury Lane and Covent Garden and took their acting copies these volumes then that catch my firelight hold the very plays that the crowds of 1774 looked upon here in is the Romeo word for word that Lydia languished sniffled over here in is Shylock not yet with pathos on him but a buffoon still to draw the gallery laugh a few nights later having by grace of God escaped a dinner out and being of a consequence in a kindly mood the scandal too having somewhat abated in my memory I took down a brown volume and ran my fingers over its sides and along its yellow edges then I made myself comfortable and opened it up there is nothing today more degenerate than our title pages it is in a mean spirit that we pinch and starve them I commend the older kind wherein generously and sampled is the promise of the rich diet that shall follow at the circus I have said I'll go within that booth that has most allurement on its canvas front and where the hawker has the biggest voice if a fellow will but swallow a snake upon the platform at the door my money is already in my palm thus of a book I demand an earnest on the title page Bell's title page is of the right kind in the profusion and variety of its letters it is like a printer sample book with tall letters and short letters dogmatic letters for heaping facts on you and script letters reclining on their elbows convalescent in the text there are slim letters and again the very progeny of false staff and what flourishes on the page it is like a pond after the antics of a skater there follows the subscribers list it is a mr. tickles set that has come to me for his name is on the fly leaf but for me and this set of bell mr. tickle would seem to have sunk into obscurity I proclaim him here and if there be anywhere at this day younger tickles even down to the nearest titillation may they see these lines and thus take a greeting from the past then follows an essay on oratory it made me grin from end to end yet as on the repeating of a comic story it is hard to get the sting and rollock on the tongue and much quotation on a page makes it like a foundling hospital sentences unparented ideas abandoned of their proper text where grief is to be expressed says Bell the right hand laid slowly on the left breast the head and chest bending forward is a just expression of it ardent affection is gained by closing both hands warmly at half arms length the fingers intermingling and bringing them to the breast with spirit folding arms with a drooping of the head describe contemplation I have put it to you and you can judge it let us consider Bell's marginalia of the plays every age has impertuned itself with the words reason was such a word and fraternity and liberty efficiency maybe is the latest though it is sure that when you want anything done properly you have to fight for it it is below the dignity of my page to put a plumber on it yet I have endured occasions this word efficiency then comes from our needs and not from our accomplishment it is at best a marching song not a shout of victory it is when the house is dirty that the cry goes up for brooms so Bell in the notes upon the margins of his pages echoes a world that is talking about delicacy about sentiment about equality for a breeze blows up from France it was these words that the 18th century most babbled when it grew old it had horror for what was low and vulgar it wore laces on its doublet front and though it seldom washed it perfumed itself and all this is in Bell for his notes are a running comment of a shallow puritanistic prig who had sharp eyes and a gossip's tongue this was the time too when such words as blanket were not spoken by young ladies if men were about for it is a bedroom word and therefore immoral Bell objected from the bottom of his silly soul that Lady Macbeth should soil her mouth with it blanket of the dark he says is an expression greatly below our author curtain is evidently better was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself where at Bell again complains that Lady Macbeth is unnecessarily indelicate though this tragedy says Bell must be allowed a very noble composition it is highly reprehensible for exhibiting the chimeras of witchcraft and still more so for advancing in several places the principles of fatalism we would not wish to see young unsettled minds to peruse this piece without proper companions to prevent absurd prejudices it must appear from this that although one gains no knowledge of Shakespeare one does gain a considerable knowledge of Bell and of his time and this is just as well for Bell's light on Shakespeare would be but a sulfur match the more at carnival time indeed Shakespeare criticism has been such a pageantry of spluttering candle ends and sniffing wicks that it is well that one or two tallow dips leave the rabble and illuminate the adjacent alleys it is down such an alley that Bell's smoking light goes wandering off as I read Bell this night it is as though I listen at the boxes and in the pit in that tinkling time of seventy-four the patched Laetitia sits surrounded by her bows it was this afternoon she had the vapors next to her as dragon over beauty is a fat dame with grenadier headdress the rivals has yet to be written London still hears the beggar's opera Lady Macbeth is played in hoop skirts the best steel is a tolerably tight building Robert Burns is strewn with his first crumbs it is the age of ombre of sonnets to Chloe's false ringlets of odes to red heels and epics to lap dogs of tinseled struttings in gilded drawing rooms it was town and alley this age and though the fields lay daily in their new creation with sun and shadow on them together with the minstrelsy of the winds across them and the still pipings of leaf and water London the while kept herself in her smudgy convent her ear tuned only to the jolting music of her streets the rough syncope of wheel and voice since then what countless winds have blown across the world and cloud rack and this older century is now but a clamor of the memory what mystery it is what were the happenings in that pinprick of universe called London of all the millions of anthills this side Orion what about this one London was so certain it was the center of circumambient space tin to nabulate little Bell so you see that the head in front of Bell's villainy was that he was a little man with an abnormal capacity for gossip if gossip then be a gallows matter let Bell unbutton him for the end on the contrary if gossip be but a trifle here were a case for climate judgment in the first place there is no vice of necessity in gossip this must be clearly understood it is proximity in time and place that makes it intolerable a gossip next door may be a nuisance a gossip in history may be delightful no doubt if I had lived in Auckland like in the days when Boswell lived at home I would have thought him a nasty little sky key but let him get to London and far off in the revolving years and I admit him virtuous a gossip seldom dies the oldest person in every community is a gossip and there are others still blooming and tender who we know will live to be leathery and hard that the life insurance actuaries do not recognize this truth is a shame to their perception ancestral lesions should bulk for them no bigger than any slightest taint of keyhole lassitude for it is by thinking of ourselves that we die it leads to rooms and indigestions and off we go and even an ignoble altruism would save us I know one old lady who has been preserved to us these thirty years by no other nostrum than a knothole appearing in her garden fence it is a matter of doubt whether at the fashionable cures it is the water that has chief potency or whether so many being met together each morning at the pump it is not the exchange of these bits of news that leads to convalescence it is marvelous how a dull eye lights up if the bit be spicy there was a famous cure I'm told though I answer not for the truth of this closed up for no other reason than that a deeper scandal being hissed about a ladies made a fair all the inmates became distracted from their own complaints and so being made new departed to this day the building stands with broken doors and windows as testament to the blight such a sudden miracle put on the springs this shows therefore that gossipry must be judged by its effects if it allay the stone or give a pleasant evening it should have reward instead of punishment and here had bell diverted me agreeably for an hour it is true he had given me no chill and arid knowledge of Shakespeare but I had had ample substitute and the clock had struck ten before its time it were justice then that I cast back the lie on Murray and give bell full acquittal no sooner was this decision made then I lifted him tenderly from the shelf where I had sequestered him volume seven was on its head but I set it upright then I stroked its sides and blew upon its top as is my custom at the last I put him on his former shelf in the company of the chased Lorna Dune and the gentle ladies of Mrs. Gasco he sits there now this night on the top shelf but one just in line with the eyes with guilt front winking in the firelight a decayed gibbon I had thought proclaims a grandfather to what length then of cultured ancestry must not this bell give evidence end of chapter two chapter three of journeys to Baghdad this is a prevox recording all the prevox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit leprevox.org recording by Avahi in November 2019 journeys to Baghdad by Charles S. Brooks the decline of nightcaps it sounds like the tinkle of triviality to descend from the stern business of this present time to right of nightcaps and yet while the discordant battles are puffing their cheeks upon the rumbling bass pipes it is relief if there be intermingle the small shrill treble any slightest squeak outside the general woe there was a time when the chief issue of foul was feather beds some few tallest and straightest feathers may be were used on women's hats and a few of better nib than common were set aside for poets use goose feathers in particular being fashioned properly for the softer flutings whether of love or spring but in the main the manifest destiny of a feather was a feather bed in those days it was not enough that you plunged to the chin in this hot swarm of weathers for discretion in an attempt to ward off from you all snuffling rooms cuffings hackings and other fleshly eels required you before kicking off the final slippers to shut the windows against what were believed to be the dank humours of the night nor was this enough you slept of course in a four-post bed and the curtains had to be pulled together beyond the parrot venture of a cranny then as a last prophylaxis you put on a nightcap Mr. Pickwick's was tied under the chin like a sun bonnet and the cords dangled against his chest but this was a matter of taste it was behind such triple rampart that you slept and were adjudged safe from the foul contagion of the dark consequently your bed was not exactly like a little boat rather it was like a pullman sleeper which as you will remember was invented early in the 19th century and stands as a monument to its wisdom I have marveled at the ease with which Othello strangled Destemona further thought gives it explanation the poor girl was half suffocated before he laid hands on her I find also a solution of Macbeth's enigmatic speech wicked dreams abuse to curtain sleep any dream that could get at you through the circumvalation of glass, brocade, cotton and feathers could be no better than a quadruplicated housebreaker compounded out of desperate villainies reader have you ever purchased a pair of pajamas in London this is homely stuff I write yet there's pathos in it the jaunty air betokens the beginning of your search before question and reiteration have dulled your spirits later there will be less sparkle in your eye what? do not the English wear pajamas? does not the sex that is bifurcated by day keep by night to its manly bifurcation is not each separate leg swayed in complete divorcement from its fellow are womanish do they rest in the common dormitory of a short de nuit the Englishmen does wear pajamas but the world with him takes on an Icelandic meaning they are built to the prescription of an Eskimo they are woolly fuzzy and the width of a finger thick if I were a night watchman doomed for a certain term to walk the night I should insist on English pajamas to keep me awake if Saint Sebastian who I take it wore sackcloth for the glory of his soul could have lighted on the pair of pajamas that I bought on Oxford Circus his halo would have burned the brighter just how the feathery and billowy nights of our great-grandparents were changed into the present is too deep for explanation perhaps Annie left a door or window open such neglect fitting with her other heedlessness and not withstanding this means of entry it was found in the morning that no sprite or oof had got in to pinch the noses of the sleepers at least there was no evidence of such a visitation unless the snoring that abounded all the night did proceed from the pinching of the nose the nasal orifice being so clamped betwixt the forefinger and the thumb of these devilish sprites that the breath was denied its proper channel unless snoring was so caused it is clear that no oof had clamped through the window or perhaps some brave man a brother to him who first ate an oyster put up the window out of Provado to snap thereby his fingers at the forms of darkness and being found whole and without blemish or mark of witch upon his throat and without catharal snuffling in his nose of a consequence the harsh opinion against the night softened or maybe some younger woman threw up her window to listen to the slim tenor of moonlight passion with such strumming business as accompanied tinkling of cithern or a mandolin and so with chin in hand she sighed her soul abroad to the result that the closing was forgotten it is like enough that her dreams were all the sweeter for the breeze that blew across her bed loaded with the rhythmic memory of the words she had heard within the night it was vanity killed the nightcap what aldermanic man would risk the chance of seeing himself in the mirror what judge perugued by day could so contain his learned locks a male with waxed mustachios or with limpest beard or chin new reaped would put his ears in such a compress you will recall how Mr. Pickwick snatched his off when he found a lady in the curl papers in his room his round face showed red with shame against the dusky bed curtains like the sun peering through the fog or bed curtains they served the intrigue of at least five generations of novelists from fielding onward there was not a rogue's tale of the 18th century complete without them the wrong persons were always being pinned up inside them the cause of such confusion started in the tap too much niggas or an overdrop of pineapple rum with a lemon in it or a potent drink whose name I have forgotten that was always ordered and make it look, my dear then after such evening I turned to the left instead of right a wrong counting of doors along the passage the jiggling of bed curtains screens and consternation it is one of the seven original plots except for clothes closets screens and bed curtains stern must have gone out of the novel business Sheridan have lost fecundity and tried and starved in a garret but a moth's caught into their red brocade at last and pretty meal they made a sleeping porch is the symbol of the friendly truce between man and a material universe the world itself and avoid spaces of its wonderings together with the elements of our celestial neighborhood have been viewed by men with dark suspicion with rather a squint-eyed prejudice let's take a single case winds for a long time have borne bad reputations except such anemic collateral as are called sapphires and winds properly speaking which are big and strong enough to have rough chins and beards coming have been looked upon as roused abouts what was mere humor in their behavior has been set down to mischief if a wind in playfulness does but shake a casement or if in frolic it scatters the ashes across the hearth or if in liveliness it swishes you as you turn a corner and drives you a slant across the street is it right that you set your tongue to gossip and judge it as son of Belial there are persons also but such sleep indoors in whose ears the wind whistles only gloomy tunes or if it rise to shrill piping it rouses only a fear of chimneys thus in both high pitch and low there is fear in the hearing of it into their faces will come a kind of God help the poor sailors in the channel look as in a melodrama when the paper snowstorm is at its worst and the wind machine is straining at its straps one would think that they were afraid the old earth itself might be buffeted off its course and fall afoul of neighboring planets but behold the man whose custom is to sleep upon a porch at what slightest hint the night being yet young with scarce three yawns gone round does he shut his book and screen the fire with what speed he bolts the door and puts out the downstairs lights lest callers catch him in the business how briskly does he mount the stairs with fingers already on the buttons then with what scattering of garments he makes him ready as though his explosive speed had blown him all to pieces and launched him about the room then behold him such general amputation not having proved fatal advancing to the door muffled like a monk there is a slippered flight he dives beneath the covers I draw you a winter picture you will see no more of him now than the tip of his nose rising like a little etna from the waves but does he fear the wind as it fumbles around the porch and plays like a kitten with the awning cords bless you he has become a playmate of the children of the night the swaying branches, the stars, the swell of leaves all the romping children of the night and if there was any fear at all within the darkness it has gone to sulk behind the mountains but the wind sings a sleepy song and the game's too short then the wind goes round and round the house looking for the leaves for the wind is a bit of a nursemaid and wherever it finds them it tucks them in under fences and up against cellar windows where they will be safe until morning then it goes off on other business so there are other streets in town and a great many leaves to be attended to but the fellow with the periscopic nose above the covers lies on his back beneath the stars and contemplation journeys to him from the wide spaces of the night End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 of Journeys to Baghdad This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Christine Lehmann, Recita, California Journeys to Baghdad by Charles S. Brooks Maps and Rabbit Holes In what pleasurable mystery would we live were it not for maps if I chance on the name of a town I have visited I locate it on a map I may not actually get down the atlas and put my finger on the name but at least I picture to myself its lines and contour and judge its miles in inches and thereby for a thing of ink and cardboard I have banished from the world its immensity and mystery but if there were no maps what then by other devices I would have to locate it I would say that it came at the end of some particular day's journey that it lies in the twilight at the conclusion of twenty miles of dusty road that it lies one hour nightward of a blowout it would make it neighbor to an appetite gratified and a thirst assuaged a cool bath a lazy evening with starlight and country sounds is not this better than a dot on a printed page that is the town I would say where we had the mutton chops and where we heard the bullfrogs on the bridge or that town may be circumstance in sherry pie a comical face at the next table a friendly dog with hair-trigger tail or some immortal glass of beer on a bench outside a road in these things make that town as a flame in the darkness a flame on a hillside to overtop my course many years can go grinding by without obliterating the pleasant sight of its flair or maybe the town is so intermingled with dismal memories that no good comes of two particularly locating it then Tony Lumpkin's advice on finding Mr. Hardcastle's house is enough it's a damned long dark boggy dirty dangerous way and let it go at that maps are totes to the thoroughfares they shower their attentions on the wide pavements holding them up to observation marking them in red and babbling and prattling upsequiously about them meanwhile snubbing with disregard all the lanes and bypass they are cockney and are interested in showing only the high roads between cities and in consequence neglect all tributary loops and windings in a word they are against the jog trot countryside and conspire with the signposts against all loitering and irregularity as for me I do not like a straight thoroughfare to travel such a road is like passing a holiday with a man who is going about his business idle as you are, vacant of purpose, alert for distraction he must keep his eyes straight ahead and he must attend to the business in hand I like a road that is at heart a vagabond which loiteres in the shade and turns its head on occasion to look around the corner of a hill which will seek out obscure villages even though it requires a zigzag course up a hillside which follows a river for the very love of its company and humours its windings which trots alongside and listens to its ripple and then crosses sans bridge like a schoolboy with its toes in the water I love a road which goes with the easy rolling gate of a sailor ashore it has no thought of time and it accepts all the vagaries of your laziness I love a road which weaves itself into eddies of eager traffic before the door of an inn and stops a minute at the drinking trough because it has heard the thirst in your horse's winny and afterwards it bends its head on the hillside for a last look at the kindly spot ah, but the vagabond cannot remain long on the hills its best are its lower levels, so down it dips the descent is easy for roads and cartwheels and vagabonds and much else until in the evening it hears again the murmur of waters and its journey has ended there is of course some fun in a map that is all wrong those, for example, of the early navigators are worth anybody's time there is possibility in one that shows Japan where Long Island ought to be that map is human it makes a correct and proper map no better than a molly coddle there can be fine excitement in learning on the best of 14th century authority that there is no America and that India lies outside the pillars of Hercules the uncharted seas, the incognitova terra where lions are Ubi Leonis Erundt as the maps say, these must always stir us in my copy of Gulliver are maps of his discoveries Lilliput lies off the coast of Sumatra and must now be within sight of the passengers bound from London to Melbourne if only they had eyes to see it Brabding nag, would you believe it, is a hump on the west coast of America and cannot be far from San Francisco that gives one a start Swift, riding in 1725 with a world to choose from, selects the Californian coast as the most remote and unknown for the scene of his fantastical adventure it thrust 1725 into a grey antiquity and yet there are many buildings in England still standing that antedate 1725 by many years some by centuries Queen Elizabeth had been dead more than a hundred years Canterbury was almost as old and probably in worse repair than it is now when Frisco was still Brabding nag Can it be that the giant red trees and the tall bragging of the coast date from its heroic past? Story writers have nearly always been the foes of maps finding in them a kind of cramping of their mental legs and in consequence they have struck upon certain devices for getting off the map and away from its precise and restricting bigotry Davy fell asleep It was Davy, you remember, who grew drowsy one winter afternoon before the fire and sailed away with the goblin in his grandfather's clock Robinson Crusoe was driven off his bearings by stress of weather at sea this is a popular device for eluding the known world whenever in your novel you come on a sentence like this on the third night it came on to blow and that night and the three succeeding days and nights we ran close reefed before the tempest whenever you come on a sentence like that you may know that the author feels pinched and cramped by civilization and is going to regale you with some adventures of his uncharted imagination which are likely to be worth your attention then there was sentimental Tommy Do you remember how he came to find the enchanted street? it happened that there was a parade an endless row of policemen walking in single file all with the right leg in the air at the same time then the left leg seeing at once that they were after him Tommy ran, ran, ran until, in turning a corner he found himself wedged between two legs he was of just sufficient size to fill the aperture but after a momentary lock he squeezed through and they proved to be the gate into an enchanted land in that lies the whole philosophy of going without a map there is magic in the world then there are surprises you do not know what is ahead and you cannot tell what is about to happen you move in a proper twilight of events after that Tommy went looking for policemen's legs doubtless there were some details of the wizardry that he overlooked as never again could he come out on the enchanted street in quite the same fashion Alice had a different method she fell down a rabbit hole and thereby freed herself from some very irksome lessons and besides met several interesting people including a duchess Alice may be considered the very John Cabot of the rabbit hole before her time it was known only to rabbits, woodchucks, and dogs on holidays whose noses are muddy with poking but since her time all this has changed now it is known as the portal of adventure it is the escape from the plane of life into its third dimension children have the true understanding of maps they never yield slavishly to them they want a pirate's den they put it where it is handiest behind the couch in the sitting room just beyond the glimmer of firelight if they want an Indian village where is there a better place than in the black space under the stairs where it can be reached without great fatigue after supper farthest thul may be behind the asparagus bed the North Pole itself may be decorated by Annie on Monday afternoon with the week's wash from whatever house you hear a child's laugh if it be a real child and therefore a great poet you may know that from the garret window even as you pass Sinbad a drift on the Indian Ocean may be looking for a sail and that the forty thieves huddle daggers drawn in the coal hole then it is a fine thing for a child to run away to see well really not to see but down the street past gates and gates and gates until it comes to the edge of the known and sees a collie or some such terrible thing I myself have fine recollection of running away from a farmhouse maybe I did not get more than a hundred paces but I looked on some broad heavens saw a new mystery in the night shadows and just before I became afraid I had a taste of a new life to me it is strange that so few people go down rabbit holes we cannot be expected to find the same delight in squeezing our fat cells behind the couch of evenings nor can we hope to find that the Chinese mountains actually lie beyond our garden fence we cannot exactly run away either after one is twenty that takes on an ugly and vagrant look commendable as it may be on the early marches Prince Hal is always a more amiable spectacle than John Falstaff much as we love the night but there are men however few who although they are beyond forty retain in themselves a fine zest for adventure a man who I am proud to say is a friend of mine and who is a devil for work by which he is making himself known in the world goes of evenings into the most delightful true entry with his music and it isn't only music it is flowers and pictures and books of course he has an unusual brain and few men can hope to equal him he is like Disraeli in that respect who it is said could turn in a flash from the problem of financing the Suez Canal to the contemplation of the daffodils knotting along the fence but do the rest of us try? there are few men of business no matter with what singleness of purpose they have been installing their machinery and counting their nickels but will admit that this is but a small part of life they dream of rabbit holes but they will never go down one I had dinner recently with a man who by his honesty and perseverance has built up and maintained a large and successful business an orchestra was playing and when it finished the man told me that if he could write music like that we had heard he would devote himself to it well if he has enough desire in him for that speech he owes it to himself that he sound his own depths for the discoveries he may make it is doubtful if this quest would really lead him to write music God forbid it might however induce him to develop a latent appreciation until it became in him both a refreshment and a stimulus there are many places uncharted that are worth a visit Treasure Island is somewhere on the seas the still vexed Bermouths feel the wind of some southern ocean the coast of Bohemia lies on the furthest shore of Fairyland all of these wonderful like white towers in the mind but nearer home as near as the pirates den that we built as children within sight of our firelight should come the dreams and thoughts that set us free from sordidness that teach our minds versatility and sympathy that create for us hobbies and avocations of worth that rest and refresh us if we must be ocean liners all day plotting between known and monotonous ports at least we may be tramp ships at night cargoed with strange stuffs and trafficking for lonely and unvisited seas End of Chapter 4 Recording by Christine Layman Chapter 5 of Journeys to Bag Dead this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Journeys to Bag Dead by Charles S. Brooks Chapter 5 Tunes for Spring cacoo jug jug pooee to Witte Wu spring the sweet spring if by any chance you have seen a man in a coat with sagging pockets and a cloth hat of the latest fashion but too a hat which I may say is precious to him old friends, old wine, old hats emerging from his house just short of noon do not lay his belated appearance to any disorder in his conduct certain neighbors at their windows as he passed raise their eyes in a manner if I mistake not of suspicion that a man should be so far trespassing on the day for nine o'clock should be the penny picker's latest departure for the vineyard thereafter the street belongs to the women except for such sprouting and unbright manhood as brings the groceries and the hardened villainy that fetches ice and with deep voices breaks the treble of the neighborhood but beyond these there are no men in sight save the pantalooned exception who mows the grass and the whir of his clicking knives sounds the prelude of the summer I'll say by way of no more than a parenthetical flick of notice that his eastern front conspicuous from the rear as he bends forward over his machine shows a patched and joined mullionry that is not unlike the tracery of some cathedrals rounded apse but I go too far in imagery plain speech is best I'll wave the gothic touch but observe this sluggard who issues from his door he knows he is suspected that the finger is uplifted and chin is wagging and so he takes on a smarter stride with a pretense of riskness to proclaim thereby the virtue of having risen early despite his belated appearance and what mighty business he has dispatched within the morning but you will get no clue as to whether he has been closeted with the law or whether he is domestic faction plumbers or others of their ilk if indeed plumbers really have any ilk and do not as I suspect stand unbothered like the humped Richard in the play or maybe some swirl of fancy blew upon him as he was spooning up his breakfast which he must set down in an essay before the matter cool or an epic may have thumped within him let us hope that his thoughts this cool spring morning have not been heeded to such bloody purpose that he has killed a score of men upon his page and that it is with the black gore of the ink pot on him that he has called for his boots to face the world you remember the fellow who kills him some six or seven dozens of scots at a breakfast washes his hands and says to his wife by upon this quiet life I want work such ferocity should not sully this fair may morning when there are sounds only of carpet beating the tingle of the man who is out to grind your knives and the recurrent melody of the connoisseur of rags and bottles who stands in his cart as he drives his lean and pointed horse at the cry of this perfumed brummel if you be not gone in years too far as often he prepares to shout the purpose of his quest you'll put a question to him hey there what do you feed your wife on and then his answer will come pat to your expectation paper rags paper rags if the persistence of youth be in you and the belief that a jesque becomes better with repetition like beans nine days cold within the pot you will shout your question until he turns the corner and his answer is lost in the noises of the street adieu adieu thy plaintive anthem fades to this day I think of a rag picker's wife is dining sparingly out of a bag not with her head inside like a horse but thrusting her scrawny arm elbow deep to stir the potage and sprinkling salt and pepper on for nicer flavor following such preparation she will fork it out like macaroni with her head thrown back to present the wider orifice if her husband's route lies along the richer streets she will have by way of tidbit for dessert a piece of chewy velvet sugared and buttered to a tenderness but what is this jingling racket that comes upon the street bless us it's a hurdy-gurdy the hurdy-gurdy I need hardly tell you belongs to the Oregon family this family is one of the very oldest and claims descent I believe from the god Pan however it accepted Christianity early and has sent many a son within the church to pipe divinity but the hurdy-gurdy a younger son wild and a bit of a pagan like its progenitor took to the streets in its life there it has acquired among much rascality certain charming vices that are beyond the capacity of its brother in the loft however much we may admire the deep rumble of his sabbath utterance the world has denied that Chanticleer proclaims the day but as far as I know no one has had the insolence to deny the street organ as the proper herald of the spring without it the seasons would halt though science lay me by the heels of the desert that the crocus which is a pioneer on the windy borderland of March would not show its head except on the sounding of the hurdy-gurdy I'll not deny that flowers pop up their heads afield without such call that the jack in the pulp it speaks its maiden sermon on some other beckoning of nature but in the city it is the hurdy-gurdy that gives notice of the turning of the seasons on its sudden blair I've seen the green stalk of the daffodil jiggle if the tune be of sufficient rattle and prolong to the giving of the third nickel before the end is reached there will be seen a touch of yellow whether this follows from the same cause as attracts the children to flatten their noses on the windows and calls them to the curb that they put their ears close upon the racket that no sweetest sound be lost is a deep question and not to be lightly answered in the sound there is promise of the days to come when circuses will be loosed upon the land and elephants will go patting by with eyes looking around for peanuts why this biggest of all beasts this creature that looms above you like a crustaceous dinosaur to use long words without squinting too closely on their meaning why this behemoth with the swishing trunk should eat peanuts contemptible peanuts lies so deep in nature that the mind turns dizzy it is small stuff to feed valor on a pennies worth of food in such a mighty hulk whatever the lion eats may turn to lion but the elephant strains the proverb he might swallow you instead reaches hat and suspenders if you be of the older school of dress before the belt came in and not so much as cough upon the buttons and there will be red and yellow wagons boarded up seductively as though they could show you if they would snakes and hyenas may be it is best you think such things lying in the seeds of time to lay aside a dime from the budget of the week for one can never be sure against the carelessness of parents and their jaded appetites but the hurdy-gurdy is the call to stern her business also I know an old lady who at the first tingle from the street will take off her glasses with a finality as though she were never to use them again for the light pleasure of reading but intended to fill the remainder of her days with deeper purpose there is a piece of two-legged villainy in her employ by the name of William and even before the changing of the tune she will have him rolling up the rugs for the spring cleaning there is a sour rhythm in the fellow and he will beat a pretty syncopation on them if the hurdy-gurdy will but stick to marching time it is said that he once broke the fabric of a curmanshaw in his zeal at some crescendo of the Robert E. Lee but he was lost upon the vaults and struck languidly and out of time but maybe reader in your youth you have heated a penny above a lamp and with treacherous smile you have come before an open window and when the son of Italy has grinned and beckoned for your bounty the penny being just short of a molten state you have thrown it to him he stoopes he feels you have learned by this how much more blessed it is to give than to receive or to dig deep in the riot of your youth you have leased a hurdy-gurdy for a dollar and with other devils of your kind gone forth to seek your fortune it's in noisier fashion than when Goldsmith played the flute through France for board and bed if you turned the handle slowly and fast by jerks you attained a rare temple that drew attention from even the most stalled windows but as music it was as not down the street it being now noon in the day Monday Mrs. Wise washing will be out to dry observe her gaunt replica cap a pie as immodest as an advertisement in her proper person she is prodigal if she on mask her beauty to the moon and in company with this is the woe and semblance of her plump husband neither of them is shaped for sportive tricks but look upon them when the music starts hand in hand upon the line as is proper for married folk heal and toe together one two and a one two three it is the hurdy-gurdy that calls to life such revelry the polka has come to its own again yet despite this evidence that the hurdy-gurdy sets the world to dancing like the fiddle in the Turkish tale where even the headsmen forgot his business despite such evidence there are persons who affect to despise its melody these claim such perceptivity of the outer ear and such fineness of the channels that the tune is but a clack when it gets inside God pity such I'll not write a word of them a spring day is at its best about noon I thrust this in the teeth of those who prefer the dawn or the coming on of night at noon there are more yellow wheels upon the street the hammering on sheds is at its loudest as the time for lunch comes near more grocers carts are rattling on their business there is a better chance that a load of green wheelbarrows may go by or a wagon of red rhubarb then to the air is so warm that even decrepitude fumbles on the porch and down the steps with a cane to poke the weeds if you look you may see a colored pusson pushing a white wash cart with altruistic intent toward all dusky surfaces except his own or maybe he has nice appreciation of what color contrasts he himself presents when the work is midway if he wear the faded memory of a silk hat it's the better picture but also the schools are out and the joy of life is hissing up a hundred years baseball has now a fierceness it lacks at the end of the day there is wild demand that shorty soaker home butterfingers is a harder insult and meanwhile a popcorn wagon will be whistling a blithe if monotonous tune in trial if there be pennies in the crowd or a waffle may be purchased if you be a creases ladled exclusively for you and dropped on the gridiron with us bladder it is a sweet reward after you have knocked a three-bagger and stolen home and is worth a search in all your 11 pockets for any last penny that may be sulking in the fuzz or perhaps there is such wealth upon your person that there is still a restless jingle in such case you will cross the street to a shop that ministers to the wants of youth in the window is displayed a box of marbles glassies companies and a larger brownie adapted to the purpose of plugging by reason of the violence with which it seems to respond to the impact of your thumb then there are baseballs of graded excellence and seduction and tops time is needed for the choosing of the top first you stand tiptoe with nose just above the glass and make your trial selection pay no attention to the color for that's the way a girl chooses black is good without womanish taint then you wiggle the peg for its tightness and demand whether it be screwed in like an honest top and finally before putting your money down you will squint upon its roundess then slam the door and yell your presence to the street or do you come on softer errand in the rear of the shop is a parlor with a base burner and virtuous models on the walls a cozy room with faces and here it is they serve cream puffs for safe transfer you balance the puff in your fingers and take an enveloping bite emerging with a prolonged suck for such particles as may not have come safely across and bending forward with stomach held in I'll leave you in this refreshment for if the money hold you will gobble until the ringing of the bell by this time as you may imagine the person with the sagging pockets whom I told you of has arrived in the center of the city where already he is practicing such device of penny picking as he may be master of end of chapter 5 chapter 6 of journeys to Baghdad this is a Libra Fox recording all Libra Fox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Libra Fox dot org recording by D Bowens journeys to Baghdad by Charles S. Brooks respectfully submitted to a mournful air to anyone of several editors dear sir I paid a visit to your city several day sense and humor myself with ambitious thoughts and the contemplation of your editorial windows I was tempted to wrap at your door and request an audience but modesty held me off once by appointment I passed an hour in your office pleasantly and profitably and even so tardily do I acknowledge your courtesy and good nature but a beggar must choose the streets carefully and must not be seen too often in the neighborhood as the same door does not always offer pie so this time your brass knocker shows no finger marks of mine you did not accept for publication the last paper I sent to you you spread an infinite deal of sorrow in your path on its return I re-read it and now confessed to concurrence with your judgment something had gone wrong it was not as intended unlike Cleopatra age had withered it was I not like a cook whose dinner has been sent back untasted the best available ingredients were put into that confection and if it did not issue from the oven with those savory whiffs that can pale appetite my stove is at fault perhaps some good old literary housewife will tell me does consul in among my pots and pans how long an idea must be boiled to be tender and how best to garnish a thought to editors taste and yet sir your manners are excellent it was patricio who cried what's this mutton just burnt and so is all the meat where is the rascal cook manners have improved in pleasant contrast is your courteous note signifying the excellence of my proffered pastry your delight that you are allowed to sniff in your regret for lack of appetite and abdominal capacity nevertheless the food came back and I poked at the broken pieces mournfully it is a witch's business presiding at the cauldron of these things and there is no magic potage above my fire and yet kind sir with your permission I shall continue in my ways and offer to you from time to time such messes as I have hoping that someday your taste will deteriorate to my level or that I shall myself learn the witchcraft and enter your regard up to this present time only a few of my papers have been asked to stay the rest have gone the downward tread of your stair carpet and have passed into the night my desk has become a kind of mausoleum of such as have come home to die and when I raise its lid a silence falls on me as on one who visits sacred places there is however another side of this certain it is that thousands of us who write seek your recognition and regard certain it is that your favorable judgment moves us to elation and your silence to our merits urges us to harder endeavors but for all this dear sir and despite your continued neglect we are a tolerably happy crew it may be that our best things were never published best because we enjoyed the most because they recall the happiest hours in the finest moods they bring most freshly to our memories the influences of books and friends and the circumstances under which they were written it is because we lack the skill to tame our sensations to our uses the patience to do well what we wish to do fast that you rightly judge them unavailable we do not feel rebellious and we admit that you are right only we do not care as much as we did for most of us are learning to write for the love of writing and without an eye on the metal with no livelihood depending with no compulsion of hours of subject under the free anonymity of sure rejection we have worked it has been a fine world these hours of study and reflection and when we assert that one essay is our best we are right for it has led us to happiness and pleasant thoughts into an interpretation of ourselves and the world that moves about us and these best mood of ours we live and think beyond our normal powers and even come to a distant kinship with men far greater than ourselves knowing this prudence only keeps us from snapping our fingers at you and marking each paper as we finish it rejected without the formality of a trip to you and then happily beginning the next we are learning to be amateurs and although our name shall never be shouted from the house tops we shall be almost as content still with there be the morning hours of study with sunlight across the floor the winding country roads of autumn with smells of corn stacks and burden vineyards the farlet hours of evening still shall we write in our gardens of a summer afternoon or change the winter snowstorm that drives against our windows and to the coinage of our thoughts we shall be independent and thinking right as we please and although we enclose stamps for a mournful recessional please know dear sir that even as you dictate your polite note of refusal we are hard at it with another paper end of chapter six chapter seven of journeys to Baghdad this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Gordon S. Jones Draper Utah journeys to Baghdad by Charles S. Brooks the chilly presence of hard headed persons it is a rash business scuttling your own ship now as I am in a way a practical person which is I take it a diminutive state of hard headedness any detraction against hard headedness must appear as leveled against myself gimlet in hand deep down amid ships it would look as if I were squatted and set on my own destruction but by hard headed persons I mean those beyond the ordinary those so far gone that a pinprick through the skull would yield not so much as a drop of ooze persons whose brain convolutions did they appear in fright at the aperture on the insertion of the pin like a head at a window when there is a fire on the street would betray themselves as but a kind of cordage such hard headedness you will admit is of a tougher substance and that which may beset any of us on an occasion at the price of meat or on the recurrent obligations of the two constant moon I am reasonably free from colds do not fret myself into a congestion if a breath comes at me from an open window or if a swirl of wind puts its cold fingers down my neck do I lift my collar yet the presence of a thoroughly hard headed person provokes a sneeze there is a chilly vapor off him a swampish miasma that puts me in a snuffling state beyond poultice and mustard foot paths no matter how I huddle to the fire my thoughts will congeal on my purpose cramp and stiffen my conceit too will be but a shriveled bladder several years ago I knew a man of extreme hard headedness as I recall I was afflicted at the time indeed the melody co-existed with his acquaintance with a sorry Qatar of the nasal passages I can remember still the clearings and snufflings that obtruded in my conversation for two winters my complaint was beyond the cunning of the doctors despite local applications and such pills as they thought fit to administer still did the snuffling continue then on a sudden my friend left town consequent to which and to the amazement of the profession the springs of my disease dried up as this happened at the beginning of the warm days of summer I am loath to lay my cure entirely to his withdrawal yet there was a nice joint tree of time my acquaintance thereafter dropped to an infrequent statistical letter against which I have in time proofed myself but the Qatar has ceased except when some faint thought echoes from the past at which again as in the older days I am forced to blow a passage in the channel for verbal navigation this man's interest in life was oil it oozed from the ventures of his talk if he looked on the map of this fair world mountains like caterpillars dozing on the page for so do maps present themselves to my fancy he would see merely the blueprint and huge specification of oil production and consumption the dotted cities would suggest no more than agencies in its distribution and they would be pegged in many colors as is the custom of our business efficiency by way of base symbolism of their rank and pretense the wide oceans themselves would be merely courses for his tank ships to bustle on and leave a greasy trail really contrary to my own experience and sudden cure one might think that such an oleaginous stream of talk if directed in atomizer fashion against the nostrils of the listener would serve as a healing emulsion for the complaint I then suffered with be these things as they may what I can actually vouch for is that when this fellow had set himself and opened a volley of facts on me I was shamed to silence there was a spaciousness a planetary sweep and glittering breath that shriveled me the commodity which I dispensed was but used around the corner with a key turned upon it at the shadowy end of day against its intrusion on the night but his oil all day long and all night too was swishing in its tanks and coursed to Zanzibar and all the fretted activity of the earth was tributary to his purpose how like an untrimmed smoky night candle did my ambition burn if I chance to think in thousands it was a strain upon me my cerebrum must have throbbed itself to pieces upon the addition of another cypher but he marshaled his legions and led them up and down until it dazed me I was no better than some cobbler with a fiddle crooked an intent to the twanging of his E string while the great Napoleon thundered by the secret channels of the earth and the fullness thereof made a joyful gurgle in his thoughts and if he ever wandered in the country and ever saw a primrose on the river's brim which I consider unlikely his attention being engaged at the moment on figuring the cost of oil barrels with special consideration for the price of bungs if this man ever did see a primrose would it have been a yellow primrose to him and nothing more bless your dear eyes it would have been a compound of byproducts paraffin, wax candles cup grease, lamp wax bees wax and peppermint drops not to mention its proper distillation into such rare odors as might be sold at so much a bottle to jobbers and a set price at retail with best legal talent to avoid the Sherman act this man has lived deeply and rises at the thought in many of the capitals of Europe for six months at a time he has walked around one end of the Louvre on his way home at night without once putting his head inside indeed it is probable he hasn't noticed a building or if he has thinks it is an arsenal now in all humility and unbuttoned as it were for a spanking by whomsoever shall wish to give it I must confess that I myself have no great love for the Louvre but as an endurance test for tired tourists a kind of blow in the nozzle and watch the dial mount up contrivance as at a county fair and so I am not sure but that the band playing in the gardens is a better amusement for a bright afternoon and that a nurse made in uniform with her children bare-legged tauts with fingers in the sand and that such sight is more worthy of respect than a dead duchess painted on the wall it is but a ritualistic innocence I have paid the gods inside my finer reverence has been for benches in the sun and the vagabondage of a bus top if ever my friend gets to heaven it will be but another point for exportation how closely he will listen for any squeaking of the pearly gates with a nostrum ready for their dry complaint when he is once through and safe the other pilgrim still coming up the hill for heaven I am sure will be set on some windswept ridge with purple distance in the valleys how he will put his ear against the hinge for nice diagnosis as to the weight of the oil that will give best result how he will wink upon the gateman that he write his order large reader I have sent you off upon a wrong direction I have twisted the wooden finger at the crossroads the man of oil does not exist he is a piece of fiction with which to point a moral big iron or cotton cloth served as well anything in fact were on by too close squinting one may blunt his sight we have all observed a growing tendency in many persons to put as it were electric lights in all the corners and attics of their brains until it is too much a rarity to find anyone who will admit a twilight in his whole establishment this is carrying mental housekeeping too far I will confess that I prefer a light at the foot of the back stairs where the steps are narrow at the turn for any is precious to us I will confess also that it is well to have a switch in the kitchen to throw light in the basement on the chance that the wood box may get empty before the evening has spent itself there is comfort too in not being forced to go darkling to bed like child rolling to the tower but to put out the light from the floor above but we are carrying this business too far in mental concerns here is properly a place for a rare twilight it is not well that a man should always flare himself like a lighted ballroom much of our best mental stuff if you exclude the harsher grindings of our business hours fades into course of light does a brocade that for best preservation must not be hung always in the sun there must be regions in you unguessed at cornered and shadowy places recesses to be shown at people finger width yielding only to the knock of fancy dim sequesterings tucked obscurely from the noises of the world where one must be taken by the hand and lead dusky closets beyond the common use it is in such places your finger on your lips and your feet a tiptoe on the stairs that you will hide away from baser uses the stowage of moonlight stuff and such other gaseous and delightful foolery as may lie in your inheritance End of chapter 7