 CHAPTER I of HINTS TO PILGRAMS The man's thoughts in older time were set on pilgrimage. His neighbors came forward with suggestions. One of them saw that his boots were freshly tapped. Another was careful that his hose were darned with honest wool. An oldish ant, no doubt, with beeswax and thimble and glasses forward on her nose. A third sly creature fetched in an embroidered wallet to hold an extra shift, and hinted in return for a true nail from the Holy Cross. If he were a bachelor, a tender garter was offered him by a lonely maiden of the village, and was acknowledged beneath the moon. But the older folk who had made the pilgrimage took the settle, and fell to argument on the merit of the ins. They scrawled maps for his guidance on the hearth, and told him the sights that must not be missed. Here he must veer off for a holy well. Here he must be wear a treacherous bog. Here he must ascend a steeple for the view. They cautioned him to keep upon the highway. Was it not Christian, they urged, who was lost in by-path meadow. Again they talked of thieves, and warned him to lay a chair against the door. Then a honey-sillow-ub was drunk in clinking cups, and they made a night of it. Or perhaps our pilgrim belonged to a guild which, by an agreeable precedent, voted that its members walk him to the city's gate and present from each a half-penny to support him on the journey. The greasy pockets yield their treasure. He rattles on both sides, with generous copper. Here, also, is a sab for a man and beast, a receipt for a fever-draft. We may fancy now the pilgrim's mule plowing up the lazy dust at the turn of the road, as he waves his last farewell. His thoughts already have leapt the valley to the misty country beyond the hills, and now, above his dusty road, the sun climbs the exultant noon. It whips its flaming chariot to the west, on the rim of twilight, like a traveler who departs. It throws a golden offering to the world. But there are pilgrims in these later days also. Strangers to our own fair city, script and wallet and staff in hand, who come to place their heavy tribute on our shrine, and to them I offer these few suggestions. The double stars of importance, as in Bedaker, mark our restaurants and theaters. Dear pilgrim, put money in thy purse. Persuade your guild to advance you to a penny. They mark the bridges, the shipping, the sharp canyons of the lower city, the parks, limousines where silk and lace play nursed to lap-dogs, bufo on an airing, the precious spits upon a scarlet cushion. They mark the parade of wealth, the shops and glitter of Fifth Avenue on a winter afternoon. If this is Fifth Avenue, as I heard a dazzled stranger comment lately on a bus stop, my God, what must First Avenue be like? And then there are the electric signs, the mammoth kitten rolling its ball of silk, ginger ale that forever issues from a bottle, a fiery motor with a flame of dust, the wriggly triplets correcting their sluggish livers by exercise along the Astor Roof. Surely letters dispatched home to Kalamazoo deal excitedly with these flashing poor tents, and of the railroad stations and the Woolworth Tower with its gothic pinnacles questing into heaven. What pilgrim words are adequate? Here, certainly. Kalamazoo is baffled and must halt and bite its pen. Nor can the hotels be described, toppling structures that run up to thirty stories, at a night a clatter in the basement and a clatter on the roof, sons of Belial and rich folk from Akron, who are spending the profit on a few thousand hot water bottles and inner tubes. What mad pursuit! What pipes and timbrels! What wild ecstasy! Do we set a noisy barred upon our towers in the hope that our merriment will sound to Mars? Do we persuade them that jazz is the music of the spheres? But at morning in these hotels are thirty stories of snoring bipeds, exhausted trousers across the bed post, frocks that have been rumpled in the hubbub, tear upon tear of bipeds, with sleepy curtains drawn against the light. Boniface in olden time, sunning himself beneath his bush and swinging dragon. Watching the dust for travelers, how would he be amazed at the advancement of the inn? Dear pilgrim, you must sag and clink for entrance to the temples of our joyous gods. Put money in my purse and wire ahead. On these streets there is a roar of traffic that Babylon never heard. Nineveh in its golden age could have packed itself with all its splendid luggage in a single building. Athens could have mustered in a street. Our block parties that are now the fashion, neighborhood affairs and fancy costumes, with a hot trombone and banners stretched from house to house, produce as great an uproar as ever arose upon the Acropolis. And lately, when our troops returned from overseas and marched beneath our plaster arches, Rome itself could not have matched the largeness of our triumph. Here, also, men had climbed up to walls and battlements. But to what far dizzier heights? To towers and windows and to chimney tops to see great Pompey past the streets. And by what contrast shall we measure our tall buildings? Otis and Effeltes, who contracted once to pile Pellion on top of Osa, were evidently builders who touched only the larger jobs. They did not stoop to a cottage or a bungalow, but figured entirely on such things as arcs and the towers of Jericho. When old Cheops sickened, it is said, and thought of death, they offered a bid upon his pyramid. Noah, if he was indeed their customer, as seems likely, must have fretted them as their work went forward. Whenever a cloud appeared in the rainy east, he nagged them for better speed. He prowled around on Sunday mornings with his qubit measured to detect any shortness in the beam. Or he looked for knotholes in the gopher wood. But Otis and Effeltes could not, with all their sweating workmen, have fetched enough stones for even the foundations of one of our loftier structures. The tower of Babel, if set opposite Wall Street, would squat as low as Trinity, for its top, when confusion broke off the work, had advanced scarcely more than seven stories from the pavement. My own windows, dwarfed by my surroundings, looked down from as great a height. Indeed, I fancy that if the famous tower were my neighbor to the rear, on Ninth Street, just off the L, its whiskered masons on the utmost platform could have scraped acquaintance with our cook, they could have gossiped at the noon hour from gutter to sink, and eaten the crawlers that the kind creature tossed across. Our whistling grocery-man would have found a rival, and yet the good folk of the older testament, ignorant of our accomplishment to come, were in amazement at the tower. And strangers came in from Gilead and Bersheba. Trippers, as it were, upon a holiday, staff in hand and pomegranates in a papyrus bag, locusts and wild honey, or manna to sustain them in the wilderness on their return. Trippers, I repeat, caulked back their heads, and they counted the rows of the windows to the top, and went off to their far land, marvelling. The banker's trust-building culminates in a pyramid. Where this narrows to a point, there issues a streamer of smoke. I am told that inside this pyramid, at a dizzy height above the street, there is a storage room for gold. Is it too fanciful to think that inside, upon this unsung heap of metal, there is concealed an altar of mammon with priests to feed the fire, and that this smoke rising in the lazy air is sweet in the nostrils of the greedy god? There is what seems to be a chapel on the roof of the bush terminal. Gothic decorations mark our buildings, the pointed arch, mullions, and gargoyles. There are few nowadays to listen to the preaching of the church, but its symbol is at least a pretty ornament on our commercial towers. Nor in the general muster of our sights must I forget the magic view from across the river, in the end of a winter afternoon when the lower city is still lightened. The clustered windows shine as if a larger constellation of stars have met in thick convention. But it is the eye of one who travels in the evening mist from Staten Island that towers of finest gossamer arise. They are built to furnish a fantastic dream. The architect of the summer clouds has tried here his finer hand. It was only lately when our ferry boat came around the point of Governor's Island that I noticed how sharply the chasm of Broadway cuts the city. It was the twilight of a winter's day. A rack of sullen clouds lay across the sky as if they met for mischief, and the water was black with wind. In the threatening obscurity the whole island seemed to be a mightier house of usher, intricate of many buildings, cleft by Broadway in its middle, and ready to fall prostrate into the dark waters of the tarn. But until the gathering tempest rises and an evil moon pierce through the crevice, as in the story, we must judge the city to be safe. Northward are nests of streets, thick with children. One might think that the old woman who lived in a shoe dwelt hard by, with all her married sisters round about. Children scurry underfoot, oblivious of contact. They shoot their marbles between our feet, and we are the moving hazard of their score. They chalk their games upon the pavement. Baseball is played, long and thin between the gutters. Peddlers carts line the curb. Carrots, shoes, and small hardware. And there is shrill chaffering all the day. Here are dim restaurants with truant smells for their advertisement. In one of these I was served unleavened bread. Folk from Damascus would have felt at home, and yet the shadow of the Woolworth Tower was across the roof. The loaf was rolled in, like a chair pad that a monstrous fat man habitually sits upon. Indeed I looked sharply at my ample waiter on the chance that it was he who had taken his ease upon my bread. If Kalamazoo would tire for a night of the beauty chorus, and the wriggly triplets, and would walk these streets of foreign population, how amazing would be its letters home. Our Greenwich Village also has its sights. Time was when we really were a village beyond the city. Even more remotely there were farms upon us and comfortable burgers jogged up from town to find the peace of country. There was once a swamp where Washington Square now is, and, quite lately, mason's in demolishing a foundation struck into a conduit of running water that still drains our pleasant part. When Broadway was a muddy post-road, stretching for a weary week to Albany, Ducks quacked about us and were shot with blunderbuss. Yes, and they were doubtless roasted with applesauce upon the side. And then a hundred years went by, and the breathless city jumped to the north and left us a village in its midst. It really is a village. The grocer gives you credit without question. Further north were fashion shops he would inspect you up and down with a cruel eye and ask a reference. He would linger on any patch or shiny spot to trip your credit. But here he wets his pencil and writes down the order without question. His friendly cat rubs against your bundles on the counter. The shoemaker inquires how your tap soles are wearing, the boot black, without lifting his eyes, knows you by the knots in your shoestrings. I fear he beats his wife, for he has a great red nose, which even prohibition has failed to cool. The little woman at the corner offers you the times before you speak. The cigar man tosses you a package of camels as you enter. Even the four corners beyond Baraeod, unknown, remote, quite off to general travel, could hardly be more familiar with the preference of its oldest citizen. We need only a pump and a pig and chickens in the street. Our gossip is smaller than is found in the cities, if we had yards and gardens we would talk across the fence on Monday like any village, with clothespins in our mouths, and pass our ailments down the street. But we are crowded close, wall to wall. I see my neighbor cooking across the street. Each morning she jolts her dust mop out the window. I see shadows on a curtain as a family sits before the fire. A novelist is down below. By the frenzy of his fingers on the typewriter it must be a tale of great excitement. He never pauses or looks at the ceiling for a plot. At night he reads his pages to his patient wife when they together have cleared away the dishes. In another window a girl lies the bed each morning. Exactly at 7.45, after a few minutes of sleepy stretching, I see her slim legs come from the coverlet. Once she caught my eye she stuck out her tongue. Your stockings, my dear, hang across the radiator. We have odd characters too, known to everybody, just as small towns have, who, in country circumstance, would whittle on the bench outside the village store. The father of a famous poet, but himself unknown except hereabouts, has his chair in the corner of a certain restaurant, and he offers wisdom and reminiscence to a coterie. He is our Johnson at the miter. Old M, who lives in the alley in what was once a hayloft, now a studio, is known from 4th to 12th Street for his Indian curry and his knowledge of the older poets. It is his pleasant custom to drop in on his friends from time to time and cook their dinner. He tosses you an ancient sonnet as he stirs the pot. Or he beats time with his iron spoon to a melody of the petateek. He knows Shakespeare to a comma, and discourses so agreeably that the Madison Square Clock fairly races up to midnight. Every morning it is said, but I doubt the truth of this for a gossiping lady told me. Every morning until the general droth set in, he issued from the alley for a toddy to sustain his seventy years. Sometimes she says, Old M, went without a tie or a collar on these quick extorsions, yet with the manners of the empire and a sweeping bow if he met any lady of his acquaintance. A famous lecturer in a fur collar sweeps by me often, with his eyes on the poetic stars. As he takes the air this sunny morning he thinks of new paradoxes to startle the ladies at his matinee, how they love to be shocked by his wicked speech. He is such a daring, handsome fellow, so like a god of ancient Greece, and of course most of us know T., who gives a yearly dinner at the Assyrian restaurant, sixty cents a plate, with a near beer extra from a saloon across the way. Any guest may bring a friend, but he must give ample warning in order that the table may be stretched. The chief poet of our village wears a corduroy suit, and goes without his hat, even in winter. If a comedy of his happens to be playing at a little theatre, he rings himself a bell in his favorite restaurant, and makes the announcement in true Elizabethan fashion. No ye, one and all, there is a conceited comedy this night! His hair is always tousled, but as its confusion continues from March into the quieter months, the disarrangement springs not so much from the outer tempest, as from the poetic storms inside. Then we have a kind of Peter Pan, grown to shiny middle life, who makes ukuleles for a living. On any night of special celebration, he has prevailed upon to mount the table, and sing one of his own songs to this accompaniment. These songs tell what a merry, wicked crew we are. He sings of the artist's balls that ape the bohemia of Paris, our genius, our unrestrained, our scorn of all convention. What is morality but a suit to be discarded when it is old? What is life, he sings, but a mad gesture with tinkling bells. Youth is brief, and when dead, we're buried deep. So let's romp and drink and kiss. It is a pagan song that has lasted through the centuries. If it happens that any folk are down from the uptown hotels, Peter Pan can sense to sell a ukulele between his encores. Here, my dear pilgrims, is an entertainment to be squeezed between Ziegfields and the Wintergarten. You are welcome at all of our restaurants. Our samovars, the pagan whistle, the three steps down. A crowded room where you spill your soup as you carry it to a table, but a cheap, honest place in which to eat. The green witch. The simple Simon. The food is good at all of these places. Grop your way into a basement. Wherever one of our fantastic signs hangs out, or climb broken stairs into a dusty garret, over a contractor's storage of old lumber and bathtubs, over the litter of roofs, and you will find artistic folk with flowing ties, spreading their elbows at bare tables with uncapped dripping candles. Here is youth that has blown hither from distant villages. Youth that was misunderstood at home. Youth that looks from its poor valley to the heights and follows a flame across the darkness. Youth whose eyes are a window on the stars. You're also, alas, our slim white moths about a candle. And here wrinkled children play at life and art. Here are radicals who plot the reformation of the world. They hope it may come by peaceful means. But if necessary, we'll welcome revolution and machine guns. They demand free speech. But put to silence any utterance less red than their own. Here are seething sonateers, playwrights bulging with rejected manuscript. Young women with bobbed hair and cigarettes lolling limply at their mouths. For a cigarette I have observed, that hangs loosely from the teeth, shows an artistic temperament. Just as in business circles a cigar that is tilted up till it warms a nose marks a sharp commercial nature. But business counts for little with us. Recently, to make a purchase, I ventured of an evening into one of our many small shops of fancy wares. Judge my embarrassment to see the salesman was entertaining a young lady on his knee. I was too far inside to retreat. Presently the salesman shifted the lady to his other knee, and, brushing a lock of her hair off his nose, asked me what I wanted. But I was unwilling to disturb his hospitality. I begged him not to lay down his pleasant burden, but rather to neglect my presence. He thanked me for my courtesy, and made his guest comfortable once more while I fumbled along the shelves. By good luck the price was marked upon my purchase. I laid down the exact change and tiptoed out. The peddlers of our village, our street musicians, our Applemen, belong to us. They may wander now and then to the outside world for a silver tribute, yet they smile at us on their return as at their truest friends. Ice creaks up the street in a little cart and trickles at the cracks. Rags and bottles go by with a familiar jangling bell. Scissors grinders have a bell also, with a flat tinny sound, like a cow that forever jerks its head with flies. But it was only the other day the two fellows went by selling brooms. These were interlopers from a noisier district, and they raised up such a clamour that one would have thought that the armistice had been signed again. The clatter was so unusual, our own merchants are a quieter voice, that a dozen of us thrust our heads from our windows. Perhaps another German government had fallen. The novelist below me put out his shaggy beard. The girl with the slim legs was craned out the sill with excitement. My pretty neighbour below, who is immaculate when I meet her on the stairs, was in her mob cap. My dear pilgrim from the west, with your ample house and woodshed, your yard with this croquet set, and hammock between the wash poles, you have no notion of how we are crowded on the island. Laundry tubs are concealed beneath kitchen tables. Boxes for clothes and linen are ambushed under our beds. Any burglar hiding there would have to snuggle among the mothballs. Sitting room tables are swept up books for dinner. Bookcases are desks. Desks are beds. Beds are couches. Couches are, bless you, all the furniture is at masquerade. Kitchen chairs turn upside down and become step ladders. If anything does not serve at least two uses, it is a slacker. Beds tumble out of closets. Fire escapes her nurseries. A patch of roof is a pleasant garden. A bathroom becomes a kitchen with a lid upon the tub for groceries and the milk cooling below with the cold faucet drawn. A room's use changes with the clock. That girl who lives opposite, when she is dressed in the morning, puts a Baghdad stripe across her couch. She punches a row of colored pillows against the wall. Her bedroom is now ready for collars. It was only the other day that I read of a new invention by which a single room becomes four rooms by simply pressing a button. This is the manner of the magic. In a corner, let us say, of a rectangular room there are set into the floor a turntable ten feet across. On this are built four compartments, shaped like pieces of pie. In one of these is placed a bathtub and stand. In another a folding bed and wardrobe. In a third is a kitchen range uncovered. And in the fourth a bookcase and piano. Must I explain the mystery? On rising you fold away your bed and spin the circle for your tub, and then in turn your stove appears. At last, when you have rolled your dishes to retirement, the piano comes in sight. It is as easy as spinning the castor for the oil and vinegar. A whirling Susan on the supper table is not more nimble. With this device it is estimated that the population of our snug island can be quadruplecated, and that landlords can double their rents with untroubled conscience. Or by swinging a fifth piece of pie out of the window, a sleeping porch could be added. When the morning alarm goes off, you have only to spin the disc and dress in comfort beside the radiator. Or you could, but possibilities are countless. Tom Payne died on Grove Street. Oh Henry lived on Irving Place and ate at a lairs on Third Avenue. The aquarium was once a fort on an island in the river. Later Lafitte was welcomed there and Jenny Lynn sang there. John Maysfield swept out a saloon, it is said, on Sixth Avenue near the Jefferson Market. And for all I know, his broom may still be standing behind the door. The Bowery was once a post road up toward Boston. In the stream that flowed down Maiden Lane, Dutch girls did the family washing. In William Street, not long ago, they were tearing down the house in which Alexander Hamilton lived. These are facts at random. But Captain Kidd lived at 119 Pearl Street. Dear me, I have thought that he was a creature of a nursery book, one of the pirates whom Sinbad fought. And here on Pearl Street in our own city, he was arrested and taken to hang in chains in London. A restaurant now stands at 119. A bucket of oyster shells is at the door and inside a clatter of hungry spoons. But the crowd thickens on these narrow streets. Work is done for the day and tired folk hurry home. Crowds flow into the subway entrances. The streets are flushed as it were with people. And the flood drains to the rushing sewers. Now the lights go out one by one. The great buildings that glistened but a moment's sense at every window are now dark cliffs above us in the wintery mist. It is time, dear pilgrim, to seek your hotel or favorite cabaret. The wriggly triplets once more are correct by exercise their sluggish livers. The kitten rolls its ball of fiery silk. Times Square flashes with entertainment. It stretches its glittering web across the night. Dear pilgrim, a last important word. Put money in thy purse. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of Hints to Pilgrims 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 Robert Dunlop Hints to Pilgrims by Charles Stephen Brooks I plan a vacation. It is my hope when the snow is off the ground and the ocean has been tamed by breezes from the south to cross to England. Already I fancy myself seated in the pleasant office of the steamship agent, listening to his gossip of rates and sailings, bending over his colored charts, weighing the merit of cabins. Here is one of midships in a location of greatest ease upon the stomach. Here is one with a forward port that will catch the sharp and wholesome wind from the Atlantic. I trace the giant funnels from deck to deck. My finger follows delightedly the confusing passages. I smell the rubber on the landings and the salty rugs. From on top I hear the wind in the cordage, I view the moon, and I see the mast swinging among the stars. Then, also at the agents, for my pleasure, there is a picture of the ship cut down the middle, showing its inner furnishing and the hum of life on its many ducks. I study its flights of steps, its strange tubes and vents and boilers. Munchhausen's horse, when its rearward end was snapped off by the falling gate, the faithful animal, you may recall, galloped for a mile upon its forward legs alone before the misadventure was discovered. Munchhausen's horse, I insist, the unbroken forward half did not display so frankly its confusing pipes and coils. Then there is another ship, which, by a monstrous effort of the printer, is laid in Broadway, where it stacks out top trinity. I pace its mighty length on the street before my house, and my eye climbs our tallest tree for a just comparison. It is my hope to find a man of like ambition and endurance as myself to walk through England. He must be able, if necessary, to keep to the road for twenty-five miles a day, or, if the inn runs before us in the dark, to stretch it to thirty. But he should be a creature also who is content to doze in meditation beneath a hedge. Heedless weather the sun in faster boots puts into lodging first. Careless of the hour he may remark in my sleepy ear, how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines. He must be able to just when his feet are tired. His drooping grunt must be spiced with humor. When stiffness cracks him in the morning, he can the better play the clown. He will not grumble at his bed or poke too shrewdly at his food. Neither will he talk of graves and rheumatism when a rainstorm finds us unprepared. If he snuffle at the nose he must snuffle cheerfully and with hope. Wit, with its unexpected turns, is to be desired, but a pleasant and even humor is a better comrade on the dusty road. It endures blisters and an empty stomach. A pack rests more lightly on its weary shoulders. If he sing, he should know a round of tunes and not wear a single melody to tatters. The merriest lilt grows dull and lame when it travels all the day. But although I wish my companion to be of a cheerful temper, he need not pipe or dance until the mists have left the hills. Does not the shining sun itself rise slowly to its noonday glory? A companion must give me leave to enjoy in silence my sullen breakfast. A talent for sketching shall be welcome. Let him produce his pencils and his tablet at a pointed arch or mullioned window, or catch us in absurd posture as we travel. If one trumbles in a ditch, it is but decency to hold the pose until the picture is made. But, chiefly, a companion should be quick with a smile and a nod, after a conversation along the road. Neither beard nor ringlet must snub his agreeable advance. Such a fellow stirs up a mixed acquaintance between town and town, to point the shortest way, a bit of modest gang of mixing a pudding at a pantry window, age hobbling to the gate on its friendly crutch, to show how a better path climbs across the hills, or in a tap room he buys a round of ale and becomes a crony of the place. He enlists a dozen friends to sniff outdoors at bedtime, with conflicting prophecy of a shifting wind and the chance of rain. A companion should be alert for small adventure. He need not, therefore, to prove himself run to grapple with an angry dog. Rather, let him soothe the starling creature. Let him hold the beast in parley while I go on to safety with unsoiled dignity. Only when arbitration and soft terms fail shall he offer a haunch of his own fair flush. Generously he must boost me up a tree before he seeks safety for himself. But many a trivial mishap, if followed with a willing heart, leads to comedy and is adjust thereafter. I know a man who, merely following an inquisitive nose through a doorway marked no admittance, became comrade to a company of traveling actors. The play was Uncle Tom's Cabin and they were at rehearsal. Presently, at a changing of the scene, my friend boasted to Little Eva, as they sat together on a pile of waves, that he performed upon the tuba. It seems that she had previously mounted into heaven in the final picture without any welcoming trumpet of the angels. That night, by her persuasion, my friend sat in the upper wings and dispensed flutings of great joy as she ascended to her rest. Three other men of my acquaintance were caught once between towns on a walking trip in the Adirindex and fell by chance into a kind of sanitarium for convalescent consumptives. At first it seemed a gloomy prospect, but, learning that there was a movie in a nearby village, they secured two Chinese and gave a party for the inmates. In the church parlor, when the show was done, they ate ice cream and layered cake. Two of the men were fat, but the third was a slight and handsome fellow. I write on suspicion only, so one pretty patient at the feast that, on the homeward ride, they were rattling in the tonneau. She graciously permitted him to steady her at the bumps and sudden turns. Nor was this the end, as it still lacked an hour of midnight the general sanitarium declared a Roman holiday. The slight fellow, on a challenge, did a handstand, with his feet waving against the wall, while his knife and keys and money dropped from his pockets. The pretty patient read aloud some verses of her own upon the spring. She brought down her watercolors and, laying a charcoal portrait off the piano, she arranged her lovely wares on the top. The fattest of my friends, also eager to do his part, stretched himself, heels and head between two chairs. But when another chair was tossed upon his unsupported middle, he fell with a boom upon the carpet. Then the old doctor brought out wine and bohemian glasses with long stems and, as the clock struck twelve, the company pledged one another's health, with hopes for a reunion. They lighted their candles on the landing and so to bed. I know a man also who once met a sort swallower at a county fair. A volunteer was needed for his trick, someone to hold the scarlet cushion with its dangerous knives, and Zele's friends pushed him from his seat toward the stage. Afterwards he met the Caucasian beauties and, despite his timidity, they dined together with great merriment. Then there is a kind of humorous philosophy to be desired on an excursion. It smokes a contented pipe to the tune of every rivulet. It rests a peaceful stomach on the rail of every bridge. And it observes the floating leaves, like golden caravals upon the stream. It interprets a trivial event. It is both serious and absurd. It sits on a fence to moralize on the life of cows and flings in Plato on the soul. It plays catch and toss with life and death and the world beyond. It sees a significance in the common things. A farmer's cart is a tumble of the revolution. A crowing rooster is a shanticleer. It is the very cock that proclaimed to Hamlet that the dawn was nigh. When a cloud rises up, such a philosopher discourses on the flood. He counts up the forty rainy days and names the present rascals to be drowned, profiteers in food, plumbers, and all laundremen. A stable lantern swinging in the dark rouses up a race of giants. I think it was some such fantastic quality of thought that Horace Walpole had in mind when he commended the three princes of Sarendip. Their highnesses, it seems, were always making discoveries by accident and sagacity of things which they were not in quest of. For instance, he writes, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had traveled the same road lately because the grass was eaten on the left. At first I confess, this employment seems a waste of time. Sherlock Holmes did better when he pronounced on finding a neglected wisp of beard that Dr. Watson's shaving mare had been shifted to an opposite window. But doubtless the princes put their deduction to higher use and met the countryside and village with shrewd and vivid observation. Don Keody had the same quality, but with more than a touch of madness. Did he not build up the Lady Talosa out of a common creature at an inn? He sought knighthood at the hands of its stupid keeper and watched his armor all night by the foolish moon. He tilted against a windmill. I cannot wholeheartedly commend the Don, but for an afternoon, certainly, I would prefer his company between town and town to that of any man who carries his clanking factory on his back. But also I wish a companion of my travels to be the first time in England in order that I may have a fresh audience for my superior knowledge. In the cathedral towns I wish to wave an instructive fingering krypton Isle. Here is a bit of early glass. Here is a wall that was plastered against the plague when the Black Prince was alive. I shall gossip of scholars in cordon gown working at their rubric in the sunny cloisters. Or if I choose to talk of kings and forgotten battles, I wish a companion ignorant but eager for my boasting. It was only last night that several of us discussed vacations. Wyoming was the favorite, a ranch with a month on horseback in the mountains, hemlock brews for a bed, morning at five and wood to chop. But a horse is to me a troubled creature. He stands to too great a height. His eye glows with exultant deviltry as he turns and views my imperfection. His front teeth seem to be made for scraping along my arm. I dread any fly or be lest it sting him to a motion. I am point to point in agreement with the psalmist. And horse is a vain thing for safety. If I must ride, I demand a tired horse who has cropped his wild oats and has come to a slippered state. Are we not told that the horse in the crustaceous age— I select a large word at random—was built no bigger than a dog. Let this snug and peerless ancestor be saddled and I shall buy a ticket for the west. But I do not at this time desire to beard the wilderness. There is a camp of Indians near the ranch. I can smell them these thousand miles away. Their beads and greasy blankets hold no charm. Smoky bacon, indeed, I like. I can light pleasurably at the flap of the tent with sleepy eyes upon the stars. I can even plunge in chilly pool at dawn. But the Indians and horses that infest Wyoming do not arouse my present interest. I am for England, therefore, with its winding roads, its villages that nest along the streams, its peak bridges with salmon jumping at the weir, its thatched cottages and flowering hedges. The chaffinch sings on the orchard bow in England now. I wish to see reapers at work in seary fields, to stride over the windy top of Devon. To cross Wiltshire when wind and rain and mist have brought the druids back to Stonehenge. At a crossroad Stratford is ten miles off. Raglan's ancient towers peep from a wooded hill. Tinturn or Glastonbury can be gained by night. Are not these names sweet upon the tongue? And I wish a black timbered inn in which to end the day, with polished brasses in the tap and the smell of musty centuries upon the stairs. At the window of our room the cathedral spire rises above the roofs. There is no trolley car or creaking of any wheel, and on the pavement we hear only the fall of feet in endless pattern. Day weaves in a hurrying mesh, but this is the quiet fabric of the night. I wish to walk from London to Inverness. To climb the ghostly ramparts of Macbeth's castle. To hear the shrill cry of Duncan's murder in the night. To watch for witches on the stormy moor. I shall sit on the bench where Johnson sat with Boswell on his journey to the Hebrides. I shall see the wizard of the north, lame of foot, walking in the shade of ruined dry burrow. With drunken tam I shall behold an alaway Kirk warlocks in advance. From the gloomy house of Shaw's and its broken tower David Balfour runs in flight across the heather. Clodden echoes with the defeat of an outlaw prince. The stairs of hollywood drip with Rizio's blood, but also I wish to follow the Devon lanes, to rest in villages on the coast at the fall of day when fishermen wind their nets. To dream of Arthur in his court on the rocks beyond Tintagel. Merlin lies in Wales with his dusty garments pulled about him and his magic sleeps. But there is wind tonight in the noisy caverns of the sea, and Spanish pirates dripping with a slime of watery grave bury their treasure when the fog lies thick. Thousands of years have peopled these English villages. Their pavements echo with the tread of kings and poets. Here is a sunny bower for lovers when the world was young. Bishops of the Roman church. Saint Thomas himself in his robes pontifical has walked through these broken cloisters. Here is the altar where he knelt at prayer when his assassins came. From that tower Mary of Scotland looked vainly for assistance to gallop from the north. Here stretches the pilgrims way across the downs of Surrey, worn and scratched by Pious feet. From the west they came to Canterbury. The wind stirs the far-off traffic and the mist covers the hills as with an ancient memory. How many thirsty elbows have rubbed this table in the forgotten years? How many feasts have come steaming from the kitchen when the London coach was in? That pewter cup, maybe, offered its eager pledge when the news of Adgincourt was blown from France. Up that stairway Tom Jones reeled with sparkling Canary at his belt. These cobbles clacked in the pretender's flight. Here is the chair where Falstaff sat when he cried out that the sack was spoiled with villainous lime. That signboard creaked in the tempest that shattered the armada. My fancy mingles in the past. It hears in the in-yard the chattering pilgrims starting their journey. Here is the pardoner jesting with the merry wife of Bath with his finger on his lips to keep their scandal private. It sees Dick Turpin at the crossroads with the loaded pistols in his boots. There is mist tonight on Bagshot Heath and men in Kendall Green are out. And fancy rebuilds a ruined castle and lights the hospitable fires beneath its mighty cauldrons. It hangs tapestry on the empty walls and, like a sounding trumpet, it summons up a gaudy company in rough and velvet to tread the forgotten measures of the past. Let Wyoming go and hang itself in its muddy riding boots and khaki shirt. Let its tall horses leap upward and click their heels upon the moon. I am for England. It is my preference to land at Plymouth, and our anchor, if the captain is compliant, will be dropped at night in order that the Devon Hills, as the thrifty stars are dimmed, may appear first through the mists of dawn. If my memory serves, there is a country church with stone and battled tower on the summit above the town, and in the early twilight all the roads that climb the hills lead away to promised kingdoms. Drake, I assert, still bulls nightly on the key at Plymouth, with pins that rattle in the windy season, but the game is done when the light appears. We clatter up to London, Paddington Station, or Waterloo, I care not. But for a rival, a rainy night is best. When the pavements glisten and the mad taxis are rushing to the theaters, and then, for a week, by way of practice and to test our boots, we shall trudge the streets of London, the Strand and the Embankment, and certainly we shall explore the temple and find the sights of Blackfriars and the Globe. Here, beyond this present brewery, was the bear pit. Tarleton's just still sound upon the bank. A weary once in this busy river conveyed Sir Roger up to Vauxhall. Perhaps, here on the homeward trip, he was rejected by the widow. The dear fellow, it is recorded, out of sentiment merely, kept his clothes unchanged in the fashion of this season of his disappointment. Here also was the old bridge across the fleet. Here was Drury Lane, where Garrick acted. Tender hearts, they say, in pit and stall, fluttered to his Romeo, and sighed their souls across the candles. On his muddy curb, Link-boys waited when the fog was thick. Here the footmen bawled for chairs. But there are bookshops still in Sharing Cross Road, and for frivolous moments, Haberdashry is offered in Bond Street and Vaudeville and Leicester Square. And then, on a supreme morning, we pack our rucksacks. It was a grievous oversight that Christian failed to tell us what clothing he carried in his pack. We know it was a heavy burden, for it dragged him in the mire. But did he carry slippers to ease his feet at night? And what did the partner put inside his wallet? Surely the wife of Bath was supplied with a powder-puff and a fresh taffeta to wear at the journey's end. I could indeed spare Christian one or two of his encounters for knowledge of his wardrobe. These only details are of interest. The mad night of La Mancha, we are told, mortgaged his house and laid out a pretty sum on extra shirts. Stevenson also tells us the exact gear that he loaded on his donkey. But what did Marco Polo carry? And Munchhausen and the Wandering Jew? I have skimmed their pages vainly for a hint. For myself, I take an extra suit of underwear and another flannel shirt, a pair of stockings, a rubber cape of lightest weight that falls below the knees, slippers, a shaving kit and brushes. I shall wash my linen at night and hang it from my window, where it shall wave like an admiral's flag to show that I sleep upon the premises. I shall replace it as it wears. And I shall take a book, not to read, but to have ready on the chance. I once carried the book of Psalms, but it was Nick Carter I read, which I bought in a tavern parlor fifteen pages missing from a fat lady who served me beer. We run to the window for a twentieth time. It has rained all night, but the man in the lift was hopeful when he came up from breakfast. We believe him, as if he sat on a tower with a spyglass on the clouds. We cherish his tip, as if it came from Ailis himself, holding the winds and leash. And now a streak of yellowish sky. London's substitute for blue shows in the west. We pay our bill. We scatter the usual silver. Several senators in uniform bow us down the steps. We hail a bus in Trafalgar Square. We climb to the top. To the front seat was full prospect. The hay market. Sandwich men with weary steps announce a vaudeville. We snap our fingers at so stale in entertainment. There are flower girls in Piccadilly Circus. Regent Street. We pass the marble arch near which cutthroats were once hanged on the three-legged mare of Tibern. Hammersmith. Brentford. The bus stops. It is the end of the route. We have ridden out our sixpence. We climb down. We adjust our packs and shoestrings. The road to the western country beckons. My dear sir, perhaps you yourself have planned for a londelet this summer and an English trip. You have laid out two swift weeks to make the breathless ground. You journey from London to Bristol in a day. Another day and you will climb out stiff of leg among the northern lakes. If then, as you lull among the cushions, lapped in luxury, pink and soft, if then you see two men with sticks in hand and packs on shoulder, know them for ourselves. We are singing on the roads to Windsor, to Salisbury, to Stonehenge, to the hills of Dorset, to Lyme Regis, to Exeter and the Devon Moors. It was a shepherd who came with a song to the mountaintop. The sun shone, the bees swept past me singing, and I, too, sang, shouted, world, world, I am coming. CHAPTER III. AT A TOYSHOP WINDOW. In this Christmas season, when snowflakes fill the air and twilight is the pleasant thief of day, I sometimes pause at the window of a toy shop to see what matter of toys are offered to the children. It is only five o'clock and yet the sky is dark. The night has come to town to do its shopping before the stores are shut. The wind has Christmas errands. And there is a throng of other shoppers. Fathers of families grip with packages and puff after street-cars. Fat ladies, now then, all together, are hoisted up. Old ladies are caught in revolving doors. And the relatives of Santa Claus, surely no nearer than nephews, anemic fellows in faded red coats and cotton beards, pound their kettles for an offering toward a Christmas dinner for the poor. But also little children flatten their noses on the window of the toy shop. They point their thumbs through their woolly mittens in a sharp rivalry of choice. Their unspent knuckles itch for large investment. Extravagant dimes bounce around their pockets. But their ears are cold, and they jiggle on one leg against their frosty toe. Here in the toy shop is a tin motor-car. Here is a railroad trade with tracks and curves and switches, a pasteboard mountain and a tunnel. Here is a steamboat, with a turning of a key it starts for Honolulu behind the sofa. The stormy straits of Madagascar lie along the narrow hall. Here in the window also are beams and girders for a tower, not since the days of Babel has such a vast supply of men gathered. And there are battleships and swift destroyers and guns and armored tanks. The nursery becomes a dangerous ocean with submarines beneath the stairs, or it is the plain of flenders and the great war eckles across the hearth. Chateauteaity is a pattern in the rug and the andirons of the towers of threatened Paris. But on this Christmas night, as I stand before the toy shop in the whirling storm, the wind brings me the laughter of far-off children. Time draws back its somber curtain. The snow of thirty winters is piled in my darkened memory, but I hear shrill voices across the night. Once upon a time, in the days when noses and tables were almost on a level, and manhood had wavered from kilts to pants buttoning on the side, once there was a great chest which was lodged in a closet behind a sitting-room. It was from this closet that the shadows came at night, although at noon there was plainly a row of hooks with comfortable winter garments. And there were drawers and shelves to the ceiling where linen was kept, and a cupboard for cough syrup and oily lotions for chapped hands. A fragrant paste also was spread on the tip of the little finger which, when wiggled inside the nostril and inhaled, was good for wet feet and snuffles. Twice a year these bottles were smelled all round and half of them discarded. It was the ragman who bought them, a penny to the bottle. He coveted chiefly, however, lead and iron, and he thrilled to old piping as another man thrills to Brahms. He was a sly fellow, and unless Annie looked sharp he put his knee against the scale. But at the rear of the closet, beyond the lamp-light, there was a chest where playing-blocks were kept. There were a dozen broken sets of various shapes and sizes, the deposit and remnant of many years. These blocks had once been covered with letters and pictures. They had conspired to teach us. C. had stood for cat. D. announced a dog. Learning had put on, as it were, a sugar coat for pleasant swallowing. The arid height teased us to mount by an easy slope. But we scraped away the letters and the pictures. Should a holiday we thought be ruined by insidious instruction, must a teacher's wagging finger always come among us? It was sufficient that five blocks end to end made a railway car, with finger-blocks for platforms. That three blocks were an engine, with a block on top to be a smokestack. We had no toy mountain and pace-board tunnel, as in a soft fashion of the present, but we jacked the rug with blocks up hill and down, and pushed our clanking trains through the hollow underneath. It was an added touch to build a castle on the summit. A spool on a finger-block was the Duke himself on horseback, hunting across his sloping acres. There was also, in the chest, a remnant of iron coal-cars with real wheels. Their use was too apparent. The best invention was to turn play things from an obvious design. So we placed one of the coal-cars under the half of a folding checkerboard, and by adding masks and turrets and spools for guns, we built a battleship. This could be sailed all around the room on smooth seas where the floor was bare, but it pitched and tossed upon the carpet. If it came to port battered by the storm, should it be condemned like a ship that has broken on a sunny river? It's plates and rivets had been tested in a tempest. It had skirted the head-lens in the staircase and passed the windy horn. Or perhaps we built a fort upon the beach before the fire. It was a pretty warfare between the ship and fort, with marbles used shot and shot and turn. A lucky marble tops the checkerboard off its balance and wrecked the ship. The sailors, after scrambling in the water, put to shore on flat blocks from the boat-deck and were held as prisoners until supper in the dungeons of the fort. It was in the sitting-room that we played these games under the family's feet. They moved above our sport like a race of tolerant giants. But when collars came we were rushed to the rear of the house. Spools were men. Thread was their short and subsidiary use. Their larger life was given to our armies. We had several hundred of them threaded on long strings on the closet-hooks. But if a great campaign was planned, if the planes of Abraham were to be stormed or Cornwallis captured, our recruiting sergeants rummaged in the drawers of the sewing machine for any spool that had escaped the draft. While we peeked into Mother's work-box, and if a spool was almost empty, we suddenly became anxious about our buttons. Sometimes when a great spool was needed for a general, Mother wound thread upon a piece of cardboard. General Grant had carried black silk. Napoleon had been used on trouser patches. And my grandmother and a half-dozen aunts and elder cousins did their bit and plied their needles for the war. In this regard, grandfather was a slacker, but he directed the battle from the sofa with his crutch. Toothpicks were guns. Every soldier had a gun. If he was hit by a marble in the battle and the toothpick remained in place, he was only wounded. But he was dead if the toothpick fell out. Of each two men wounded, by hay convention, one recovered for the next engagement. Of course we had other toys. Led soldiers in cocked hats came down the chimney and were marshaled in the Christmas dawn. A whole continental army lay in paper sheets to be cut out with scissors. A steam engine with a coil of springs and key furnished several rainy holidays. Our red wheel-barrel supplied a short fury of enjoyment. There were sleds and skates, and a printing press on which we printed the milkman's tickets. The memory still lingers at five cents in those cheap days bought a pint of cream. There was also a castle with a princess at the window. Was there no prince to climb her trellis and bear her off beneath the moon? It had happened so and asked a lot. The princes of the gorgeous east had wooed also in such a fashion. Or perhaps this was the very castle that the Wicked Carizac lifted across the Chinese mountains in the night, shooting a laden of his bride. It was a rather clever idea, as things seem now in this time of general shortage, to steal a lady, house and all, not forgetting the cook and laundress. But one day a little girl with dark hair smiled at me from next door, and gave me a Christmas cake. And in my dreams thereafter she became the princess of my castle. We had stone blocks with arches and round columns that were too delicate for the hazard of siege and battle. Once, when a playmate had scarlet fever, we lent them to him for his convalescence. Afterwards, against contagion, we left them for a month under a bush in the side-yard. Every afternoon we wet them with a garden hose. Did not Noah's flood purify the world? It would be a stout microbe, we thought, that could survive the deluge. At last we lifted out the blocks at arm's length. We smelled them for any lurking fever. They were damp to the nose and smelled like the cement under the back porch. But the contagion had vanished like Noah's Wicked Neighbors. But store toys always broke. Wheels came off, springs were snapped. Even the princess faded at her castle window. Sometimes a toy, when it was broken, arrived at a larger usefulness. Although I would not willingly forget my velocipede in its first gay youth, my memory of sharpened pleasure reverts to its later days, when one of its rear wheels was gone. It had been jammed in an accident against the piano. It has escaped me whether the piano survived a jolt, but the velocipede was in ruins. When the wheel came off the brewery wagon before our house and the kegs rolled here and there, the record was hardly so complete. Three spokes were broken and the hub was cracked. At first it had seemed that the day of my velocipede was done. We laid it on its side and tied the hub with rags. It looked like a jaw with a toothache. Then we thought of the old baby carriage in the storeroom. Perhaps a transfusion of wheels was possible. We conveyed upstairs a hammer and a saw. It was a wobbling and impossible experiment, but at the top of the house there was a kind of racetrack round the four posts of the attic. With three wheels complete we had been forced to ride with caution at the turns or be pitched against the sloping rafters. We now discovered that a missing wheel gave the necessary tilts for speed. I do not recall that the pedals worked. We legged it on both sides. Ten times round was a race, and the audience sat on the ladder to the roof and held a watch with a second hand for records. Ours was a roof that was flat in the center. On winter days when snow would pack we pelted the friendly milkman. Ours also was a cellar that was lost in darkened mazes. A blind area off the laundry, where the pantry had been built above, seemed to be the opening of a cavern, and we shuddered at the sights that must meet the candle of the furnaceman when we closed the draught at bedtime. Abandoned furniture had uses beyond a first intention. A folding bed of ours closed to about the shape of a piano. When the springs and mattress were removed it was a house with a window at the end where a wooden flap let down. Here sat the prisoner of chillin' with a clothesline at his ankle. A pile of old furniture in the attic covered with a cloth became at twilight a range of mountains with a gloomy valley at the back. I still believe, for so does fancy wanton with my thoughts, that Aladdin's cave opens beneath those walnut bedposts that the cavern of jewels needs but a dusty search on hands and knees. The old house, alas, has come to foreign use. Does no one now climb the attic stairs? Has time worn down the awful Caucasus? No longer is their children's laughter on the stairs. The echo of their feet sleeps at last in the common day. No must furniture of necessity be discarded. We dived from the footboard of our bed into a surf of pillows. We climbed its headboard like a mast and looked for pirates on the sea. A sewing table with legs folded flat was a sled upon the stairs. Must I do more than hint that two bed slats make a pair of stilts, and that one may tilt like King Arthur with the wash poles? Or who shall fix a narrow use for the laundry-tubs or put a limit on the coal-hole? And stepladders. There are persons who consider a stepladder as a menial. This is an injustice to a giddy creature that needs about a holiday to show its metal. On Thursday afternoons, when the cook was out, you would never know it for the same thin creature that goes on work days with a pail and cleans the windows. It is a tower, a shining lighthouse, a crowded grandstand, a circus, a ladder to the moon. But perhaps, my dear young sir, you are so lucky as to possess a smaller and inferior brother who frets with ridicule. He is a toy to be desired above a red philosophy. I offer you a hint. Print upon a paper in bold plain letters, sucking the lead for extra blackness, that he is afraid of the dark, that he likes the girls, that he is a butterfinger at baseball and teachers' pet and otherwise contemptible. Paste the paper inside the glass of the bookcase so that the insult shows. Then lock the door and hide the key. Let him gaze at this placard of his weakness during a rainy afternoon. But I caution you to secure the keys of all some more glass doors, of the china-closet, of the other bookcase, of the knick-knack cabinet. Let him stew in his nicquity without chance of retaliation. But perhaps, in general, your brother is inclined to intimidate you and to be a tardy pattern of your genius. He apes your fashion and suspenders, the tilt of your cap, your method in shiny. If you crouch in a barrow and hide and seek, he crowds in too. You wag your head from side to side on your bicycle in the manner of Zimmerman, a champion? Your brother wags his too. You spit in your catcher's mitt like Kelly, the ten thousand dollar baseball beauty. Your brother spits in his mitt, too. These things are unbearable. If you call him sloppy when his face is dirty, he merely passes you back the insult unchanged. If you call him sloppy two times, still he has no invention. You are justified now to call him nigger and to cuff him to his place. Tagging is his worst offence. Tagging along behind when you are engaged on serious business. Now then, sunny, you say, run home, get nursed to blow your nose. Or you bribe him with a penny to mind his business. I must say a few words about paper-hangers, although they cannot be considered as toys or play things by any rule of logic. There is something rather jolly about having a room papered. The removal of the pictures shows how the old paper looked before it faded. The furniture is pushed into an agreeable confusion in the hall. A rocker seems starting for the kitchen. The great couch goes out the window. A chair has climbed upon a table to look about. It needs but an alpinstock to clamber on the bookcase. The carpet marks the places where the piano legs came down. And the paper-hanger is a rather jolly person. He sings in whistles in the empty room. He keeps to a tune, day after day, until you know it. He slaps his brushes if he liked his work. It is a sticky, splashing, slopping slap. Not even a plasterer deals in more interesting material. And he settles down on you with ladders and planks as if a circus had moved in. After hours when he is gone you climb on his planking and cross Niagara, as it were, with a cane for balance. To this day I think of paper-hangers as a kindly race of men who sing in echoing rooms and eat pie and pickles for their lunch. Except for their Adam's apples, gut with gazing at the ceiling, surely not the wicked apple of the garden. I would wish to be a paper-hanger. Plumbers were a darker breed, who chewed tobacco fetched up from the hip pockets. They were enemies of the cook by instinct, and they spat in dark corners. We once found a cake of their tobacco when they were gone. We carried it to the safety of the furnace-room and bit into it in turn. It was of a Swedish flavor of licorice that was not unpleasant. But the sin was too enormous for our comfort. But in November, when days were turning cold and hands were chapped, our parents' thoughts ran to the kindling-pile to stock it for the winter. Now the kindling-pile was the best quarry for our toys because it was bought from a washboard factory round the corner. Not every child has a good fortune to live near a washboard factory. Necessary as washboards are, a factory of modest output can supply a county, with even a little dribble for export into neighboring counties. Many unlucky children, therefore, live a good ten miles off and can never know the fascinating discard of its lathes, the little squares and cubes, the volutes and rhythmic flourishes that are cast off in manufacturing and sold as kindling. They think a washboard is a dull and common thing. To them it smacks of Monday. It smells of yellow soap and suds. It wears, so to speak, a checkered blouse and carries clothespins in its mouth. It has perspiration on its nose. They do not know, in their pitiable ignorance, the towers and bridges that can be made from the scorings of a washboard factory. Our washboard factory was a great wooden structure that had been built for a roller-skating rink. Father and mother, as youngsters in the time of their courtship, had cut fancy eighths upon the floor. And still in these later days, if you listened outside a window, you heard a whirling roar as if perhaps the skaters had returned and again swept the corners madly. But it was really the sound of machinery that you heard, fashioning toys and blocks for us. At noonday, commonly red-faced girls ate their lunches on the windowsills, ready for conversation and acquaintance. And now, for several days, our rumor has been running round the house that a wagon of kindling is expected. Each afternoon on our return from school, we run to the cellar. Even on baking-day, the whiff of cookies holds us only for a minute. We wait only to stop our pockets. And at last the great day comes. The fresh wood is piled to the ceiling. It is a high mound in chaos, without form, but certainly not void. For there are long pieces for bridges, flat pieces for theatre scenery, tall pieces for towers and grooves for marbles. It is a vast quarry for our pleasant use. You will please leave us in the twilight, sustained by doughnuts, burrowing in the pile, throwing out sticks to replenish our chest of blocks. And therefore, on this Christmas night, as I stand before the toy shop in the whirling storm, the wind brings me the laughter of these far-off children. The snow of thirty winters is piled in my darkened memory. But I hear the shrill voices across the night. CHAPTER IV. SICK TRANSIT I do not recall a feeling of greater triumph than on last Saturday when I walked off the eighteenth green of the country club with my opponent four down. I have the card before me now, with its pleasant row of fives and sixes, and a four, and a three. Usually my card has mounted here and there to an eight or nine, or I've blown up all together in a sand pit. Like Byron, but oh how differently, I have wandered in the pathless wood. Like Ruth, I have stood in tears amid the alien corn. In those old days, only a week ago, but dim already, so soon does time wash the memory white. In those old days, if I were asked to make up a foursome, some green inferior fellow, a novice who used his sister's clubs was paired against me, or I was insulted with two strokes a hole, with three on the long hole past the woods. But now I shall ascend a faster company. It was my elbow. Now I square it and cock it forward a bit, and I am cured. Keep your head down, fritzy boy, I say. Mind your elbow, I say it aloud, and I have no trouble. There is a creek across the course. Like a thread in the wolf, it cuts the web of nearly every green. It is a black strand that puts trouble in the pattern, an evil thread from Clotho's ancient loom. Up at the sixth hole, this creek is merely a dirty rivulet, and I can get out of the damn thing. One must rightly say as one talks and not go on stilts. I can get out with a niblick by splashing myself a bit. But even here, in its tender youth as it were, the rivulet makes all the mischief that it can. Gargantua, with his nurses, was not so great a rogue. It crawls back and forth three times before the tee with a kind of jeering tongue stuck out. It seems foredoomed from the cradle to a villainous course. Further down at the 17th and 2nd holes, which are near together, it cuts a deeper chasm. The bank is shale and steep. As I drive, I feel like a black sinner on the nearer shore of sticks, gazing upon the sunny fields of paradise beyond. I put my caddy at the top of the slope, where he sits with his apathetic eye upon the sullen, predestined pool. But since last Saturday, all is different. I sailed across on every drive, on every approach. The depths beckoned, but I heeded not. And when I walked across the bridge, I snapped my fingers in contempt as at a dog that snarls safely on a leash. I play my best with a niblick. It's not entirely that I use it most. Any day you can hear me bawling to my caddy to fetch it behind a bunker or beyond a fence. Rather, the surface of the blade turns up at a reassuring hopeful angle. It shining eyes seems cast at heaven in a prayer. I have had spells, also, a fondness for my mashy. It is fluted for a backspin. Except for the click and flight of a preposterous drive, I know nothing of prettier symmetry than an accurate approach. But my brassie, I consider a reckless creature. It has bad direction. It treads not in the narrow path. I have driven. Good! For once I am clear of the woods. That white speck on the fairway is my ball. But shall my ambition or leap itself? Shall I select my brassie and tempt twice the gods of chance? No. I'll use my mashy. I'll creep up to the hole on hands and knees and be safe from trap and ditch. Has anyone spent more time than I among the Blackberry bushes along the railroad tracks on the eleventh? It is no grossness of appetite. My niblick grows hot with its exertions. Once our course was not beset with sand pits. In those bright days, woods and gully were enough. Once clear of the initial obstruction, I could roll up, unimpeded to the green. I practiced a bouncing stroke with my putter that offered security at 20 yards. But now these approaches are guarded by traps. The greens are balanced on little mountains with sharp ditches all about. I hoist up from one to fall into another. What word, my son, has passed the barrier of your teeth, said a theme once to Odysseus. Is the game so ancient? Were there sand pits also on the hills of Stony Ithaca or in Ortigia, Seagirt? Was the deer wanderer off his game and fallen to profanity? The white arm nymph, Calypso, must have stuffed her ears. But now my troubles are behind me. I've cured my elbow of its fault. I keep my head down. My very clubs have taken on a different look since Saturday. I used to remark their nicks against the stones. A bit of green upon the heel of my driver showed how it was that I went sideways to the woods. In those days I carried the bag spitefully to the shower. Could I leave it, I pondered, as a foundling in an empty locker? Or should I strangle it? But now all is changed. My clubs are servants to my will, kindly obedient creatures that wait upon my nod. Even my brassie knows me for its master. And the country seems fairer. The valleys smile at me. The creek is friendly to my drive. The tall hills skip and clap their hands at my approach. My game needs only thought and care. My fives will become fours. My sixes slip down to fives. And here and there I shall have a three. Except for a row of books. My mental piece is bare. Who knows? Someday I may sweep off a musty row of history and set up a silver cup. Later, Saturday again. I've just been around in a hundred and twenty-three. Horrible. I was in the woods and in the blackberry bushes and in the creek seven times. My envious brassie, my well-beloved mashy, old vile conspiracy, ambition's debt is paid. One twenty-three. Now, now it's my shoulder. End of Chapter 4. Chapter 5. The Posture of Authors There is something rather pleasantly suggestive in the fashion employed by many of the older writers of inscribing their books from their chambers or lodging. It gives them a once locality and circumstance. It brings them to our common earth and understanding. Thomas Fuller, for example, having finished his Church History of Britain, addressed his reader in a preface from his chambers in Sion College. May God alone have the glory, he writes, and the ingenious reader the benefit of my endeavors, which is the hearty design of thy servant in Jesus Christ, Thomas Fuller. One pictures a room in the tutor's style, with oak wainscot, tall mullioned windows and leaded glass, a deep fireplace and black beams above. Outside perhaps is the green quadrangle of the college, cloistered within ancient buildings with gay wall, flowers against the sober stones, veils answered from tower to belfry and agreeable dispute upon the hour. They were cast in a quieter time and refused to bicker on a paltry minute. The sunlight is soft and yellow with old age. Such dedication from such a place might turn the most careless reader into scholarship. In the seat of its leaded windows, even the quirk of a Latin sentence might find a meaning. Here would be a room in which to meditate on the worthies of old England, or to read a chronicle of forgotten kings, queens, and protesting lovers who have faded into night. Here we see Thomas Fuller dip his quill and make a start. I have sometimes solidarily pleased myself, he begins, and he gazes into the dark shadows of the room, seeing, as it were, the pleasant specters of the past. Bishops have bricked long dead and stole and miter. Forgetful of their solemn office, dance in the firelight of his walls. Popes move in dim review across his studies and shake a ghostly finger at his heresy. The past is not approved. To her lover she reveals her beauty, and the scholar's lamp is her marriage torch. Nor need it entirely cool our interest to learn that Scion College did not slope thus in country fashion to the peaceful waters of the Cam, where this fringe of trees and sunny meadow did not possess even a gothic tower in Cloyster. It was built on the site of an ancient priory, Elsing's Spital, with Alm's houses attached, a Jesuit library, and a college for the clergy. It was right in London, down near the Roman Wall in the heart of the tangled traffic, and street cries kept breaking in. Muffins, perhaps, and hot spiced gingerbread and broken glass, I hope at least that the good gentleman's rooms were up above. Somewhat out of the clatter, where muffins had lost their shrillness. Gingerbread, when distance has reduced it to a pleasant tune, is not inclined to rouse a scholar from his meditation. And even broken glass is blunted on a journey to a garret. I hope that the old gentleman climbed three flights or more, and that a range of chimney pots was his outlook and speculation. It seems as if a rather richer flavor were given to a book knowing the circumstances of its composition. Not only would we know the complexion of a man, whether he'd be a black or a fair man, as Addison suggests, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor, but also in what posture he works, and what objects meet his eye when he squares his elbows and dips his pen. We are concerned whether sunlight falls upon his papers or whether he writes in shadow. Also, if an author's desk stands at a window, we are curious whether it looks on a street, or on a garden, or that it squints blindly against a wall. A view across distant hills surely sweetens the imagination, whereas the clatter of the city gives a true to twist, to fancy. And household matters are a proper concern. We would like to be informed whether an author works in the swirl of the common sitting-room. If he writes with an earshot in the kitchen, we should know it. There has been debate whether a steam radiator chills a poet as against an open fire, and whether a plot keeps up its giddy pace upon a sweeping day. Histories have balked before a household interpretation. Novels have been checked by the rattle of a careless broom. A smoky chimney has choked the sturdiest invention. If a plot goes slack, perhaps it is a bursted pipe. An incessant grocer's boy, unanswered on the back porch, has often foiled the wicked Earl and his attempts against the beautiful Pomona. Little did you think, my dear madam, as you read your latest novel, that on the very instant when the heroine, Mrs. L. Myra Jones, deserted her babies to follow her conscience and become a movie actress, that on the very instant when she slammed the street door, the plumber, the author's plumber, came in to test her radiator. Mrs. Jones nearly took her death on the steps as she waited for the plot to deal with her. Even a marquee now and then, one of the older sort in wig and ruffles has been left, when the author's ashes have needed attention, on his knees before the lady Emily, begging her to name the happy day. Was it not Courage's cow that calved while he was riding Kubla Khan? Inversed the housemaid with the joyful news, and that man from Porlock mentioned in his letters who came on business. Did he not to spoil the mourning of its poetry? Did Wordsworth's pigs, surely he owned pigs, never get into his neighbor's garden and need quick attention? Martin lew through through his ink pot, supposedly at the devil. Is it not more likely that it was at Annie who came to dust? Bakery has said to have written largely at his club, the Gerrick, or the Athenium. There was a general stir of feet and voices, but it was foreign, and did not plague him. A tinkular of glasses in the distance he confessed were soothing like a waterfall. Steele makes no complaint against his wife, Prue, but he seemed to have written chiefly in taverns. In the very first paper of the Tatler, he gratifies our natural curiosity by naming the several coffeehouses where he intends to compose his thoughts. For in domestic news he says you will have from St. James Coffeehouse. Learning will proceed from the Grecian, but all accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment shall be under the article of White's Chocolate House. In the month of September, 1705, he continues, a gentleman was watching his teeth at a tavern window in Paul Mall, when a fine equipage passed by, and in it a young lady who looked up at him away goes the coach. Away goes the beauty with an alluring smile, rather an ambiguous smile, I'm afraid, across her silk and shoulder. But for the continuation of this pleasing scandal, you may be sure that the pretty fellow was quite distracted from his teeth. One must turn up the yellow pages of the Tatler. We may suppose that Steele called for pins and paper in a sandbox and took a table in one of White's forward windows. He wished no garden view or brick wall against the window. We may even go so far as to assume that something in the way of Punch, or Canary, or Negus Luke, my dear, was handy at his elbow. His paragraphs are punctuated by the gay procession of the street. Here comes a great dandy and red heels with lace at his beard and wrists. Here is a scarlet captain who has served with Marlboro and has taken a whole regiment of Frenchmen by the nose. Here is the Lady Belinda in her chariot, who is the pledge of all the wits and poets. That little pink ear of hers has been rhymed in a hundred sonnets. Ear and tear and fear and near and dear. The king has been toasted from her slipper. Their pretty creature has been sitting in ombre for most of the night, but now at four in the afternoon she takes the morning air with her lap dog. That great hat and feather will slay another dozen hearts between shop and shop. She is attended by a female dragon, who contrives by accident to show an inch or so of charming stocking at the curb. Steel at his window, I'm afraid, forgets for the moment his darling pru and is promised to be home. There is something rather pleasant in knowing where these old authors, who are now almost forgotten, wrote their books. Richardson wrote Clarissa at Parsons Green. That ought not to interest us very much, for nobody reads Clarissa now, but we can picture the fat little printer reading his daily batch of tender letters from young ladies begging him to reform the wicked lovelace, and turn the novel to a happy end. For it was issued in parts, and so, of course, there was no opportunity for young ladies, however impatient, to thumb the back pages for the plot. Richardson wrote Pamela at a house called the Grange, then in the open country just out of London. There was a garden at the back and a grotto. One of the grottos that had been the fashion for prosperous literary gentlemen, since Pope had built himself one at Thickenham. Here it is said Richardson used to read his story day by day as it was freshly composed to a circle of his lady admirers. Hugh Thompson has drawn the picture in delightful silhouette. The ladies listen in suspense, perhaps the wicked master is just taking Pamela on his knee. Their hands are raised in protest. La, the monster! Their noses are pitched up to a high excitement. One old lady hangs her head and blushes at the outrage. Or does she cock her ear to hear the better? Richardson had a kind of rocking horse in his study, and he took his exercise so between chapters. We may imagine him galloping furiously on the hearth rug, then, quite refreshed, after four or five dishes of tea, hiding his villain once more under Pamela's bed. Did it never occur to that young lady to lift the valance? Half a dozen times, at least, she has come popping out after she has loosened her stays, once even when she has got her stockings off. Perhaps this is the dangerous moment when the old lady in the silhouette hung her head and blushed. If Pamela had gone rummaging vigorously with a poker beneath her bed, she would have cooled her lover. Goldsmith wrote his books, for the most part, in lodgings. We find him starving with the beggars in Axe Lane, advancing to Green Arbor Court, sending down to the cook-shop for a tart to make his supper, living in the temple as his fortune mended. Was it not at his window in the temple that he wrote part of his animated nature? His first chapter, four pages, is called a sketch of the universe. In four pages, he cleared the beginning up to Adam. Could anything be simpler or easier? The clever fellow, no doubt, could have made the universe, actually made it out of chaos. Stars and moon and fishes in the sea, in less than the allotted six days, and not needed to rest upon the seventh. He could have gone instead, in plum-colored coat, in full fig, to Vox Hall for a frolic. Goldsmith had nothing in particular outside of his window to look at, but the stone-flagging, a pump, and a solitary tree. Of the whole green earth, this was the only living thing. For a brief season, a bird or two lodged there, and you might be sure that Goldsmith put the remnant of his crumbs upon the window casement. Perhaps it was here that he sent down to the cook-shop for a tart, and he and his birds made a common banquet across the glass. Poets, depending on their circumstance, are supposed to ride either in garrets or in gardens. Grounding, it is true, lived at Casa Guidi, which was yellow with sunshine from morning to evening, and here and there a prosperous Byron has a Persian carpet and mahogany desk. But for the most part, we put our poets in garrets, as a cheap place that has the additional advantage of being nearest to the moon. From these high windows, sonnets are thrown on a windy night. Rhymes and fancies are roused by gazing on the stars. The rumble of the lower city is potent to start a metaphor. These fringes of lamplight it is written, struggling up through smoke, and thousand-fold exaltation. Some fathoms into the ancient reign of night. What thinks boots of them, as he leads his hunting dogs over the zenith in their leash of sidereal fire? That stifled hum of midnight when traffic has lain down to rest. Here, under a sloping roof, the poet sits, blowing at his fingers. Hokearth has drawn him, the distressed poet, cold and lean and shabby. That famous picture might have been copied from the life of any of a hundred creatures of the duncead, and where the change of costume might serve our time as well. The poor fellow sits at a broken table in the dormer. About him lie his scattered sheets, his wife mends his breeches. Outside the door stands a woman with the unpaid milk-score. There is not a penny in the place, and for food only half a loaf and something brewing in a kettle. You may remember that when Johnson was a young poet, just come to London, he lived with Mr. Cave and St. John's Gate. When there were visitors he ate his supper behind a screen because he was too shabby to show himself. I wonder what definition he gave the poet in his dictionary. If he wrote in his own experience, he put him down as a poor devil who was always hungry. But Chatterton already died of starvation in a garret, and those other hundred poets of his time and hours got down to the bone and took to coughing. Perhaps we shall change our minds about that sonnet which we tossed lightly to the moon. The wind thrusts a cold finger through chink and rag. The stars travel on such lonely journeys. The jest loses its relish. Perhaps those merry verses to the Christmas, the sleigh bells and the roasted goose, perhaps those verses turned bitter would written on an empty stomach. But do poets ever write in gardens? Swift, who is by way of being a poet, built himself a garden seed at Moore Park when he served Sir William Temple. But I don't know that he wrote poetry there. Rather it was a place for reading. Pope in his prosperous days wrote a tricking ham, with the sound of his artificial waterfall in his ears. And he walked to take the air in his grotto along the Thames. But do poets really wonder beneath the moon to think their verses? Do they compose on summer Eve by haunted stream? I doubt whether Gray conceived his elegy in an actual graveyard. I smell oil. One did not see the thing described upon the very moment. Shelly wrote of mountains, the awful range of Caucasus. But his eye at the time looked on sunny Italy. Ibsen wrote to the North when living in the South. When Bunyan wrote to the delectable mountains, he was snug inside a jail. Shakespeare doubtless saw the giddy cliffs of Dover, the Rialto, the Scottish Heath, from the vantage of a London lodging. Where did Andrew Marvell stand or sit or walk when he wrote about gardens? Wordsworth is said to have strolled up and down a gravel path with his eyes on the ground. I wonder whether the gardener ever broke in, if he had a gardener, to complain about the drought, or how the dandelions were getting the better of him. Or perhaps the lawnmower squeaked, if he had a lawnmower, and threw him off. But wasn't it Wordsworth who woke up four times in one night and called to his wife for pens and paper, lest an idea escape him? Surely he didn't take to the garden at that time of night in his pajamas with an ink pot. But did Wordsworth have a wife? How one forgets. Coleridge told Hazelit that he liked to compose walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copeswood. But then you recall that a calf broke into Kubla Khan. On that particular day, at least, he was snug in his study. No, I think the poets may like to sit in gardens and smoke their pipes and poke idly with their sticks. But when it comes actually to composing, they would rather go inside. For even a little breeze scatters their papers. No poet wished to spend his precious morning chasing a frisky sonnet across the lawn. Even a heavy epic, if lifted by a sudden squall, challenges the swiftest foot. He puts his stick on one pile and his pipe on another, and he holds down loose sheets with his thumb. But it is awkward business, and it checks the mind in its loftier flight. Nor do poets care to suck their pencils too long when someone may see them, perhaps Annie at the window rolling her pie crust, and they can't kick off their shoes outdoors in the hot agony of composition. And also, which caps the argument, a garden is undeniably a sleepy place. The bees drone a sleepy tune. The breeze practices a lullaby. Even the sunlight is in the common conspiracy. At the very moment, when the poet is considering Little Miss Muffet and how she sat on a tuffet, doubtless in a garden for their spiders, even at the very moment when she sits unsuspectingly at her curds and way, down goes the poet's head and he is fast asleep. Sleepiness is the plague of authors. You may remember that when Christian, who doubtless was an author in his odd moments, came to the garden and the arbor on the hill difficulty. He pulled his roll out of his bosom and read therein to his comfort, thus pleasing himself a while. He at last fell in slumber. I have no doubt, other theories to the contrary, that Kublikon broke off suddenly because Coleridge dropped off to sleep. A cup of black coffee might have extended the poem to another stanza. Men's pie would have stretched it to a volume. Is not Shakespeare allowed his forty winks? Has it not been written that even the worthy Homer nods? A pleasing land of drowsy head it was, of dreams the way before the half-shut eye, and of gay castles in the clouds that pass, forever fleshing round a summer sky. No, if one has a bit of writing to put out of the way, it is best to stay indoors, choose an uncomfortable straight-back chair, toss the sheets into a careless litter, and if someone will pay the milk score and keep the window mended, a garret is not a bad place in which to write. Novelists, unless they have need of history, can write anywhere. I suppose at home or on a journey, in the burst of their hot imagination and knee is a desk. I have no doubt that Mr. Hugh Walpole, touring in this country, contrives to write a bit even in a Pullman. The ingenious Mr. Oppenheim, surely dashes off a plot on the margin of the menu card between meat and salad. We know that Pickwick Papers was written partly in Hackney Coaches, while Dickens was jolting about the town. An essayist, on the other hand, needs a desk in a library near at hand, because an essay is a kind of backstove cookery. A novel needs a hot fire, so to speak, a dozen chapters bubble in their turn, above the reddest coals, while an essay simmers over a little flame. Pieces of this and that, an odd carrot, as it were, a left potato, a pithy bone, discarded trifles, are tossed in from time to time to enrich the composition. Raw paragraphs, when they have stewed all night, at last become tender to the fork. An essay, therefore, cannot be written hurriedly on the knee. Essayists, as a rule, chew their pencils. Their desks are large and always in disorder. There is a stack of books on the clock shelf. Others are pushed under the bed. Matches, pencils, and bits of paper mark a hundred references. When an essayist goes out from his lodging, he wears the kind of overcoat that holds a book in every pocket. His sagging pockets proclaim him. He is a bulging person, so stuffed even in his dress, with the ideas of others that his own leanness is so concealed. An essayist keeps a notebook, and he thumbs it for forgotten thoughts. Nobody is safe from him, or he steals from everyone he meets. An essayist is not a mighty traveller. He does not run to grapple with a roaring lion. He desires neither typhoon nor tempest. He is content in his harbour to listen to the storm upon the rocks. If now and then, by a lucky chance, he can shelter someone from the wreck. His hands are not red with revolt against the world. He has glanced upon the thoughts of many men, and, as opposite philosophies point upon the truth, he is modest with his own and tolerant toward the opinion of others. He looks at the stars, and knowing in what a dim immensity we travel, he writes a little things beyond dispute. There are enough to weep upon the shadows. He, like a dial, marks the light. The small clatter of the city beneath his window, the cry of peddlers, children shocking their games upon the pavement, laundry dancing on the roofs and smoke in the winter's wind, these are the things he weaves into the fabric of his thoughts, or sheep upon the hillside if his window is so lucky, or a sunny meadow is a profitable speculation, and so while the novelist is struggling up a dizzy mountain, straining through the tempest to see the kingdoms of the world, behold the essayist, snug at home, content with little sighs, he is a kind of poet, a poet whose wings are clipped. He flaps to no great heights and sees neither the devil, the seven oceans, nor the twelve apostles. He paints old thoughts in shiny varnish, and, as he is able, he amends small habits here and there, and therefore, as essayists stay at home, they are precise, quite amorous in the posture and outlook of their writing. Lee Hunt wished a great library next to his study. But for the study itself, he writes, give me a small snug place almost entirely walled with books. There should be only one window in it looking upon trees, how the precious fellow scorns the mountains and the ocean. He has no love at scenes for typhoons and roaring lions. I entrench myself in my books, he continues, equally against sorrow and the weather. If the wind comes through a passage, I look about to see how I can fence it off by a better disposition of my movables. And by movables, he means his books. These were his screen against cold and trouble, but Lee Hunt had been in prison for his political beliefs. He had grappled with his lion, so perhaps, after all, my argument fails. Mr. Edmund Goss had a different method to the same purpose. He was so anxious to fly all outward noise that he desired a library apart from the house. Maybe he had had some experience with Annie and her clattering broomstick. In my sleep, he writes, where dreams are multitude. I sometimes fancy that one day I shall have a library in a garden. The phrase seems to contain the whole felicity of man. It sounds like having a castle in Spain or a sheep walk in Arcadia. Montaigne's study was a tower, walled all about with books. At his table in the midst, he was the general focus of their wisdom. Hazlet wrote much at an inn in Winterslow with Salisbury Plain around the corner of his view. Now and then let us hope when the London coach was due, he received in his nostrils a savoury smell from the kitchen stove. I taste pepper sometimes and sharp sauces in his writing. Stevenson, except for ill health and a love of the South Seas here was the novelist showing himself, would have preferred a windy perch over looking Edinburgh. It does seem, as if a rather richer flavour were given to books by knowing the circumstances of its composition. Consequently, readers, as they grow older, turn more and more to biography. It is chiefly not the biographies that deal with great crises and events, but rather the biographies that are concerned with small circumstance and agreeable gossip that attract them most. The life of Gladstone with its hard facts of British policy is all very well, but Mr. Lucas' life of Lamb is better. Who would willingly neglect the record of a Thursday night at Inter-Temple Lane? And these pages, Talford, Proctor, Hastleton, Hunt have written their memories of those gatherings. It was to his partner at Wist, as he was dealing that Lamb once said, if dirt were trumps what hands you would hold? Nights of wit and friendly banter. Who would not crowd his ears with gossip of that mirthful company? George Dyer who forgot his boots until halfway home. The dear fellow grew forgetful as the smoking jug went round. Charles Lamb feeling the stranger's bumps. Let the empire totter. Let Napoleon fall. Africa shall be parceled as it may. Here will we sit until the cups are empty. Lately in the bookshop at the foot of Cornhill, I fell in with an old scholar who told me that it was his practice to recommend four books, which, taken end on end, furnish the general history of English letters from the Restoration to a time within our own memory. These books were Peep's diary, Boswells Johnson, the diary and letters of Madame Darbly, and the diary of Crab Robinson. Beginning almost with the days of Cromwell, here is a chain of pleasant gossip across the space of more than two hundred years. Perhaps at first, there were old fellows still alive who could remember Shakespeare, who still sat in chimney corners and babbled through their toothless gums of black friars in the globe. But at the end we find a reference to President Lincoln and the freeing of the slaves. Here are a hundred authors, perhaps a thousand, tucking up their cuffs, looking out from their familiar windows, scribbling their large or trivial masterpieces. End of Chapter Five Recording by Chris Pyle Chapter Six of Hints to Pilgrims 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 Caro Hints to Pilgrims by Charles Stephen Brooks Chapter Six After Dinner Pleasantries There is a shop below Fourteenth Street, somewhat remote from fashion. That sells nothing but tricks for amateur and parlor use. It is a region of cobblers, tailors and small grocers. Upstairs, locksmiths, and buttonhole cutters look through dusty windows on the L, which, under some dim influence of the moon, tosses past the buildings here, its human tide, up and down, night and morning. The trick shop flatters itself on its signboard that it carries the largest line of its peculiar trickery on the western hemisphere, hinting modestly that Baluchistan, perhaps or Mesopotamia, where magic might be supposed to flourish, may have an equal stock. The shop does not proclaim its greatness to the casual glance. Its enormity of fraud offers no hint to the unsuspecting curb. There must be caverns and cellars at the rear, a wealth of baffling sham unrumoured to the street, shelves sagging with agreeable deception, huge bales of slight of hand and musty barrels of old magic. But to the street the shop reveals no more than a small shop window, of a kind in which liquorice sticks and all the suckers might feel at home. It is a window at which children might stop on their way from school and meditate their choice, fumbling in their pockets for their wealth. I have stood at this window for ten minutes together. There are cards for fortune-tellers and manuals of astrology, decks with five aces and marked backs and trick hats and boxes with false bottoms. There are iron cigars to be offered to a friend and bleeding fingers and a device that makes a noise like blowing the nose, only much louder. Books of magic are displayed and conjurer's outfits, shell games and disappearing rabbits. There is a line of dribble glasses. A humorous contrivance with little holes under the brim for spilling water down the front of an unwary guest. This, it is asserted, breaks the social ice and makes a timid stranger feel at home. And there are puzzle pictures, beards for villains and comic masks, Satan himself and other painted faces for Halloween. Some persons, of course, can perform their parlor tricks without this machinery and appliance. I know a gifted fellow who can put on the expression of an idiot. Or he wrinkles his face into the semblance of eighty years, shakes with palsy and asks his tarred wife if she will love him when he's old. Again he puts a coffee cup under the shoulder of his coat and plays the humpback. On a special occasion he mounts a table or two kitchen chairs become his stage and recites Richard and the winter of his discontent. He needs only a pillow to smother Desdemona. And then he opens an imaginary bottle, the popping of the cork, the fizzing, the gurgle when it pours. Sometimes he's a squealing pig caught under a fence and sometimes two steamboats signalling with their whistles in a fog. I know a young woman, of the Neurosort, who appears to swallow a lighted cigarette with smoke coming from her ears. This was once a man's trick, but the progress of the weaker sex has shifted it. On request she is a nervous lady with a fear of monkeys taking five children to the circus. She is Camille on her deathbed. I know a man too who can give the rebel yell and stick a needle full length into his leg. The pulpy part above his knee seems to make an excellent pincushion. And then there is the old locomotive starting on a slippery grade for beginners in entertainment. The hand-organ man and his infested monkey, a duet, the chicken that is chased around the barnyard, hamlet with the broken pallet, this is side-splitting in any company, and Moriarty on the telephone. I suppose our best vaudeville performers were once amateurs themselves around the parlor lamp. And there is Jones too who plays the piano. Jones, when he is asked, sits at the keyboard and fingers little runs and chords. He seems to be thinking which of a hundred pieces he will play. What will you have? He asks. And a fat man wants William Tell and a lady with a powdered nose asks for bubbles. But Jones ignores both and says, Here's the little thing of Shuman. It's a charming bit. On the other hand, when Brown is asked to sing, it is generally too soon after dinner. Brown, evidently, takes his food through his windpipe, and it is, so to speak, a one-way street. He can hardly permit the ascending Siegfried to squeeze past the cheese and crackers that still block the crowded passage. There is not a college dinner without the mockery of an eccentric professor. A wag will catch the pointing of his finger his favourite phrase. Is there a lawyer's dinner without its imitation of Harry Lauder? Isn't there always someone who wants to sing? It's nice to get up in the morning and trot up and down with twinkling legs. Plumbers on their lodge-nights, I am told, have their very own Charlie Chaplin. And I suppose that the Soda-Clarke's Union, the deer-creatures with their gum, has its local Mary Pickford, ready with a scene from Pollyanna. What jolly dinners dentists must have, telling one another in dialect how old Mrs. Finnegan had her molars out. Forcepts and burrs are there unwearyed just across the years. When they are together and the doors are closed, how they must frolic with our weakness. And undertakers, even they, I am informed, throw off their solemn countenance when they gather in convention. Their carnation and mournful smile are gone, that sober gesture that waves the chilly relations to the sitting-room. But I wonder whether their dismal shock doesn't cling always just a bit to their mirth and songs. That poor duffer in the poem who asked to be laid low wrapped in his tarpaulin jacket, surely undertakers never sing of him, they must look at him with disfavour for his cheap proposal. He should have roused for a moment at the end with a request for black broadcloth and silver handles. I once sat with an undertaker at a tragedy. He was of a lively sympathy in the earlier parts and seemed hopeful that the hero would come through alive. But in the fifth act when the clanking army was defeated in the wings and Brutus had fallen on his sword, then unmistakably his thoughts returned to the peculiar viewpoint of his profession. In fancy he sat already in the back parlor with the grieving Mrs. Brutus arranging for the music. To undertakers Caesar is always dead and turned to clay. Full staff is just a fat old gentleman who drank too much sack, a babbled of green fields, and then needed professional attention. Perhaps at the very pitch of their meetings when the merry glasses have been three times filled they pledge one another in what they are pleased to call the embalmers fluid. This just grows rosier with the years. For these many centuries at their banquets they have sung that it was a cough that carried him off, that it was a coffin now then gentlemen all together for the chorus, that it was a coffin they carried him off in. I dined lately with a man who could look like a weasel. When this was applauded he made a face like the dude of Palmer Cox's brownies. Even Susan, the waitress who knows her place and takes a jest soberly, broke down at the pantry door. We could hear her dishes rattling in convulsions in the sink. And then our host played the insect with his fingers on the tablecloth, smelling a spot of careless gravy from the roast with his long thin middle finger. He caught the habit that insects have of waving their forward legs. I still recall an uncle who could wiggle his ears. He did it every Christmas and Thanksgiving day. It was as much a part of the regular program as the turkey and the cranberries. It was a feature of his engaging foolery to pretend that the wiggle was produced by rubbing the stomach, and a circle of us youngsters sat around him rubbing our expectant stomachs waiting for the miracle. A cousin brought a guitar and played the Spanish Fandango while we sat around the fire, sleepy after dinner. And there was a maid and aunt with thin blue fingers who played waltzes while we danced, and she nodded and slept to the drowsy sound of her own music. Of my own after-dinner pleasantries I am modest. I have only one trick. Two. I can recite the fur-bearing animals of North America, the bison, the bear, the wolf, the seal, and sixteen others, and I can go downstairs behind the couch for the cider. This last requires little skill. As the books of magic say, it is an easy and baffling trick. With every step you crook your legs a little more until finally you are on your knees hunched together and your head has disappeared from you. You reverse the business coming up with trained glasses. But these are my only tricks. There is a Brahms waltz that I once had hopes of, but it has a hard run on the second page. I can never get my thumb under in time to make connections. My best voice, too, covers only five notes. You cannot do much for the neighbours with that cramped kind of range. A tailor there sat on his window-edge is one of the few tunes that fall inside my poverty. He calls to his wife, you may remember, to bring him his old crossbow, and there is a great zum-zum up and down in the base until ready before the chorus starts. On a foggy morning I have quite a formidable voice for those zums, but after dinner pleasantries are only good at night and then my bass is thin. A sailor's life, yo-ho! is a very good tune, but it goes up to D, and I can sing it only when I am reckless of circumstance or when I am taking ashes from the furnace. I know a lady who sings only at her sewing machine. She finds a stirring accompaniment in the whirling of the wheel. Others sing best in tiled bathrooms, sitting in warm and soapy water their voices swell to carousels. Laundresses, I have noticed, are in lustiest voice at their tubs, where their arms keep a vigorous rhythm on the scrubbing board. But I choose ashes. I am little short of a valkyr, despite my sex, when I rattle the furnace great. With hymns I can make quite a showing in church if the bass part keeps to a couple of notes. I pound along melodiously on some convenient low note and slide up now and then by a happy instinct when the tune seems to require it. The dear little lady who sits in front of me turns what I am pleased to think is an appreciative ear, and now and then for my support she throws in a pretty treble. But I have no tolerance with a bass part that undertakes a flourish and climbs up behind the tenor. This is mere egotism and a desire to shine. Art thou there, true penny? You hear this fellow in the cellarage? That is the proper bass. Dear me, now that I recall it, we have guests, guests tonight for dinner. Will I be asked to sing? Am I in voice? I tumble am a little up and down for experiment. The roar of the subway drowns this from my neighbours, but by holding my hand over my mouth I can hear it. Is my low eth in order? No, undeniably it is not. Thin and squeaky. The zums would never do. And that fast run in Brahms, can I slip through it? Or will my thumb as usual catch and stall? Have my guests seen me go downstairs behind the couch for the cider? Have they heard the fur-bearing animals? The bison, the bear, the wolf, the seal, the beaver, the otter, the fox and raccoon? Perhaps, perhaps it will be better to stop at the trick-shop and buy a dribble-glass and a long black beard to amuse my guests. End of Chapter Six