Chapter VI: Part 6

The worst of hot spells is that they always occur in the summer. Now a nice hot spell in the middle of winter or the beginning of March, when we are all getting sick of the snow and heavy woollens, would be--but enough of this! We are not the man to fly in the face of Divine Providence and suggest changes in the climatic arrangements. We leave that to the parsons.

It is quite possible, of course--in fact, with our usual luck in such matters, it is highly probable--that by the time this has been printed, bound, and inflicted on the public, the public will be sitting in front of a grate-fire with a shawl and a cold in the head, having been caught in the sleet on the way home from the office. The public will therefore regard our advice on the best way to keep cool as an impertinence and an imposition. And we hate to have the public think us a jackanapes or a darn fool. Of course, the public is bound to find us out some time, but we would like to postpone the dread day as long as possible.

Whatever the weather may be like at the time of reading, at the time of writing and for some days back we have been going through a period of torridity during which keeping cool has been an art--a lost art, we regret to state. Having devoted to it all the powers of our mind and all the energy we had left after the business of perspiring, we feel qualified to speak on the subject with assurance and authority. Not that we have ever considered it necessary for us to feel qualified before speaking, but it is just as well.

As soon as the heat-wave hit us in our office-chair, we took off our coat, vest, collar and tie, and knotting our suspenders around our editorial waist, we sent out for all the heat-literature that could be obtained for love or money--preferably for love. And then we plunged with characteristic impetuosity into the task of mastering this subtle science or esoteric philosophy or whatever it is. Only we didn't master it.

We never in all our life became so hot as we did reading the various directions for keeping cool. When we got through we were stuck to the back of our chair, the pattern of our shirt had been roughly transferred to our epidermis, and we had gone into liquidation to the extent of several pounds--avoirdupois, not sterling. But we had the satisfaction of feeling that we knew all there was to be known about keeping cool, all the hints, surmises, suggestions, and epizootic bosh generally.

Advice on how to keep cool, so far as we can find out, usually concerns itself with clothes, food, rest, and the state of one's mind. The crest of the heat-wave is always littered with suggestions as to what one should wear and eat and drink--especially what one shouldn't--how much one should rest, and how peaceful and serene one's mind, or what one uses in its place, should always remain. This last is considered very important. Perhaps if one can only get cool, a cool mind will help one to keep so. But we never get--not till the hot spell is over.

Concerning clothes we are told that we should wear as little as possible--as little, that is, as the crossing-policemen will let us get by with. And what little we do wear should be of silk or linen or thin flannel, and very light in color, preferably white.

Now, so far as the girls are concerned, this is easy. They have already at the dictate of fashion removed all the lower strata of clothing, retaining only the extreme outer layer. And even this they have cut so low and slit so high, that there is practically no obstacle in the way of the weakest zephyr that ever zephed. And, as for mosquitoes, a really sporting mosquito would scorn to take opportunities so easy.

But men are somewhat handicapped. We still retain vestiges of primitive reticence. Or perhaps it is only that we do not think we would look so well in transparent garments. The thought of wearing muslin trousers tastefully slashed to the knee causes us to shrink painfully. Nor would we like our shirts cut low to display our collar-bone and Adam's-apple. There is something crude and ungainly about masculine architecture when exposed in that unabashed way.

Of course, there are linen suits and mohair suits. Now and then one even sees a silk suit--very seldom, though, for few men are dare-devils of this unfaltering type. But, though cool enough in a way, there are disadvantages to all such clothes. We know, for we have tried them.

Five or six years ago, we recall, there was a hot spell of the good old blast-furnace type. In its tropical glare one's ordinary suit felt like the winter garb of an Esquiman. Fat men became slim, though not graceful, in a single afternoon. It was like being rendered in one of those German plants for producing glycerine.

Personally, we became desperate. Not that we are of a fat or particularly full-blooded type. But then neither are we a lightning-rod--not, except in the most figurative sense. We rushed out to our barber and had him reduce our dome of thought somewhat to the appearance of a stubble-field. We got a pair of canvas shoes and a Panama hat. We tried beer. Then we tried ice-cream sodas. Then we tried beer again--this time we gave it a really good trial. Still no relief. As a last resort we bought two linen suits. We were desperate, that's all! The idea in buying two was to wear one while the laundry was hanging, drawing, and quartering the other.

They were nice suits--not a doubt about it! On the stage they would have caused matinee-girls to dream about us. But for private life, especially such a modest and retiring private life as ours, they were rather pronounced. One of them was made out of a genteel sort of gunny-sacking; while the other was smooth with hair-line stripes at wide intervals. But both had the same general color-effect. It suggested a sick canary--yellow, you know, but not up to its usual form.

The first time we put one of them on, we sneaked out the back way. We didn't dare step out where the neighbors could see us. Of course, there would not be the same occasion for nervousness nowadays, when suits of this airy character have become so much more familiar. But this was five or six years ago, when masculine tastes were less Arcadian.

While we stood waiting for a street-car--we felt as though we had been waiting several hours--hot blushes coursed over us from head to foot. The perspiration fairly sizzled on our cheeks. We couldn't have felt hotter in a coon coat.

As the car bore down upon us, we noticed that the motorman kept his eye fixed on us with withering contempt. He fairly snorted with indignation as he applied the air-brake. We put it down to jealousy. He was wearing one of those nice serge suits, blue and shiny, made of cloth weighing half a pound to the square foot, and bound with leather at the wrists, as is popular in municipal-traction circles. A coat like that is about as pervious to air as a zinc roof. We tried to persuade ourself that he envied us.

The conductor, while he held out the box for our yellow ticket--no, we didn't choose it to match the suit--studied us as though we were a new and exotic specimen at the local zoo. Then he went up to the front of the car, and as he went the motorman turned halfway round and said in a stage-whisper that carried easily the full length of the car: "Fer gawd's sake, did yuh see what got on?" Then they talked seriously together for a moment or two. They seemed to be considering whether or not they ought to throw us off. It was very difficult to look unconcerned, but we tried.

There are many painful recollections connected with that day. We bore up against the flood of contumely and ridicule as best we could. But in the end it was too much for us. We passed a group of boys on a street-corner. We had passed several such groups during the day, and had been obliged to listen to many personal remarks of a vulgar character utterly lacking in true wit. As we went past this last group the usual derisive comments were made, but we neither slackened nor hastened our stately progress. Then in the midst of them a shrill voice suddenly piped up: "Oh, you Votes-for-Women!"

It was too much. Our cup was full--in fact, it was sloshing over our anguished soul. We hurried home and tore the suit off, and were only prevented by fear of our landlady from burning it in the corner of our room. We never wore it again.

As we pointed out before, however, the public attitude towards garments of this sort has changed very considerably in the past few years. A man may now clothe himself like the lily--the orange lily, that is--without causing people on the street to suspect him of being a poet or a professional fox-trotter. Think of the vogue of the Palm Beach suit in the past few years!--which reminds us.

We were sitting in the office the other day--a real sizzler, too!--with the door locked for protection and most of our clothes piled up on the extra chair. Oh, it's all right. We had arranged with the office-boy to ring a bell when he saw anyone coming towards our door, so we could put some of them on again.

Well, we had hastily scrambled into our coat and an expression of alert dignity when a fat man was ushered in. He is a friend of ours who had dropped in to show us a nice new Palm-Beach suit he had bought for ten dollars and a quarter the day before--heaven alone knows what the quarter was for! In fact, at the first glance we wondered what the ten dollars was for.

To be perfectly frank--always an interesting and perilous endeavor--we took a scunner against that suit. In the first place it was so darn baggy; and then the color! It hung on him in folds like an elephant's skin--a light tan elephant who had been crossed in love. We wouldn't wear a suit like that--not, if we had to go around in our pyjamas. But naturally we didn't tell him so--there is such a thing as tact. We said all we could for the suit. We remarked that there seemed to be a good deal of cloth in it for the money, and it would be a nice invisible shade for sitting around the beach in the evening. Even the sand-flies would hardly be able to find him.

If we had let the matter rest right there, we would have been all right. He wasn't flattered exactly, but he was satisfied. Unfortunately, in our desire for information, we asked him if the waiters in the better-class restaurants made any objection to serving him.

You should have heard that fat man talk--that is, when he ceased to foam and his rage became articulate. What he said about us and our clothes we would hate to admit in the police court, let alone print in cold type here. He wound up with the statement that the only reason we hadn't been sun-struck before now was because there was nothing in our noodle for the sun to strike. And this was flattering compared to some of the things that went before.

Finally we were forced to remind him that he was exhausting what little air there was in our office. As a matter of fact, we don't know of anything that will exhaust the air of an ordinary room so quickly on a hot day as a fat man in one of those pale, porous suits.

The immediate chill that ensued in our conversation was very grateful to us. It was the first chill we had had in days, and we were looking for chills. Night after night we kept hoping some burglar would break into the house, or a good gruesome ghost start strolling around, so we could have a few authentic chills chasing one another up and down our spinal column. But no luck! You couldn't hire a burglar in such weather--not if you doubled the regular rates of the Burglars' Union. And as for ghosts--well, they found it cooler, no doubt, even in the place where the naughty ones are sent.

By way of finishing with the subject of summer clothes, we may as well confess that we bought a mohair suit once. It was very nice stuff, a little shiny, but quite cool. All went well till we were caught in a shower. Then that suit did things we had never before thought possible for anything but a snake or a contortionist. It tied itself into incredible knots. The trousers climbed up one leg, and twisted frantically in an endeavor to break the other. The tails of the coat curled up, presumably with a view to getting around our neck and strangling us. It took a couple of our friends to pry the suit off and restore our circulation. We never felt the same towards it afterwards.

So much for the heat-suggestions about clothes. And the advice they give you in the matter of food is almost as bad--nothing but milk and eggs and salads. Spoon-feed and garden truck! Fine stuff to expect a man to do his work on. Not that we are so set on working that we eat solely with that end in view. But one must hold one's job, if one is obliged to have such a thing at all. And holding a job implies, so far as we are concerned, a certain number of steaks and slices of roast-beef-rare.

"Ah, but, my friend," says the heat-suggester, "you must not over-exert yourself. You must repose, especially during the heat of the day. You may do a little work in the early morning and again in the evening. But from eleven to four--nay, nay, 't is very unwise." And then he proceeds to dwell at length on that beautiful Southern custom of the siesta.

It is a beautiful custom all right. Far be it from us to deny it. For years we have been dreaming of nice little siestas out in the grape-arbor with a bubble-pipe and a couple of senoritas singing Spanish love-songs to the silvery tinkling of the mandolins. We realize that the bubble-pipe is not especially Spanish, but it is cool and that is the principal thing.

We have never dwelt on this ambition to the Managing Editor. We do not believe he possesses a romantic imagination--not sufficiently romantic, at any rate. But what do hot-weather tipsters care about managing editors?--pish-tush and less! What do they care for jobs, or even positions? They simply refuse to take them into account. All they ever stop to consider is temperature.

In the same way they take no stock of human infirmities and foibles. They ruthlessly cut out all the pleasures of life, innocent or otherwise--especially otherwise, as you might expect, but the innocent ones, too. For instance, you mustn't smoke. That raises your blood-pressure! We presume that having one's blood-pressure raised is a very serious thing, something like having one's taxes raised. Anyway, we are warned against it.

The same applies to drink--only much more so. God bless us, yes! Of course, when we say "drink," the reference is to fluid of a sociable and cheering character, not to iced tea or well-water or such other insipid means of internal refrigeration. But then the Prohibitionists have cut drink off, too--and much more effectually, alas!--so the warnings of the health-cranks find us unresigned but acquiescent. We may even be soothed by their assurances that "booze" is bad for us in the summer, though personally we have never found much consolation in reflections of this nature.

The thing is done, however--at least, for the present, whatever hopes one may entertain for referendums in the future--and we must accept our thirsty destiny. So farewell the jovial Collins and the smooth and voluptuous Gin Fizz, whether silver or golden. No longer must we soar on the bounding High Ball to celestial regions where the heat-waves cease from troubling and the mercury is at rest. The pungent and appetizing Cocktail is not for us, nor the enticing Rickey. Even the mild and genial Shandy-gaff must we shun, for it contains Beer, and the name of Beer is anathema in anything but negligible percentages.

Their merry reign is over, and all their kingdom is given up to plebeian beverages like Sarsaparilla and Soda-Pop. But those of us who are royalists at heart will still continue to look forward to a restoration of the old regime. They have gone, but their memory is green in our hearts--green with sprigs of mint.

*Back to Nature in a Limousine*

There has been in recent years a good deal of talk about "going back to nature"--perhaps we should make that a capital "N." Even some of the highest-class magazines have been devoting to it so much space that we begin to suspect the advertisers must have asked to be put next to extra-pure reading matter. It is true that most of it was written at so much a line or an inch or a column by chaps living in hall-bedrooms, but it is none the less an indication of a genuine back-to-the-land movement. We know for we have taken part in it ourself.

Last summer we went back to the land for a week-end. As a result of our experience we wish to state that we now approve of the land as an institution. But you have to go back to it right. Everything depends on that.

Years and years ago when we were younger and foolisher than we will ever be again, we trust--as a matter of fact, we were fresh out of college, very fresh--we went back to the land. The experience embittered our nature for years. We made the mistake of going back to work on the land. Never, never do that. That way misanthropy lies.

Brutally heedless of our "B.A." and our other scholastic honors, big, coarse farmers bullied us around from four o'clock in the morning till ten at night. The rest of the time was our own. We went out at dewy dawn and hitched two or three imbecile horses to a rusty old plough, and spent the day tearing irregular gashes in the scenery till it looked like a crochet pattern, and till our head swam and our knees wobbled.

When we tottered in at twilight, an old and broken man, we had to go and chase home several festive cows who did the Maxixe and Tango and several other dances quite unknown to human beings at that time--they are still unknown to all but dancing professors. It usually took an hour at least to shoo them into the barn and hog-tie them so they wouldn't kick us through the pail, or the pail through us--they didn't care which.

We were supposed to be doing this for our health. We had never been robust, though always very sound as to appetite, and the family said the fresh air and joyous work of the fields would do us so much good, poor boy. It nearly did us for good and all. When we got home to mother after a year of it, with callouses on our hands and on our soul, the house-dog sat up and howled in anguish of mind, and the town-undertaker licked his lips and measured our length and breadth--there wasn't much breadth--with his eye. We could see him wondering whether the family would stand for solid silver handles or just the plain oxidized kind.

For years afterwards the mere mention of the word "farm" would cause us to tremble from head to foot and perspire clammily at every pore. We couldn't look at a cow without wanting to heave a brick at her, or a hired man without a sudden desire to go over and shake his honest hand and murmur a few words of sympathy.

So when a wealthy friend of ours--we make a point of picking 'em rich--called us up last summer and suggested that we should go out to his "little place in the country" for the week-end, we feared the worst. We realized in a moment that his hired man had quit or had died of over-exertion, and that he was trying to work us in as a substitute--for our keep. But we couldn't think of any decent excuse to give, so we yielded a dismal consent.

"You mustn't expect too much," he warned us, "it's the simple life, you know--no fol-de-rols, but just good plain farm fare."

Our heart sank at the words. Not that we have ever been so stuck on fol-de-rols. We don't mind an occasional fol-de-rol--a fol-de-rol for two, say, with a quart of "extra dry" in a tin pail of ice alongside. But we have never hankered for them as a steady diet. At the same time the warning sounded ominous. Plain farm fare!--we could see the platter of pork and cabbage and the slab of marmoreal pie.

He called for us--or rather, we stood on the street-corner and he picked us up in a ten-thousand-dollar limousine, lined in grey silk, with a big bouquet of roses concealing the chauffeur from the gaze of the occupants.

This cheered us up somewhat, but we had a feeling that our doom was merely postponed. We had a notion that we were being lured. We had heard of people who had been made "white slaves" that way. And if a farm-hand is not a white slave, we would like to know who has any better right to the title. Not that he is so very white, but....

With the engine purring softly and the cushions heaving voluptuously, we swiftly glided--or should it be "glid" or "glode?"--out past the last suburban lot, meaning about thirty miles. It was a beautiful pastoral region, occupied mostly by golf-clubs and villas. Long rows of peonies and Canterbury-bells and flowering shrubs were the nearest approach to farming we could see--these and a few cows of the domestic-pet variety.

Our host was very chatty all the way, and his talk was of the beauties of the simple life and the general rottenness of civilization as evidenced by stock-exchanges and clubs and all-night restaurants.

"Luxury and indolence," he assured us over and over again, "are eating the heart out of modern society. We are all living too fast and too high. We have too much money--that's what's wrong with people in our class."

We said he was quite right and that too much money was certainly the cause of gout and divorce and all the other ills to which we were heir. We spoke with as much conviction as we could, while we listened to the merry clinking in our right-hand trouser-pocket of the six dollars and eighty-odd cents which we had received that morning along with the I.O.U's in our pay-envelope.

"Look at what we eat," said our host, "and look at what we drink!"

Of course, our host was one of the lucky ones who still have some drink to look at. He could therefore afford to adopt a somewhat deprecating attitude on the subject of beverages.

Suddenly the limousine whirled off the high-road and shot along a beautiful private driveway under swaying elm-trees. We were on the farm! Wildly we gazed about for the fields of grain, the hog-lot and the cow-pasture, the big red barn, and, and all the other familiar stage-properties of our agricultural tragedy of years before. But we saw none of these things.

Instead our eye rested on well-groomed apple-orchards and cherry-groves, on clumps of pines and Japanese summer-houses, on strawberry-patches and vegetable gardens. The vegetable gardens may seem to the reader to suggest farming. But the "kitchen-garden" on a real farm is merely a frowsy patch where "table truck" is grown. This particular vegetable garden was the work of a landscape artist. Judging by the amount of toil which had been put into designing it and weeding it and picking bugs off it, every potato or carrot would cost about forty cents each.

The big car swung on a wide curve, and "round the cape of a sudden came the Lake!" Browning!--we know. We do that sort of thing now and then just to show that we are a literary editor in the half of the week that we don't spend farming with our friends among the idle rich.

There was good old Lake Ontario shimmering in the glimmering sunlight, or glimmering in the shimmering sunlight--it works either way. And there was the thirty-thousand-dollar farmhouse nestling in the midst of ten acres of lawn. There, too, was the farmer's wife on the steps to welcome us--she was clad in a simple little importation from the Rue de la Paix. It was a lovely rural scene.

"Well, and what do you think of the farm?" asked our host.

Farm! Good Lord! Our thoughts leaped back to the real farms we had known, and in a broken voice we tried to tell him that this was the sort of farm we had dreamed of but never worked on. This was farming as it should be--farming de luxe.

We began farm-life that very afternoon on the grounds of the adjacent golf-club, where we planted several balls in various parts of the landscape and couldn't find them again. There would be a very decent little grove of rubber-plants on that course in a year or so, if they would let us play there a few times.

Then we went back to the farm for dinner and had a sample of the farm-fare. It was a simple repast of seven or eight courses. One of the farm-hands, a butler, waited on table. Most of the food was of the sort that we try to conceal on the menu-card from a lady, in case she should order it and we would have to leave our watch with the waiter.

In the midst of the meal there was a solemn pause. We felt dimly that some marvel of the culinary art was about to appear. In came the butler with an air of importance and a silver dish containing six or seven anaemic radishes.

"Grown on the place!" said our host in the tone of a man who expects to astonish. He glanced with pride at his wife and she glanced back in affectionate joy at him. Theirs was the delight with which young parents exhibit their first-born.

We nibbled a little piece out of one, while they leaned back and waited confidently for our words of almost incredulous admiration. We are a bad liar as a rule--persistent, that is, but unsuccessful--but we would have cut off our right hand rather than disappoint that good man and that dear lady, so charming both of them in their simple faith. It had taken fifty or sixty thousand dollars and several years of thought and labor to produce those poor runts of radishes. So we forgot all the lessons of truthfulness that we had learned at our mother's knee--perhaps we should say, while laid across our mother's knee--and swore that they were the finest radishes we had ever tasted, and that no joy in life was equal to eating the vegetables grown on one's own door-step, so to speak.

"You're right, my boy, you're right," beamed our host. "The only truly happy and independent man on earth is the farmer."

The next day they showed us over the farm. We saw the aristocratic cows, whose ancestry went back as far as that of the kings of Ireland. Their milk, at a low estimate, must have cost about as much as a vintage wine.

We were particularly interested in the hens. They all belonged to the royal families of hendom. Most of them had been exhibited and had won ribbons or medals or whatever it is they give hens. They certainly were beautiful in a poultry way, but they seemed cold and proud. Our host said they didn't lay very well. We suggested it might be for the same reason as prevents people in the smart set from having any children.

"No, I don't think it's that," said our host very earnestly. "I believe it's because they haven't enough to interest them. I read in a poultry book the other day that hens must be kept bright and cheerful."

We recommended comic selections on a gramaphone. We also asked him if he had ever tried reading our articles to these haughty fowl. We felt that might draw a cluck or two of amusement out of them. But he treated our remarks with the silent contempt they no doubt deserved. We would like to tell a lot about life on that farm--about the trip in our host's big motor-boat, and the dance in the evening, and the horse-back rides on high-stepping horses that chinned themselves at every step and were always going up when we were coming down. We would like to tell also about the tennis and the billiards and the canoeing.

We would like to do all this, but we haven't the heart. Some real farmer might read this article, and go right out to his barn, and fasten a bit of rope between his neck and a beam, and kick the box over. Our only hope is that if one should happen to see this, he will merely grunt to "maw" that we are another of "them dern slick liars in the city," and refuse to believe a word of it. We don't wish to spoil his life.

*Stringencies and How to Stringe in Them*

It is extraordinary and also somewhat disconcerting how prayers are sometimes answered. When we were a little boy we were often warned by pious relatives of the perils of too much wealth--usually when we displayed a pagan desire for pocket money. Local pulpiteers also added their authority to this doctrine, reinforcing it with excerpts from Holy Writ. As a result our young soul was filled with horror at the thought of millionaires and camels trying to crawl through the eyes of needles. And, being a very earnest-minded little boy, we prayed that we might never be rich.

This prayer has been answered. We are not rich. Moreover, present indications are that we will never be rich. Whether or not our character has been benefited by the chronic depression which has been the outstanding feature of our financial career, we are in no position, and are far too modest, anyway, to state. There are times, however, when we would like to test our moral fibre by exposing it to the seductions of wealth. We might even like to succumb once or twice, or three or four times or oftener, just to show that we are one of those supermen who can "take it or leave it alone." But these opportunities for moral "swank" have been denied us.

We prayed for poverty and we got it. We have prayed for a lot of other things in our time, which we haven't got. But the celestial Committee on Prayers certainly O.K'd that poverty-petition of ours. They gave it to us "good and plenty," in the vulgar idiom. Of course, there is no use at this late date in explaining to the Powers that we were only praying against becoming a millionaire--half a million would more than satisfy our modest requirements. The thing is settled. As a result we have become mighty careful what we pray for. There is always a chance that we might get it.

This introduction is by way of letting the reader know that stringencies, such as the one through which we have all been passing ever since peace started, are no new thing with us. We are quite undismayed by the present state of the markets of the world. We are facing the situation with unruffled brow and the assured air which bespeaks long experience. We know how to deal with stringencies. We have tackled many of them. In fact, we have reason to regard ourself as one of the best little stringe-ists in this part of the country; and we are prepared to stringe with anyone of our financial weight for a reasonable purse and a modest side-bet.

There was that time, for instance, Friend Reader, that we went broke in 'Frisco, many, many miles from home and mother and the bed in the spare room. In a week we were acquainted with every free-lunch counter and ten-cent restaurant in the City of the Golden Gate. As a result of the acquaintance we developed a horror of "boiled beef Spanish," which has remained with us to the present day. And we ended up on a dairy ranch--thirty per and our keep! But let us draw the veil--we hate to think of the way we used to talk to those cows.

Stringent experience such as ours is a very valuable thing at a time like this, and we feel that it is in the nature of a public duty for us to lay before our readers--the whole five of them--the ripe results of our painfully acquired wisdom. Of course, we may be compelled to make revelations of a personal nature; but we don't mind. We can stand it. We have no social position that we need be worried to lose.

The trouble with the general public is that so few people know how to tackle a stringency. They are impulsive and unscientific. They go at it in a precipitate, not to say temerarious, manner.

Take, for instance, all those eager little housewives who rushed right out on the news of the declaration of war and tried to corner all the flour the grocer had, and all the bacon in the butcher-shop, forgetting that by the time the family had eaten about one-fifth of the supply, the flour would make a Limburger cheese seem like sweet hay for aroma, and the bacon would be scratching at the cellar door to get out. They even bought crates of eggs and oranges and cart-loads of vegetables!

Men's notions of economy are frequently not much better. We have a friend--oh, we still manage to keep one or two--who announced not long ago that he had given up cigars. He said they cost too much. We were rather sorry to hear of his decision, for he is one of those large, expansive fellows who are becoming to a cigar--he smokes them with the band on. We expressed our surprise.

"Not giving up smoking altogether, are you?" we asked. "Won't you find it difficult to think without nicotine to act as a...."

"Certainly I'm not giving up smoking! I've taken to a pipe, and believe me, my boy, it's the only smoke that...."

But you know how they all talk the first few days.

He showed the pipe to us. It was a beautiful thing, meerschaum, all dolled up with gold and amber. And it reposed in the cutest little case--one of those plush and papier-mache affairs that add a dollar and a half to the cost of any pipe. They are really worth about seven cents.

He showed us also a new tobacco pouch--grained leather, with gold monogram and rubber lining. Eight dollars, if it cost a cent!

Under his arm he carried a tin of tobacco that looked as big as a hat-box, and his pockets were full of pipe-cleaners, special ash-trays, and a patent combination arrangement of tools with which you could tamp the tobacco down in your pipe, gouge holes in the wad if you got it too tight, scrape the charcoal off the sides, and dig the pipe out when you had smoked it. All the thing lacked was a compartment in the end for ice to cool your tongue.

Altogether the outfit cost about twenty-five or thirty dollars. We said nothing. The thing was too pathetic. Three days later we met him smoking a cigar--still with the band on. He looked us straight in the eye with a truculent air, as though daring us to make a comment. We didn't. We knew how he felt. We had been through it all ourself.

Personally we have taken to smoking cheaper cigars, ever since that last increase in taxes. In our days of affluence we used to walk into the shop of our favorite tobacconist, and throwing down a quarter with a reckless hand, would say, "Gimme three!" Now we slip into a drug-store--we cannot bear to abate a jot of our lordly air in the presence of our tobacconist--and dejectedly buy a "five-cent straight," though they cost ten cents now.

(No, girls, the cigars are not always straight, nor are they always made of straight tobacco--on the contrary! We presume that they were called "five-cent straights" because they were bought by people in straightened circumstances, in dire straits, so to speak.)

In happier days if we had dared to smoke five-centers around the office, we would have been subjected to nasty personal remarks from the other members of the staff. But nobody says anything now. They are smoking stogies themselves, or consorting with pipes of ill-repute. The Financial Editor in the room next door smokes a villainous briar that growls even at its owner. We hate to say this, but only the other day we put our hand too near it as it lay on his desk asleep, and it almost got our little finger.

Not only are we smoking cheaper cigars, but we are making them last longer. How do we do this? Easily, dear reader, easily. We don't light them, that's all! We bite the end off very carefully, and insert the cigar at a rakish angle in the middle of our expression, and carry it around like that for nearly an hour before we touch a match to it. That way two cigars can be made to do the work of six. The worst of lighting a cigar is that it becomes oxidized so quickly. After that it isn't any good, except possibly as tooth-powder.

Another economy we indulged in during last fall was the buying of a straw hat. Of course, it may at first seem rather late in the season for one to start in and buy a "boater." But we got this one for ninety-eight cents--a three-dollar hat, the salesman assured us. But more of that anon.

You see, we had met our old friend Bjones on the street, carrying under his arm a box about the size of those they crate oranges in.

"G'wan in and buy one before they're all sold," he gasped, "greatest bargain I ever saw!"

"But what are they?" we asked, displaying an indulgent interest by ceasing to twirl our silver-mounted cane--(yes, a present from a lady).

"Hats, of course--ninety-eight cents--worth three and a half or four! Just bought six of them. Everything going up--got to keep supplied, you know."

We never stopped to reflect that Bjones would take the next six years to wear those hats out, and that his wife would probably divorce him if he tried. In fact, that may have been part of his plan. But we caught the fever from him. We hunted up the store and rushed right in. There was a big table of sailor straws, with about thirty men grabbing them up and trying them on. The lot didn't contain our exact size, so we took the nearest we could get. It was a little small, and it sat up on our head in a way that suggested an amateur performance of "H.M.S. Pinafore." But it was a very nice hat. That is, we thought it a nice hat.

Candor, however, compels us to state that we showed it to a friend in the hat business whom we met while we were triumphantly carrying it home. We asked him if he didn't think it was a mighty nice hat.

"Oh, yes, it's a nice hat all right," he answered cordially. "Why, those hats cost forty-nine cents each, buying them by the dozen wholesale!"

We tried to ascribe his words to professional jealousy. But somehow we took a sudden scunner against that hat. In fact, we tried a few days later to give it to the office-boy. But he declined. He sports a six-dollar one himself. Besides, his head is bigger than ours.

We have also been looking at some celluloid collars lately--just looking, you understand. Of course, we wouldn't think of wearing one of the things, but it is just as well to keep them in mind, for you never can tell, with the price of laundering where it is. Besides, they aren't so bad--a little blue and shiny, perhaps, and with peculiar button-holes. But with the washer-ladies buying closed cars, and the stringency becoming more stringent all the time, it is well to know of collars that can be done up with a tooth-brush or simply left on the neck when taking a bath.

But we have no intention of wearying the reader with a further account of those symptoms of a financial depression which has long since become chronic with us. We are no more depressed now than we ever were, except inasmuch as any kindly and sensitive heart must be depressed at the sight of widespread destitution--especially among millionaires.

Depression--and when we speak of depression we naturally refer to financial depression and not to the state of a man's liver or conscience--depression, we repeat, is largely a relative matter. A man is depressed or otherwise in comparison with the high-water mark of his prosperity. A financial status which would make the hairs of John D. Rockefeller's Sunday wig rise up in separate and individual horror, might cause us in sheer exuberance of joy to buy and stock a "Winter Garden" just for ourself alone. In view of the jeopardy which would ensue for our eternal salvation, we are glad--or should be that this is not immediately imminent.

It is really the rich who suffer most in a period of stringency. The mental anguish of hardened stringe-ists like ourself is nothing to what must be endured by the people who have never before had to ask the price of anything. We met one of them not long ago on the street. He is not a regular millionaire--only an intermittent, so to speak. Every little while he manages to chin himself on the trapeze of wealth, though he never quite succeeds in climbing securely into it. He was looking very gloomy, his suit needed pressing, and the diamond in his tie seemed smaller and less brilliant than of yore.

"Hello, old pirate, why so glum?" we asked insolently--we always make a point of being rude to millionaires. "What's the trouble?--those naughty stocks misbehaving again, or does some fresh Aleck of a legislator propose to investigate you?"

He looked at us with a melancholy and lack-lustre eye. There was none of the old bounce and condescension in his manner.

"It's all right for you chaps to make bum jokes," he grumbled. "You're on Easy Street. What difference does the depression make to you? You haven't promised a new touring-car to your wife as I did. And now the poor little girl has to worry along on last year's model. And I could only give her a pearl pendant for her birthday instead of the diamond sun-burst she wanted. While you...."

But we hurried away. Far be it from us to stand idly by and gaze upon a strong man's agony. The vision of that defeated and broken man has followed us ever since. Not even the little sunburst she wanted--gawd, can such things be! Why doesn't someone start another war so that he can get back into the munitions business? There must be dozens of others like him. And while these deserving millionaires are in this state of comparative destitution, here are gay, care-free fellows like ourself swaggering about town, jingling the quarter against the small change in our pocket, and wondering whether we will blow it on two cigars or on three. It doesn't seem fair, does it?

It has been said thousands of times--therefore, we have no hesitation in repeating--that one-half the world doesn't know how the other half lives. Not that millionaires constitute half the world--God forbid! They are not even the emerged tenth, if we may say so. But it is none the less true that the rest of us don't know how they live.

You may see the magnificent, yea, verily, the palatial residences they have built after the model of famous prisons and royal stables abroad. You may hear the accents and see the spats of their sons who have been to Oxford--in fact, you can almost see the accents and hear the spats. You may gaze upon their daughters at theatre-parties, clad in feathers and the rail of the box, with nothing between them and lumbago but the backs of their chairs. You may be dazzled by the flash of the twenty-carat headlight in fawther's dress-shirt, or by the soft refulgence of mother's stomacher of pearls. You may witness all this--you may even envy it. But little you know the breaking heart that may lurk in the limousine.

To look at the average millionaire you would never suspect what worm may prey upon his damask cheek--or should we say, damaged cheek? The gilded sausages of his double watch-chain may be as ponderous and resplendent as ever. The crease in his trousers and the shine on his shoes may still show the skill and energy of an expensive valet. He may curse at the waiters in his old lordly manner, even though he no longer is able to order his cocktails in a tumbler. But he is not at peace within.

If you are a shrewd observer you will notice that his sixty-cent cigar is not quite at the old aggressive, betcha-million-dollars angle. And the familiar wad of mazuma in the right-hand front pocket of the pants is not so swollen as of yore. We should say it is thinner by several one-hundred-dollar bills. In fact, it may be padded up with fives and tens and other bills of small denomination just to make it look good.

In a word, the average millionaire is not the man he was only two or three years ago, when the war was on, and orders were flowing in, and he was picking what crumbs of comfort he could--and also quite a few nice, bright little nuggets--out of the general chaos. It may seem to you that he is going as strong as ever. You may suppose that once a week he still has a lorry back around to the side entrance to take his profits down to the bank to be weighed and shoveled into the vaults. You may imagine that he still spends his leisure hours clipping the nimble coupon. But such is far from being the case, as you would realize if you could only get him to open his heart to you.

Try asking him to increase your salary--this is a really good way to find out. Then you will discover that most of his business day is devoted to running around with his hat in his hand begging hard-hearted bankers to let him have just a few more hundred thousands--surely a man has a right to this pittance--so that he may pay his bills and be able to look the world in the face once more. You will be horrified to learn of such hideous octopuses--(thank you, Professor, we should have said "octopi")--as Labor Unrest, Overhead Charges, Depreciation, and Stagnant Markets. Secure in your weekly envelope with its usual twenty dollars--unless like ourself, dear reader, you draw an occasional I.O.U.--you may care little for the vagaries of any other market than the one at which your wife or landlady buys the family meat and vegetables. But this great and good man has to bear the brunt of the fight. Is he complaining? No, friend, he is not.

"It is not for myself," he tells you in a voice quivering with emotion and considerable brandy-and-soda--they can still get it, of course. "It's not for myself, my boy. I must keep the old plant going for the sake of the men and their families."

Just about then you burst into tears and beg his pardon for ever having even thought of such a thing as more pay.

"You have no idea how delicate and complicated these financial problems are," he assures you in a burst of confidence, "You don't realize, for instance, that if I were to raise the wages of everyone in the institution a dollar a month, I'd simply have to shut the old place up. And I couldn't bear to do that--the associations, you know."

You have a vision of him in his poverty-stricken old age, out of work, condemned to spend all his time at Palm Beach or the Riviera. If you are a man of real feeling, you will tell him you think you could get along on ten dollars a month less, and would he please take it to help tide him over his difficulties?

It is experiences like this which convince a man that these are indeed times of depression. And everything deepens the feeling. See the lines of people waiting to buy the best seats for musical comedies and hockey-matches! See them crowding into the cabarets at midnight! And the jolly little dance-and-supper parties after the show in homes where the cellar has not yet been entirely despoiled of its treasures!

All this is merely a proof of general anguish of mind. They are seeking for respite and nepenthe and surcease of sorrow. They are dying game, so to speak. If they were to sit down quietly at home and think things over, they might become so desperate as to cut down their expenses. So they roll out the old touring-car instead, and collect a few congenial spirits, and possibly some more spirits under the cushion of the back seat, and go--but it doesn't matter so much now where one goes. All towns are alike.

Of course, there are financial giants, whose position is so secure that no money panic can ever disturb their equilibrium or equanimity. We called on one the other evening--two floors up over a grocery store. It was a cold night, the heat was off, he was wearing his overcoat in the house, and was feeding old newspapers into the parlor grate. In the intervals he was reading Anatole France in the original, and consulting a big French dictionary every line or so.

"Come in," he roared, "and help feed the fire. I've left the hero in a delicate and somewhat improper position, and I want to see if anything happened. I'll tell you in a minute." And he reached for the dictionary.

We intimated that we would certainly like to know if anything of an indelicate nature occurred, so that we might rush right out and report the matter to the proper authorities.

"But how can you be interested in such things as that," we enquired, "when hundreds of your fellow-millionaires and near-millionaires--they are human beings after all--are writhing in financial agony? Have you any European holdings, any Russian roubles, or anything of that sort?"

"I'm not holding 'em any longer," he said with a shameless grin. "I gave them to the butcher as an instalment on last month's bill."

"But you must have some stocks on margin--are they properly covered?" we persisted. That's the kind of fellow we are, always looking for information--the more unpleasant the better.

"Huh, what's that?" he grunted, after a long pause during which he had been hunting feverishly for a word. "What's that, margins? Are my margins covered? Sure, they're covered, old top--and so are the missus's and the kid's. Our margins are all protected from the weather--also our chests and such other places as one usually takes cold in."

But what's the use of talking to a man like that? He shut the book with a bang and reached for the tobacco-jar.

"Now what do you know about that?" he groaned. "Nothing happened after all. Just as things were at their liveliest, and the hero held out his arms, and the heroine--well, just then the old Abbe blundered in and...."

But there is something criminal and callous about such indifference as this.

*Taming the Furnace*

"And what the devil do you know about taming furnaces, anyway?" asks the reader, presuming that the reader has a somewhat abrupt style in conversation. "Here you go around bragging about being a bachelor and having inclinations for the monastic life and all that sort of rot"--meaning the bragging, of course--"and yet you have the nerve to write an article on how to handle a furnace. G'wan and teach your grandmother to suck eggs!"

Thereupon, the reader in torrid indignation drops the book and goes down into the cellar, and seizing a short shovel with a broken handle tosses half a ton of coal into the maw of the steel dragon there--a dragon which consumes its own heat and lets none of it get as far as the radiators.