Chapter VII: Part 7

Incidentally, why should it be regarded as the height of absurdity to teach one's grandmother to suck eggs? Why should one's grandmother be expected to know all about sucking eggs? Is one's grandmother a weasel that she should be universally regarded as a supreme exponent of this art? We are aware that this paragraph is in the nature of a digression, but we have all our life been puzzled to account for this curious tradition that grandmothers know everything to be known about removing the contents of eggs by the primitive process of suction. We feel quite sure that both our own personal and private grandmothers knew nothing about it. We are also sure that we would never have had the nerve to teach them how to do a thing so obviously vulgar and futile. Furthermore, no one's grandmother could afford to suck eggs at the present market quotations. So what would be the use, anyway, even if she did know how? Altogether this seems to us a very silly proverb.

But, to return to furnaces, we really do know something about them--not everything (what man does?), not even a great deal, perhaps, but still something. And we ought to know something, for we have wrestled in spirit and otherwise with every one of the fifty-odd varieties--hot air, hot water, steam, and everything that lies between. Some men are born furnace-tenders. Some learn it from plumbers. But we have had our knowledge forced upon us.

One of our earliest and least-treasured recollections is of an enormous old furnace in our grandfather's house--a mediaeval contraption, all bricked-in, as big as a cottage, with a mouth the size of a pair of folding doors, and a capacity for coal which would make a twin-screw steamship turn a dark bottle-green. We used to be held up to the door of it when we had been very naughty, and have it explained to us that naughty boys were sent to a place bearing a general resemblance to that bed of red-hot coals. We do not recall that we had much joy of the prospect.

Later on, when we had got to the point of having Holy Writ retailed to us with expository remarks--our preceptors usually picked out something infernally gruesome--we used to associate that old furnace with the various trials by fire mentioned in the Old Testament. Especially could we see those three brave young Hebrews, who were condemned by old Nebuchadnezzar to be burned to death, standing smilingly on the familiar coals--each with a fire-insurance policy in his pocket, as we presume now. Else why be so cheerful about it?

Even as a boy at grandfather's place we began to form that intimate acquaintance with furnaces which has been the bane of our young life. When the furnace man did not turn up--usually as a sequel to a nocturnal endeavor to make the distilleries enlarge their plants--we had to shovel coal into that grinning old monster until our back and arms ached, and we would cheerfully have thrown in a few sticks of dynamite if there had been any handy.

But, of course, that sort of thing is part of the penalty of being a member of a family. We have no complaints to make. If a fellow will permit himself to be dragged into a family he must pay the price thereof. What we really object to is that since we have attained the dignity of manhood and the responsibility of a vote in provincial and federal affairs, we are still obliged to toil in cellars with a coal-shovel--a black-and-white slave, so to speak.

It would be different if we were married. We would expect to look after a furnace. And, anyway, to a married man what is a little trouble more or less?--he has lots of it. But freedom from worry about the furnace should be one of the most sacred privileges of the bachelor. We have been deprived of our rights. Instead of "the" furnace, we have several to think about. We are one of the busiest little amateur stokers in town.

There must be something in our appearance which suggests that we have a masterful way with furnaces, that we can make them eat right out of our shovel. It has become a habit with our lady friends when we call on them in the evening--naturally we have social duties to perform--to pat the radiator in a reflective sort of way, and then smiling brightly at us to say in a casual but wheedling tone something to the following effect:

"Oh, Mister O'D."--a few of them call us Peter in a sisterly way--"I just hate awfully to bother you, but paw is at the lodge and--well, you are such a good hand with a furnace. It's such a comfort to have a man who is really handy around the house, and--just a shovelful--thanks!"

So we bid a temporary farewell to the company and to all the delights of polite conversation, and retire to the cellar to give first aid to a rusty demon of a furnace whose vital spark is almost extinct. Laying our coat neatly folded on the bottom step of the cellar-stairs, we first seize a long lever which comes out every moment or two on our toe, and we shake enough ashes out of the grate to stifle Pompeii. Then groping our way to the coal-bin--away at the other end of the cellar--we proceed forcibly to feed the furnace with a broken scoop-shovel. About half of each shovelful misses the little opening--why the dickens do they put such small doors on the things?--and by the time we have accomplished the chore we are knee-deep in anthracite. Great stuff for a nice, new serge suit, that!

When we come upstairs again we are coated with a soft covering of powdered ash, our collar is melted, our hands suggest that we have been working on a slag-pile, and the young lady insists on sitting on a little narrow chair instead of on the sofa as usual. Every time we stir she glances nervously at the rug and the upholstery. The social atmosphere grows chillier and chillier, though the water is boiling in the "rads."

About an hour later "paw" comes home from the lodge, disappears into the subterranean depths, and emerges in a moment to ask in a loud belligerent voice who th'ell has been and gone and put all that coal on the furnace, and if people are aware that coal costs fifteen dollars a ton, and if people wouldn't be better advised to mind their own business. Whereupon daughter blushes violently and rushes out to him in the hall. There is a brief dialogue which is brought to a conclusion by "paw" grunting, "Oh, him, is it?" in a manner not altogether flattering.

Even at home in the flat where we lived for two somewhat cramping years--we swept the pictures off the walls every time we put on our shirt--we could not get away from furnace troubles. The thing was an obsession, that's all. Our proprietor, that inaccessible local divinity, was supposed to supply heat, which naturally implies a furnace and a furnace-man. There really was a furnace and also a furnace-man, but the two were seldom found in conjunction.

Down in the cellar there was an enormous structure of cast iron, with twisted pipes sticking out of it in all directions as though it were some sort of mechanical octopus. And down in the very heart of it there were usually half a dozen coals smouldering away. That was its ordinary condition. But two or three afternoons a week a local financier, who had about thirty furnaces on his visiting list, used to call and pour a ton or so of coal down its throat. Then he opened wide all the drafts and went rejoicing on his way to the bank to deposit his latest dividend.

About midnight on such days we were all awakened by a noise which seemed to combine the roar of the angry surf with a riot in the Ford automobile plant. There were also suggestions of a volcano in active eruption. The furnace was boiling! Then one hustled into a dressing-gown and one hurried down to the cellar to shut the thing off; and, as one passed bashfully by, one saw sights through open doors that no gentleman would ever speak of.

We have a friend, however, who has mastered the furnace problem--about as well, that is, as mortal can hope to do it. He has devoted years of thought and much bullion and energy to the task. He has a huge furnace all encased in white asbestos--it sheds its nighty every now and then and has to get a new one--and on this furnace he has more electric attachments than would run a suburban trolley system. All he has to do before he goes to bed is to wind up two or three clocks and set half a dozen hands on as many dials, and the furnace does the rest. It keeps the house at a certain specified heat--unless, of course, it goes out, which it does every so often--and moreover, it will turn on the heat at any specified time in the morning. Instead of having to get up in a chilly house and wander dismally down to the cellar to open the blamed thing up, he has only to lie awake in bed and listen if the regulator is working properly--and three times out of five it is. But, of course, this is rather hard to hear, and if it shouldn't be working and he didn't notice it--well, on those mornings he eats his breakfast in his coon-skin coat.

Naturally he has to remove the ashes and shovel in the coal, but that only takes an hour or so a day. Besides, it is fine exercise. Nothing like putting on your furnace-clothes and tying a damp silk handkerchief over your face and going down for a little bout of graeco-roman with the furnace to give you an appetite. And the thirst!--but what's the use of talking about that nowadays?

It may be thought that we are prejudiced against furnaces. We are. We admit it frankly. And we have good reason to be. If it hadn't been for a furnace that went out, we might to-day be a happily married man and the father of a large--oh, well, perhaps that is taking a little too much for granted. But we might have been married, at any rate.

She was a druggist's daughter, a lovely girl of about eighteen summers. That is, she claimed eighteen summers, though perhaps a few summers were so short and so cold that she forgot to count them. Her father lived and had his shop in a Prohibition town--this was before there was no other kind of town. Naturally he was the principal citizen of the place and the popular saver of many masculine lives. Father used to prescribe for gentlemen for miles around, the prescriptions being usually taken in the back of the store. No one ever bought anything out of the show-case except cigars.

We used to drop into the store occasionally to ward off a chill or a fever or something of that sort--we were always strong for preventive medicine--and it was there we met daughter. It was a case of one good long look, a few words about the weather we were having, and then we went straight home and tore up all the pictures on our chiffonier. Not long after we got into the habit of taking her out in father's buggy--it had a large top and the horse could be trusted.

So we whiled away the autumn. At Christmas we sold something and blew the proceeds on a couple of dozen of those red, red roses, which are almost as significant as an engagement-ring. Gwendoline--'t was thus she loved to be called--told us several times with thrilling emphasis that she "just loved those roses to death." Everything seemed to smile upon our suit.

The night we went with our mind made up to settle the matter conclusively--even to the date of the ceremony and the nicest place to spend the following week--was a bitterly cold one. In fact, the parlor where we sat waiting for Gwen to come down seemed decidedly chilly. But she floated in looking radiantly beautiful to the eye of affection, and the light was low, and--oh, dash it all, we forgot about the temperature entirely. It is a poor lover who can't furnish his own heat.

Conversation was graceful and animated, but with an undercurrent of serious purpose. We felt that something was expected of us, but naturally a man of tact and romantic feeling doesn't plunge into a proposal of marriage as though it were the purchase of a dog-collar. It is a thing to be led up to; and we were casting about in our mind for the most graceful and effective way of doing so, when we began to realize that the room had grown strangely cold and that the lady was looking rather blue--with a tendency to redness about the nose. Also she was gazing at us in a curiously critical way, and we remembered that we never look our best when we are chilly. There is a certain spottiness--but these details are unnecessary.

It grew colder and colder. Gwendoline got a shawl, and we turned up our coat-collar as unobtrusively as possible and put our hands in our pockets. The lady became absent-minded, and in spite of ourself our thoughts wandered to tall glasses with something hot in them and pieces of lemon floating around.

There is no use dragging out this account of the disaster. The whole thing simply fizzled out. A masterful man might perhaps have saved the day--or the evening, to be accurate--by seizing the lady, slamming her against his throbbing heart, and warming her up at the fire of his own ardor. But we let the psychological moment shiver by. She passed us with a curt nod on the street next day, and six months later was married to a chap in the bank. Her father took him into the business at once--she was an only child.

Do you wonder we hate furnaces?

*Mike*

Cats have character. You may not like them, but you have to respect them. They feel no affection, and they make no pretence of it. If they rub up against your leg and purr, it is because they like the stuff your trousers are made of--yes, madam, we are speaking for ourself!

Now, it is just the opposite with dogs. You like dogs, but usually you don't respect them. They are not sufficiently self-centred and independent. They lack poise and that repose of manner which is the unfailing sign of the aristocrat.

Dogs are too fond of you--in itself an evidence of a lack of discrimination--and too demonstrative. One of the meanest-souled human weasels that ever slunk home from his office in the evening to be nasty to his wife and slap the children has a dog. And that dog watches for him for hours, and comes tearing down the street to greet him, barking his head off and turning somersaults in delirious joy.

Now, who ever saw a cat come tumbling and barking down the street to greet anyone? The finest and ablest man in the Empire--Lloyd George, Haig, or even Sir Arthur Currie or the virtuous Newton Wesley Rowell--couldn't get a flicker of a cat's whisker, if they came home after six months' absence all covered with medals. The only arrival to make a cat sit right up and mew in salutation is the milkman in the morning.

That's the fascination and mystery of cats--their independence and their inscrutability. Furthermore, they have utterly no morals, and they are perfectly unabashed about it. If a dog does something he knows to be wrong, he hangs his head and his tail and crawls around on his stomach and presents a ridiculous spectacle of contrition and self-abasement, till you let him know he is forgiven. Then he probably jumps into your lap, and licks your glasses off your nose, and sticks his paw in among the cigars in your vest-pocket. The only safe way to forgive a dog is from the top of a high ladder.

But a cat doesn't care whether you forgive her or not. She feels no compunction and shows no gratitude. She will walk off with a porter-house steak or present the household with a family of war-kittens with equal nonchalance and aplomb--we always make a point of using French words when discussing these matrimonial irregularities, such is our delicacy.

Of course, Mike wasn't that kind of a cat--to present the household, that is. He might figure as the injured husband or the co-respondent in these regrettable affairs, but never as the fair, frail one. Though, as a matter of fact, the family at first was under the impression that he was a tabby.

Mike was an under-sized and very quiet black kitten, with a pair of the worst bow legs we have ever seen on anyone but Harry Lauder. His back legs were straight enough, but he looked as if he had been run over by a motor lorry in front, or brought up with his head under a low beam. They gave him a curious resemblance to a somewhat battered prize-fighter--whence the war-like title, "Mike."

It has never been clearly established in the family who was responsible for bringing Mike into its bosom and its milk-pitcher, so to speak. Mike arrived, that's all--probably he liked the air of cultured serenity about the house and walked in. With a promptness which is a strong tribute to his fascination of manner, even at this early age, he won our landlady's heart, and was formally adopted under the name of Yvonne.

Personally, we were always opposed to Yvonne as savoring too much of coquetry or hauteur. We wanted something simple and homely like Mary Elizabeth or Emma Jane. But Yvonne it was, and Yvonne it remained till it became generally apparent that the name didn't fit Mike's gender or his mode of life.

We would like to devote a great deal of space to telling the reader what a cute little rascal Mike was in his Yvonnehood, so to speak, and how we loved to come down in the morning and find him sitting in our Toasted Pine Flakes, or stuck in the cream-jug--he used to come right up from the cellar to be with us.

We would like to tell all this, so that our unmarried lady-readers could write in to us about their own cats and their cunning ways, and all we girls could have a perfectly lovely time together--they might even bring the cats down. But _tempus fugit_--these French phrases will break in--and we must on to the mournful and disheartening story of Mike's adult life, with the sad light it throws on the impotence of pure and beautiful surroundings to correct a naturally evil character.

The beginning of Mike's downfall was staying out o' nights. While still a kitten Mike had been accustomed to take an evening stroll, but his notion of bedtime grew hazier and hazier. He became distinctly less and less retiring. Finally Mike had to be stalked like a chamois every evening and dragged by the tail off some perilous peak of fence.

It was then that we got a brilliant idea, one of those flashes, you know. We reminded our landlady that Mike always came running when he heard anyone whet the carving knife on the steel, knowing that it was a musical prelude to dainty tidbits of meat.

"Why not go to the back-door and rub the knife on the steel?" we asked, modestly trying to appear unconscious that we were getting off something rather dazzling. "Then when he hears it, he'll rush up and you can--"

The suggestion was so obviously sensible that, in spite of its coming from us, our landlady adopted it at once. Other suggestions of ours had not worked out quite according to specifications, but this one looked good. Our landlady was even moved to say that she hadn't expected so much wisdom from us.

She got a chance to try the ruse soon after. It was a warm dark night, when the feet of even the wisest cat might stray from the paths of piety, and Mike's had very evidently wandered. In fact, it seemed to us that the strong but lyric tenor voice singing of love down the lane might well belong to him. But we couldn't be sure. There was a good deal of singing going on, mostly of a sentimental nature.

We cheerfully undertook to do the knife-grinding, being an adept at any operation connected with eating. Squaring our elbows in a professional manner, we gave three or four slashing cuts on the steel that would have earned us a job in any packing-house. We made a noise like a duel in romantic comedy--some of that matinee idol stuff, you know, "Have at ye, caitiff knave!" lunging in tierce and quart, and then a quart or so in the dressing-room after the act.

Did it work? Yes, friend reader, it worked. It brought Mike all right--also every other cat off every other fence in that block. Before the landlady could slam and bolt the door, about ten frenzied felines hurled themselves into that quiet and orderly kitchen and immediately started trying to throw one another into the stove or drown one another in the sink.

While it lasted--and it was some minutes before the landlady's screams brought sufficient assistance, including the Chinaman out of the laundry across the way--it was the liveliest little scramble one could see outside the Petrograd Soviet. In ten seconds that kitchen looked like the plucking room of an otter-shop. Those cats just grabbed the fur in handfuls and threw it away. We got it in our porridge for weeks after, giving to that wholesome breakfast dish a still further resemblance to soft mortar.

Mike finally took to staying out all night. It was about this time that we began to entertain doubts as to his sex and morals--we were still calling him Yvonne in moments of friendship. He also wore a bow of red ribbon and a bell, the bell being for the purpose of tracking him around the house when he elected to go up and sleep in someone's bed.

The bell must have been an awful nuisance to Mike. Perhaps that is why he never could catch a mouse. We saw him tracking one in the grass one night. Every time he got ready to spring the infernal bell would tinkle, and Mike would sit up and moan. It was no use, and Mike definitely gave up mouse-catching as a steady job--stone-deaf mice being presumably rare.

His bow and bell, no doubt, made him unpopular with the other Toms. The decoration was not particularly becoming--he was about as pretty as a prize-fighter in a rose necklace--but his _confreres_ probably regarded it as a sign of a vain and uppish disposition. So they used to chasten him--three or four at a time, we should judge from Mike's mussed appearance when he came home for breakfast.

His bandy front legs must also have been a handicap at first in these nocturnal affrays, but he learned how to use them to good effect after a while--they were probably all right for upper cuts and short hooks from either side. We noticed that as time went on he used to bring more of his fur back with him in the morning, and we judged he was working well up towards the top of his class--welter-weight, we should say. Mike never got beyond medium size, and he was always rather lean.

His voice, however, was superb. He was the Caruso of the block. His range was tremendous, with great power and fine quality all the way. His upper register especially was quite wonderful. There were tenor notes in Mike's voice on still summer nights that could be heard for six blocks in all directions. We have no doubt that a greater number of useful articles, such as boots, hairbrushes, perfume bottles, and shaving mugs, were thrown at Mike than at any other ten cats in that end of town.

But he wasn't stuck up about it. He remained the same simple, unassuming fellow--no professional airs whatever, and always willing to sing. He loved his art, that's all.

Mike is gone, however. He hasn't turned up for a week, and we write this article in the hope that if any reader sees a black Tom with a red bow and a brass bell, the reader will please destroy him in some speedy and sure way. Poor Mike, we may never look upon his like again--such is our heartfelt prayer!

The last time we saw Mike was about two a.m.--we had been detained at the office. As we neared the house, mentally debating whether or not we would take off our boots downstairs--the last time we did so we absent-mindedly hung them on the hat-rack--we noticed a nice grey tabby stepping daintily across the deserted street ahead of us.

It had just occurred to us that this was no hour for a well-brought-up cat to be strolling around, when we noticed Mike pussy-footing along about three yards behind--no doubt with some chivalrous intention of seeing that she got home all right. He was wearing his bell and an expression of concentrated interest.

And right behind Mike came the biggest and dingiest tomcat we have ever seen. With a few dabs of paint he would have made a very fair panther; and he had much the same glare in his eye. It seemed to bode ill for Mike, and we felt vague stirrings of pity, which a moment's reflection caused us sternly to repress. We decided to let justice take its course.

We have never seen Mike since.

*Dogs*

Most men like to represent themselves as being very popular with dogs. Why any sane, self-respecting man should be proud of having dogs notice him on the street, is a thing we have never quite been able to understand. But they are. They seem to take it as a sign of a generous, sporting nature on their part that dogs should wag a friendly tail at sight of them.

A similar superstition exists as to babies. It is quite true that it is sometimes deuced embarrassing for a man to have a baby conceive a sudden passion for him. But even the victim is proud of it. The onlookers, especially the parents--oh, God bless us, yes!--regard it as an absolute certificate of character. They would hardly find it in their hearts to blame that man if they afterwards heard he was a burglar and a wife-beater. He might be indiscreet, but still "how Baby took to him!"

Now, personally, we get on pretty well with babies--also with grandmothers. Up to the age of six and after the age of sixty the girls seem to love us. Affection for us appears to be a characteristic of childhood--first or second. It would do your heart good to see the little dears grab for our watch and bang it on the arm of the chair or the top of the table, or anything that is handy and hard.

Grandmothers, too, are always very nice to us, and laugh at our jokes--especially if they are a little off color (the jokes, not the grandmothers). But girls of sixteen, say, or twenty-six, make it clear from their manner that they consider us a tiresome old stiff, afflicted with a pathetic hallucination that we are funny. There is something a little depressing about this.

As for dogs--well, frankly, we don't get on with them at all. The best we receive from them is a cold neutrality. Of all the dogs we know not one has a gosh-darn bit of use for us--except when we are sitting at their master's dining-table. Then they come and fix us with a threatening eye and black-mail us out of half our dinner. In fact, we have a suspicion that nothing but a certain leanness and stringiness in our lower members prevents them from eating out of our leg.

There is a house, for instance, where we dine almost every--well, as often as our hostess will let us. We like eating there. The cooking and the conversation are excellent. Also they don't regard the wine-cellar as a place to keep the winter's coal and ashes in.

But they have a dog--a big, black, furry dog, with feathers on his legs, and the ability to sit up and beg for hours at a stretch. He has also the biggest mouth we have ever seen on a dog of his size. When he opens it he splits himself apart right down to his hind legs. Some day in a moment of forgetfulness or excitement he is going to take our right arm off at the elbow. But still we go on feeding him. We don't dare stop.

In addition to getting most of our beefsteak and our lamb and our veal, that dog has got our goat. He sits right up beside us and counts every mouthful we take, looking all the time as if he hoped it would choke us. If we don't "come across" promptly with what he considers his proper "rake-off" on our food--the brute regards us as a parasite, anyway--he howls in fury.

"My dear," says our hostess to our host with characteristic thoughtfulness, "I think your dog is misbehaving himself--hadn't you better put him out?"

"Oh, the dog's only a little playful," says our host, eyeing us with the cold disapproval of a man who has his own opinion of a fellow who would sit in front of a big plate of roast beef and trimmings and let a poor dog suffer. "You don't want him put out, do you?" says he to us.

"Not for worlds!" we roar in counterfeit horror at the thought, and chuck a slab of sirloin into the gap at our elbow--it's as big as a manhole in the street. After that, whenever we catch this nice little doggie's eyes, we give him whatever happens to be on our fork, all the time hoping that he will go out on the street next day and eat a sausage full of arsenic, or some ptomaine pork.

If we don't catch his eye often enough, he pats us on the arm with a paw the size of a Virginia ham. He did that once when we were drinking a cup of coffee, and we poured it over a new pair of striped pants. We never cared to wear them afterwards--in fact, we didn't care to wear any at all for several days, until the new skin formed.

Talking of clothes reminds us that we were mistaken when we said no dog ever loved us. One did--Lord, how that dog worshipped us! He was a brindle bull belonging to an uncle of ours, who had an undershot jaw, one ear gone, a broken tail, and a record of seventy-odd murders--that is, Mutt had, not uncle.

Mutt was in many respects a very tough dog, but he loved us dearly. He dogged our footsteps, and he dogged us when we sat. In fact, when we were visiting uncle, which was fairly often--uncle always kept a few bottles on ice--that darn dog did nothing but dog us. He was the doggonest dogger we have ever known.

But we had little joy of his affection. We would rather have had him form a taste for anyone else on earth. We wouldn't have cared if he had taken up with the niggers down around the barn. In fact, when uncle wasn't looking, we used to punch him in the face and kick him behind the ears--even farther behind than that. But he regarded these caresses as proofs of affection, and would leap upon us and slobber in a riot of emotion till we were reduced to soggy helplessness.

That was the whole trouble--the slobbering. A friendly bulldog is a moist beast at best. If he loves you he drools on you, and the more he loves you the more humid he gets. But this brute was the dankest, wettest, coziest, sloppiest bulldog that ever drivelled his affection on a fancy vest. His finer feelings were a perfect swamp. His welcome was an inundation.

If, in a moment of forgetfulness or exhaustion, we so far relaxed our vigilance as to sit down, Mutt would waddle up with tears of love in his eyes and lay his head in our lap. He would gaze at us in worship as though we were a god or a side of beef, and in two minutes we would be soaking from the waist down. The trenches in Flanders had nothing on Mutt for sogginess.

Once, after we had been away for some months, we were visiting uncle, and were sitting in a nice, deep, easy chair--you know, those chairs that are so hard to get out of in an emergency. Suddenly the door burst open and seventy pounds of slobbering enthusiasm hurled itself upon us. There was no escape. Mutt took us fair in the chest and knocked our breath and all thoughts of resistance out of us in one agonized grunt.

Before they pulled him off our hair was licked into tufts, our collar was melted, the colors had run in our new tie, and we were wet to the skin. We couldn't go home that night for fear of catching double pneumonia. Mutt was a grand dog in his way, but if he took a fancy to you, you weren't safe in anything but a bathing suit or a raincoat.

Nearly all our friends have dogs--Airedales mostly. Now we have nothing against Airedales. They are good enough dogs in their way. It is true that they are as ugly as a moth-eaten buffalo in a zoo, as boisterous as Billy Sunday, and as quarrelsome as a female peace-advocate. But they are good dogs--let it go at that.

There are no less than six Airedales on the staff of the paper we work on--that is, six dogs more or less definitely recognizable as such. In fact, if you were to take the whole six of them--one dog's ears and another's tail and another's legs and another's coat--you would almost have a real Airedale, which is pretty good going with average Airedales these days.

One of them got lost the other day. They are always getting lost. Airedale books and salesmen will tell you that you can't lure an Airedale away from home. The suggestion is that if you were to invite a neighbor's Airedale out for a walk he would knock you down and bite a piece out of your Adam's apple.

Well, all we can say is that every postman or butcher boy or grocer's man in town is escorted on his rounds by two or three Airedales belonging to the best families. We even used to know one that came down-town and spent his days in the back room of a saloon. We saw him there ourself, but he cut us dead--perhaps because we didn't treat him.

The Staff Airedale that got lost is principally distinguished by the possession of a thoroughbred tail. So the owner claims, at any rate. He has frequently called our attention to it, and asked us to note the correctness of the angle at which it is held. But we could never see much in a shaggy stub of that sort, no matter how perpendicular. Now, if it was a nice, long curly tail--but then, of course, it wouldn't be an Airedale. And this dog was bought for an Airedale, the price being the principal evidence of pure breeding--that and the tail.

Well, when the dog left home, the owner immediately advertised for his recovery. Personally, we would have moved at once to another street to prevent him finding us again. But the owner advertised; and for the past two or three days we have spent most of our time listening to him answer enquiries over the 'phone. He is called up every twenty minutes by someone who has an Airedale which he is sure must be the one wanted.

The thing begins to sound like a conspiracy. Are people trying to work off a lot of second-hand Airedales--model 1916--for the sake of the reward? Or do they just want to get rid of their own dogs, and are too kind-hearted to shoot them? Anyway, this is how it sounds--his office is near our own:

"Hello!--yes, an Airedale--where did you find him, hey?"

A long pause, during which the person at the other end of the line tries to prove honesty of character and purity of intention.

"What sort of a tail has he, hey?--is it a good tail?--what do I call a good tail, hey?--well, a good tail stands up straight with a little bend in it--oh, about four or five inches long and pretty thick."

Another long pause, while the person at the other end of the line drops the receiver, goes out to the barn to study the dog's tail, and comes back to report.

"It isn't standing up now, hey?--well, did it stand up before?--does it stand up most of the time, hey?"

Usually the answer is favorable. Naturally a man with a dog he doesn't want speaks as well of its tail as he can. Thereupon our friend seizes his hat, rushes out of the building for the nearest car line, and comes back two hours later to expatiate on the crass stupidity of people who find dogs.

The tail, it seems, is never the perfect tail he is looking for--thick, shaggy and perpendicular, with a slight bend. Half the time the dogs are not even Airedales. The last one he went to look at--seven miles away in the suburban slums--proved to be a Scotch terrier, a bandy-legged, little black chap.

We told him he ought to have taken it anyway. But he is a persistent beggar, and he is still answering "ads." He is weakening, however, and we are laying bets that he will take whatever the next person who 'phones in has to offer--A Persian cat, perhaps, or a Belgian hare.

*On Being Handy With Tools*

We are not handy with tools. We state this with all solemnity and knowing full well the nature of an oath. But even if we were handy with tools we would perjure ourself rather than admit it--we know what that admission leads to.

We have a brother, dear reader--a tall, broad-shouldered, handsome fellow, as you might guess, with a very open face. That is the chief cause of his troubles, his face is so very open. And in his tender youth he used to open it regularly and widely about the things he could do with tools.

There was nothing that boy couldn't make or mend. There was no domestic emergency which he couldn't meet with the appropriate tools--either the family tools or the neighbors'. Did a tap need a washer? Frank was right there with a rubber disk in one hand and a monkey-wrench in the other. Were the electric lights on the blink, or was the gas-stove doing its best to suffocate the cook? Did the family dog, a descendant of several shaggy breeds, require a hair-cut or a shampoo? Had the horse kicked the side out of his stall?--we are not bragging, friend reader, as you would realize if you had ever seen that ancient charger. Or was the barn itself in need of a coat of paint? In any and all of these cases Frank was electrician, gas-fitter, barber, carpenter, painter, or whatever the circumstances called for.

And what was the result of all these various services so far as he was concerned personally? Did he get any special consideration because of them? Was he the favorite child of the family? Did anyone kill even a lean calf for him, or clothe him in a coat of many colors? Not that the rest of us ever noticed. About the only way we ever showed any gratitude or any acknowledgement of his skill and energy was by saving up jobs for him.

No matter what the emergency might be, no one else ever touched a hammer or a saw or a paint-brush for fear of breaking in on Frank's personal preserves and so hurting his feelings--at least, that is the way we put it. If ever he went out of town for a few days, he had to work nights and Sundays when he came back, so as to catch up with the chores and odd jobs. And because he had always done them he went on doing them. He might grouse about it, but you know how it is once you have established a family tradition. The laws of the Medes and Persians are nothing to it for permanence.

All this happened because he was handy with tools and fancied himself as an amateur mechanic. The boy was clever at it, too, but this is something one should never admit about one's self. If a job should turn up to be done around the place and you should be asked if you can do it, deny it utterly. Say you know not neither do you understand a darn thing about it. If they ask you again, deny it again. Then if one come up to you saying, lo, this is a handy man, curse and swear and say that the only nail thou canst hit with a hammer is that which groweth upon thy thumb. Even so wilt thou find peace.

You must be eternally watchful, if you would keep yourself clean from the taint of handiness. There is something balefully fascinating about tools. They are so shiny and efficient-looking, or so rusty and inefficient-looking, that one is tempted to try them in either case, just to see how they work. And they are always lying about within easy reach--except perchance when you want some particular tool very badly. Then, if so be you desire a tack-hammer, you will find many gimlets and screw-drivers and eke a saw or two. But aye verily we say unto you, you won't know where th'ell the tack-hammer is, but will be obliged to tack down that bit of linoleum with a sad-iron--perhaps that is what makes the irons so sad. If, on the other hand, thou shouldst require a gimlet in thy business, then surely will there be tack-hammers in every drawer, but the gimlets will have crawled off into a hole somewhere to play with the young rats.

Even young children are inoculated with the virus of handiness. Little boys at Christmas-time are presented by silly old uncles--generally uncles who do not have to live in the same house--with sets of little tools all nicely arranged in gaudy boxes. Then the little boys, having bright and enquiring minds, proceed to saw sections out of the piano-legs and drive nails into mother's Circassian-oak dresser. The result is usually much pain for the little boys, though not in the parts of their anatomy which they use for purposes of sawing and hammering.

When we were a little boy, we were even as other little boys in this respect, though much more beautiful and clever--we state this on the authority of our maiden aunts. Having been presented by some reckless relative with a set of tin tools, we went right out to the family shed and built a nice little house with a real fireplace in it made out of two or three half-sections of brick. Then we started a fire in it, and when it got going nicely, we ran off to tell some of the other boys in the block about it.

There could be no question about that fire. It wasn't a big fire as fires go nowadays, but it was a lively one. It took two hose-reels and a chemical engine half an hour to put it out. We don't know what grandfather told the insurance company, but even over the lapse of years we distinctly remember what he told us. You see it was grandfather's shed, and grandfather at that period of our life was acting towards us _in loco parentis_--certainly there can be no doubt about the amount of loco which he put into the role of parent on that particular occasion.

Our natural genius for mechanics was nipped in the bud by that unfortunate occurrence. Ever since we have struggled manfully and--with a few exceptions--successfully against any inclination to monkey with tools. Taps have wheezed and leaked in our presence for weeks on end, but we have carefully ignored them till such time as a plumber or brother Frank was around. Coal-bins have broken down, but never have we taken saw and hammer in hand to put them up again. We have sworn off tools.

It is true that we have sometimes been compelled to run a lawn-mower. But then a lawn-mower is not properly a tool. It is more in the nature of a plague, something like typhoid fever or Prohibition.

We have stated that there were two or three exceptions to our abstinence from tools. Alas, yes, we succumbed to temptation or pressing need, and the result was in each case deplorable. Worst of all was the little ladder we constructed so as to reach certain high book-shelves in the room which the family calls "the study"--probably because no one would dream of doing such a thing there. It was a pretty little ladder, a bit of work we were proud of. But it cost us an inheritance--not actual, you know, but prospective.

We made the ladder out of a couple of pieces of scantling and parts of an old packing-case. We planed and fitted and nailed it, till it was goodly to the eye and fairly sound to the feel. Then we painted it an art-green, and put nice round knobs of leather on the ends that leaned against the wall. It was really an ornament, the sort of thing that people years ago used to gild and hang up with pink ribbons. But unfortunately it was not a very reliable ladder. It would do everything but ladd, so to speak.

Uncle Aleck was in the house one day, and having nothing particular to do formed an evil desire for a book on the top shelf. This particular uncle, be it understood, is regarded as a wealthy old bachelor--though personally we can't be sure to what extent he is either single or rich. Anyhow, he always professed a special affection for us personally, on the curious ground that we were the image of himself at our age--a reflection which furnished us no pleasure from the point of view of physical pulchritude, however flattering it might be as a financial prospect. We were regarded by the family generally as his heir--alas, that we should have to say we "were" regarded.

Naturally Uncle, seeing this book which he shouldn't have wanted to read--at his age, too, the old rascal!--seized that infernal ladder and climbed up. It let him get right up to the top rung, and then it bucked or shied or kicked or something equally effective. When they got the splints off Uncle's leg and he was able to move around on crutches, he sent for his lawyer. Ever since he has regarded us with ill-concealed dislike. Whenever we see a short ladder from that fateful day to this we get a curious "gone" feeling under the middle button of our vest.

This is the sort of luck we have had with tools, but, of course, there are people who have had worse. We have a friend, for instance, who is an absolute victim to them. He has a fine home and a charming wife, not to mention the dog. But he is gradually undermining his health and wrecking his own happiness and theirs by his insane conviction that he is a plumber, a carpenter, an electrician, a cabinet-maker, a plasterer, and a stone-mason combined. There are three or four other trades as well, but these will do to go on with.

When he built his house, he had a large room constructed down in the basement adjoining the boudoir occupied by the furnace and the coal-bin. It is a really beautiful room, a little low as to the ceiling, perhaps, and a little dim as to the light. But there is a fine cement floor, fine big beams in the ceiling, and splendid brick walls in all their natural beauty of cool grey. It is his workshop. He tries to persuade his wife that some day it will be the billiard-room. But she, poor woman, knows better. It is his workshop now and forever, till his last tool is rusted and his last finger busted and--well, there are "dusted" and "crusted" left to rhyme with.

He has that place simply jammed with tools of all sorts and work-benches and the like. He keeps a regular harem of hammers and hatchets and saws cooped up down there, each in her own little cubicle. Not even the Sultan himself in all his matrimonial glory was ever half so jealous of his better halves--perhaps one should say, his better ninety-nine one-hundredths--as our friend is of these same tools. Why, if he were to catch anyone cutting with a chisel of his, or planing with a plane from his seraglio, he would be liable to bowstring the poor tools and throw them into the Bosphorus, as represented by the sewer or a neighbor's backyard or some similar abyss of oblivion.

Sunday afternoons and any evening when his wife has company, he disappears down into this den of hardware, and the noise of hammering and sawing which emerges from it--the place sounds like a busy shipyard on the Clyde--indicates that he is having much joy of his chilled-steel darlings. Every now and then he comes up to have a piece of court-plaster put on a new place during the temporary absence of cuticle. Then he goes back with the solemn and determined expression of a man who at great personal sacrifice is accomplishing a sacred duty.

What does he do down there? Generally speaking, Heaven only knows. We have heard him talk in vague terms of the new set of storm-windows and storm-doors he is making for the house. But that was over two years ago, and there have been some very tidy little storms since then. But never yet have we seen sash or panel of those doors and windows.

It is true he did make a set of window-boxes for the flowers in the sun-room--so-called because you can sit in there and look at the sunlight outside. But even a union carpenter could have made those boxes in half an hour, and members of the union have never been accused of undue and ill-considered haste in such matters.

It is when our friend comes up out of the cave, however, to do a job in the upper regions of the house that things really happen. There was a tap in the bath-room, rather a nice tap as taps go--a very handsome tap, in fact. But, in the case of taps, handsome is as handsome pours. And pouring was one thing this particular tap refused to do--thought it vulgar, perhaps. So our friend one bright Sunday afternoon--these things seem always to happen on Sunday--got an idea in his mind and a big monkey-wrench in his hand, and went up to the bath-room and took a half-nelson on the handle of that tap. He gave one twist--just one. It was all that was needed. The tap came away with a jerk, and a solid jet of water as thick as your wrist took him in the face.

Gurgling yells of agony brought everyone in the house to his assistance. Naturally we had to be right there among the shock-troops, heedless of the nice new suit we were wearing for the first time. We dashed in and found our friend standing in front of the pipe into which he was vainly endeavoring to stick his thumb--mindful, perhaps, of the famous exploit of the little hero of Haarlem. We succeeded in prying him away, but our new suit never looked the same again. If we had had any sense we would have left him there till he was washed away. The trouble was that no one else knew where to shut off the water, and--well, we simply had to drag him away to do it.

The next day a battalion of plumbers, plasterers, and decorators did what they could to repair the damage to the house. It took them about a week. But our friend is still hopeful. He still thinks he is a mechanical genius wasted as a mere lawyer. Only the other morning we dropped into his office. He was laboriously trying to make a piece of black court-plaster about the size of a war-map stick to the back of one hand by holding it down with the bandaged thumb of the other. There was a lump on his forehead and one of his cheeks was badly scratched. But he was in excellent spirits.

"Tell you what, old man," he burbled in his enthusiasm, "there's nothing like being able to do the odd-jobs around the house. Why, only last night I went down into my workshop, and I----"