Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

SITTING IN THE BARBER'S CHAIR

Once every ten weeks or so we get our hair cut.

We are not generally parsimonious of our employer's time, but somehow we do hate to squander that thirty-three minutes, which is the exact chronicide involved in despoiling our skull of a ten weeks' garner. If we were to have our hair cut at the end of eight weeks the shearing would take only thirty-one minutes; but we can never bring ourselves to rob our employer of that much time until we reckon he is really losing prestige by our unkempt appearance. Of course, we believe in having our hair cut during office hours. That is the only device we know to make the hateful operation tolerable.

To the times mentioned above should be added fifteen seconds, which is the slice of eternity needed to trim, prune and chasten our mustache, which is not a large group of foliage.

We knew a traveling man who never got his hair cut except when he was on the road, which permitted him to include the transaction in his expense account; but somehow it seems to us more ethical to steal time than to steal money.

We like to view this whole matter in a philosophical and ultra-pragmatic way. Some observers have hazarded that our postponement of haircuts is due to mere lethargy and inertia, but that is not so. Every time we get our locks shorn our wife tells us that we have got them too short. She says that our head has a very homely and bourgeois bullet shape, a sort of pithecanthropoid contour, which is revealed by a close trim. After five weeks' growth, however, we begin to look quite distinguished. The difficulty then is to ascertain just when the law of diminishing returns comes into play. When do we cease to look distinguished and begin to appear merely slovenly? Careful study has taught us that this begins to take place at the end of sixty-five days, in warm weather. Add five days or so for natural procrastination and devilment, and we have seventy days interval, which we have posited as the ideal orbit for our tonsorial ecstasies.

When at last we have hounded ourself into robbing our employer of those thirty-three minutes, plus fifteen seconds for you know what, we find ourself in the barber's chair. Despairingly we gaze about at the little blue flasks with flowers enameled on them; at the piles of clean towels; at the bottles of mandrake essence which we shall presently have to affirm or deny. Under any other circumstances we should deeply enjoy a half hour spent in a comfortable chair, with nothing to do but do nothing. Our barber is a delightful fellow; he looks benign and does not prattle; he respects the lobes of our ears and other vulnerabilia. But for some inscrutable reason we feel strangely ill at ease in his chair. We can't think of anything to think about. Blankly we brood in the hope of catching the hem of some intimation of immortality. But no, there is nothing to do but sit there, useless as an incubator with no eggs in it. The processes of wasting and decay are hurrying us rapidly to a pauperish grave, every instant brings us closer to a notice in the obit column, and yet we sit and sit without two worthy thoughts to rub against each other.

Oh, the poverty of mortal mind, the sad meagerness of the human soul! Here we are, a vital, breathing entity, transformed to a mere chemical carcass by the bleak magic of the barber's chair. In our anatomy of melancholy there are no such atrabiliar moments as those thirty-three (and a quarter) minutes once every ten weeks. Roughly speaking, we spend three hours of this living death every year.

And yet, perhaps it is worth it, for what a jocund and pantheistic merriment possesses us when we escape from the shop! Bay-rummed, powdered, shorn, brisk and perfumed, we fare down the street exhaling the syrups of Cathay. Once more we can take our rightful place among aggressive and well-groomed men; we can look in the face without blenching those human leviathans who are ever creased, razored, and white-margined as to vest. We are a man among men and our untethered mind jostles the stars. We have had our hair cut, and no matter what gross contours our cropped skull may display to wives or ethnologists, we are a free man for ten dear weeks.

BROWN EYES AND EQUINOXES

"What is an equinox?" said Titania.

I pretended not to hear her and prayed fervently that the inquiry would pass from her mind. Sometimes her questions, if ignored, are effaced by some other thought that possesses her active brain. I rattled my paper briskly and kept well behind it.

"Yes," I murmured husbandly, "delicious, delicious! My dear, you certainly plan the most delightful meals." Meanwhile I was glancing feverishly at the daily Quiz column to see if that noble cascade of popular information might give any help. It did not.

Clear brown eyes looked across the table gravely. I could feel them through the spring overcoat ads.

"What is an equinox?"

"I think I must have left my matches upstairs," I said, and went up to look for them. I stayed aloft ten minutes and hoped that by that time she would have passed on to some other topic. I did not waste my time, however; I looked everywhere for the "Children's Book of a Million Reasons," until I remembered it was under the dining-room table taking the place of a missing caster.

When I slunk into the living room again I hastily suggested a game of double Canfield, but Titania's brow was still perplexed. Looking across at me with that direct brown gaze that would compel even a milliner to relent, she asked:

"What is an equinox?"

I tried to pass it off flippantly.

"A kind of alarm clock," I said, "that lets the bulbs and bushes know it's time to get up."

"No; but honestly, Bob," she said, "I want to know. It's something about an equal day and an equal night, isn't it?"

"At the equinox," I said sternly, hoping to overawe her, "the day and the night are of equal duration. But only for one night. On the following day the sun, declining in perihelion, produces the customary inequality. The usual working day is much longer than the night of relaxation that follows it, as every toiler knows."

"Yes," she said thoughtfully, "but how does it work? It says something in this article about the days getting longer in the Northern Hemisphere, while they are getting shorter in the Southern."

"Of course," I agreed, "conditions are totally different south of Mason and Dixon's line. But as far as we are concerned here, the sun, revolving round the earth, casts a beneficent shadow, which is generally regarded as the time to quit work. This shadow--"

"I thought the earth revolved round the sun," she said. "Wasn't that what Galileo proved?"

"He was afterward discovered to be mistaken," I said. "That was what caused all the trouble."

"What trouble?" she asked, much interested.

"Why, he and Socrates had to take hemlock or they were drowned in a butt of malmsey, I really forget which."

"Well, after the equinox," said Titania, "do the days get longer?"

"They do," I said; "in order to permit the double-headers. And now that daylight saving is to go into effect, equinoxes won't be necessary any more. Very likely the pan-Russian Soviets, or President Wilson, or somebody, will abolish them."

"June 21 is the longest day in the year, isn't it?"

"The day before pay-day is always the longest day."

"And the night the cook goes out is always the longest night," she retorted, catching the spirit of the game.

"Some day," I threatened her, "the earth will stop rotating on its orbit, or its axis, or whatever it is, and then we will be like the moon, divided into two hostile hemispheres, one perpetual day and the other eternal night."

She did not seem alarmed. "Yes, and I bet I know which one you'll emigrate to," she said. "But how about the equinoctial gales? Why should there be gales just then?"

I had forgot about the equinoctial gales, and this caught me unawares.

"That was an old tradition of the Phoenician mariners," I said, "but the invention of latitude and longitude made them unnecessary. They have fallen into disrepute. Dead reckoning killed them."

"And the precession of the equinoxes?" she asked, turning back to her magazine.

This was a poser, but I rallied stoutly. "Well," I said, "you see, there are two equinoxes a year, the vernal and the autumnal. They are well known by coal dealers. The first one is when he delivers the coal and the second is when he gets paid. Two of them a year, you see, in the course of a million years or so, makes quite a majestic series. That is why they call it a procession."

Titania looked at me and gradually her face broke up into a charming aurora borealis of laughter.

"I don't believe you know any more about the old things than I do," she said.

And the worst of it is, I think she was right.

163 INNOCENT OLD MEN

I found Titania looking severely at her watch, which is a queer little gold disk about the size of a waistcoat button, swinging under her chin by a thin golden chain. Titania's methods of winding, setting and regulating that watch have always been a mystery to me. She frequently knows what the right time is, but how she deduces it from the data given by the hands of her timepiece I can't guess. It's something like this: She looks at the watch and notes what it says. Then she deducts ten minutes, because she remembers it is ten minutes fast. Then she performs some complicated calculation connected with when the baby had his bath, and how long ago she heard the church bells chime; to this result she adds five minutes to allow for leeway. Then she goes to the phone and asks Central the time.

"Hullo," I said; "what's wrong?"

"I'm wondering about this daylight-saving business," she said. "You know, I think it's all a piece of Bolshevik propaganda to get us confused and encourage anarchy. All the women in Marathon are talking about it and neglecting their knitting. Junior's bath was half an hour late today because Mrs. Benvenuto called me up to talk about daylight saving. She says her cook has threatened to leave if she has to get up an hour earlier in the morning. I was just wondering how to adjust my watch to the new conditions."

"It's perfectly simple," I said. "Put your watch ahead one hour, and then go through the same logarithms you always do."

"Put it ahead?" asked Titania. "Mrs. Borgia says we have to put the clock _back_ an hour. She is fearfully worried about it. She says suppose she has something in the oven when the clock is put back, it will be an hour overdone and burned to a crisp when the kitchen clock catches up again."

"Mrs. Borgia is wrong," I said. "The clocks are to be put ahead one hour. At 2 o'clock on Easter morning they are to be turned on to 3 o'clock. Mrs. Borgia certainly won't have anything in the oven at that time of night. You see, we are to pretend that 2 o'clock is really 3 o'clock, and when we get up at 7 o'clock it will really be 6 o'clock. We are deliberately fooling ourselves in order to get an hour more of daylight."

"I have an idea," she said, "that you won't get up at 7 that morning."

"It is quite possible," I said, "because I intend to stay up until 2 a.m. that morning in order to be exactly correct in changing our timepieces. No one shall accuse me of being a time slacker."

Titania was wrinkling her brow. "But how about that lost hour?" she said. "What happens to it? I don't see how we can just throw an hour away like that. Time goes on just the same. How can we afford to shorten our lives so ruthlessly? It's murder, that's what it is! I told you it was a Bolshevik plot. Just think; there are a hundred million Americans. Moving on the clock that way brings each of us one hour nearer our graves. That is to say, we are throwing away 100,000,000 hours."

She seized a pencil and a sheet of paper and went through some calculations.

"There are 8,760 hours in a year," she said. "Reckoning seventy years a lifetime, there are 613,200 hours in each person's life. Now, will you please divide that into a hundred million for me? I'm not good at long division."

With docility I did so, and reported the result.

"About 163," I said.

"There you are!" she exclaimed triumphantly. "Throwing away all that perfectly good time amounts simply to murdering 163 harmless old men of seventy, or 326 able-bodied men of thirty-five, or 1,630 innocent little children of seven. If that isn't atrocity, what is? I think Mr. Hoover or Admiral Grayson, or somebody, ought to be prosecuted."

I was aghast at this awful result. Then an idea struck me, and I took the pencil and began to figure on my own account.

"Look here, Titania," I said. "Not so fast. Moving the clock ahead doesn't really bring those people any nearer their graves. What it does do is bring the ratification of the Peace Treaty sooner, which is a fine thing. By deleting a hundred million hours we shorten Senator Borah's speeches against the League by 11,410 years. That's very encouraging."

"According to that way of reckoning," she said with sarcasm, "Mr. Borah's term must have expired about 11,000 years ago."

"My dear Titania," I said, "the ways of the Government may seem inscrutable, but we have got to follow them with faith. If Mr. Wilson tells us to murder 163 fine old men in elastic-sided boots we must simply do it, that's all. Peace is a dreadful thing. We have got to meet the Germans on their own ground. They adopted this daylight-saving measure years ago. They call it Sonnenuntergangverderbenpraxis, I believe. After all, it is only a temporary measure, because in the fall, when the daylight hours get shorter, we shall have to turn the clocks back a couple of hours in order to compensate the gas and electric light companies for all the money they will have lost. That will bring those 163 old gentlemen to life again and double their remaining term of years to make up for their temporary effacement. They are patriotic hostages to Time for the summer only. You must remember that time is only a philosophical abstraction, with no real or tangible existence, and we have a right to do whatever we want with it."

"I will remind you of that," she said, "at getting-up time on Sunday morning. I still think that if we are going to monkey with the clocks at all it would be better to turn them backward instead of forward. Certainly that would bring you home from the club a little earlier."

"My dear," I said, "we are in the Government's hands. A little later we may be put on time rations, just as we are on food rations. We may have time cards to encourage thrift in saving time. Every time we save an hour we will get a little stamp to show for it. When we fill out a whole card we will be entitled to call ourselves a month younger than we are. Tell that to Mrs. Borgia; it will reconcile her."

A lusty uproar made itself heard upstairs and Titania gave a little scream. "Heavens!" she cried. "Here I am talking with you and Junior's bottle is half an hour late. I don't care what Mr. Wilson does to the clocks; he won't be able to fool Junior. He knows when it's, time for meals. Won't you call up Central and find out the exact time?"

A TRAGIC SMELL IN MARATHON

Marathon, Pa., April 2.

This is a very embarrassing time of year for us. Every morning when we get on the 8:13 train at Marathon Bill Stites or Fred Myers or Hank Harris or some other groundsel philosopher on the Cinder and Bloodshot begins to chivvy us about our garden. "Have you planted anything yet?" they say. "Have you put litmus paper in the soil to test it for lime, potash and phosphorus? Have you got a harrow?"

That sort of thing bothers us, because our ideas of cultivation are very primitive. We did go to the newsstand at the Reading Terminal and try to buy a Litmus paper, but the agent didn't have any. He says he doesn't carry the Jersey papers. So we buried some old copies of the _Philistine_ in the garden, thinking that would strengthen up the soil a bit. This business of nourishing the soil seems grotesque. It's hard enough to feed the family, let alone throwing away good money on feeding the land. Our idea about soil is that it ought to feed itself.

Our garden ought to be lusty enough to raise the few beans and beets and blisters we aspire to. We have been out looking at the soil. It looks fairly potent and certainly it goes a long way down. There are quite a lot of broken magnesia bottles and old shinbones scattered through it, and they ought to help along. The topsoil and the humus may be a little mixed, but we are not going to sort them out by hand.

Our method is to go out at twilight the first Sunday in April, about the time the cutworms go to roost, and take a sharp-pointed stick. We draw lines in the ground with this stick, preferably in a pleasant geometrical pattern that will confuse the birds and other observers. It is important not to do this until twilight, so that no robins or insects can watch you. Then we go back in the house and put on our old trousers, the pair that has holes in each pocket. We fill the pockets with the seed, we want to plant and loiter slowly along the grooves we have made in the earth. The seed sifts down the trousers legs and spreads itself in the furrow far better than any mechanical drill could do it. The secret of gardening is to stick to nature's old appointed ways. Then we read a chapter of Bernard Shaw aloud, by candle light or lantern light. As soon as they hear the voice of Shaw all the vegetables dig themselves in. This saves going all along the rows with a shingle to pat down the topsoil or the humus or the magnesia bottles or whatever else is uppermost.

Fred says that certain vegetables--kohl-rabi and colanders, we think--extract nitrogen from the air and give it back to the soil. It may be so, but what has that to do with us? If our soil can't keep itself supplied with nitrogen, that's its lookout. We don't need the nitrogen in the air. The baby isn't old enough to have warts yet.

Hank says it's no use watering the garden from above. He says that watering from above lures the roots toward the surface and next day the hot sun kills them. The answer to that is that the rain comes from above, doesn't it? Roots have learned certain habits in the past million years and we haven't time to teach them to duck when it rains. Hank has some irrigation plan which involves sinking tomato cans in the ground and filling them with water.

Bill says it's dangerous to put arsenic on the plants, because it may kill the cook. He says nicotine or tobacco dust is far better. The answer to that is that we never put fertilizers on our garden, anyway. If we want to kill the cook there is a more direct method, and we reserve the tobacco for ourself. No cutworm shall get a blighty one from our cherished baccy pouch.

Fred says we ought to have a wheel-barrow; Hank swears by a mulching iron; Bill is all for cold frames. All three say that hellebore is the best thing for sucking insects. We echo the expletive, with a different application.

You see, we have no instinct for gardening. Some fellows, like Bill Stites, have a divinely implanted zest for the propagation of chard and rhubarb and self-blanching celery and kohl-rabi; they are kohl-rabid, we might say. They know, just what to do when they see a weed; they can assassinate a weevil by just looking at it. But weevils and cabbage worms are unterrified by us. We can't tell a weed from a young onion. We never mulched anything in our life; we wouldn't know how to begin.

But the deuce of it is, public opinion says that we must raise a garden. It is no use to hire a man to do it for us. However badly we may do it, patriotism demands that we monkey around with a garden of our own. We may get bitten by a snapping bean or routed by a rutabaga or infected by a parsnip. But with Bill and those fellows at our heels we have just got to face it. Hellebore!

What we want to know is, How do you ever find out all these things about vegetables? We bought an ounce of tomato seeds in desperation, and now Fred says "one ounce of tomato seeds will produce 3,000 plants. You should have bought two dozen plants instead of the seed." How does he know those things? Hank says beans are very delicate and must not be handled while they are wet or they may get rusty. Again we ask, how does he know? Where do they learn these matters? Bill says that stones draw out the moisture from the soil and every stone in the garden should be removed by hand before we plant. We offered him twenty cents an hour to do it.

The most tragic odor in the world hangs over Marathon these days; the smell of freshly spaded earth. It is extolled by the poets and all those happy sons of the pavement who know nothing about it. But here are we, who hardly know a loam from a lentil, breaking our back over seed catalogues. Public opinion may compel us to raise vegetables, but we are going to go about it our own way. If the stones are going to act like werewolves and suck the moisture from our soil, let them do so. We don't believe in thwarting nature. Maybe it will be a very wet summer and we shall have the laugh on Bill, who has carted away all his stones.

And we should just like to see Bill Stites write a poem. We bet it wouldn't look as much like a poem as our beans look like beans. And as for Hank and Fred, they wouldn't even know how to begin to plant a poem!

BULLIED BY THE BIRDS

Marathon, Pa., May 2.

I insist that the place for birds is in the air or on the bushy tops of trees or on smooth-shaven lawns. Let them twitter and strut on the greens of golf courses and intimidate the tired business men. Let them peck cinders along the railroad track and keep the trains waiting. But really they have no right to take possession of a man's house as they have mine.

The nesting season is a time of tyranny and oppression for those who live in Marathon. The birds are upon us like Hindenburg in Belgium. We go about on tiptoe, speaking in whispers, for fear of annoying them. It is all the fault of the Marathon Bird Club, which has offered all sorts of inducements to the fowls of the air to come and live in our suburb, quite forgetting that humble commuters have to live there, too. Birds have moved all the way from Wynnewood and Ambler and Chestnut Hill to enjoy the congenial air of Marathon and the informing little pamphlets of our club, telling them just what to eat and which houses offer the best hospitality. All our dwellings are girt about with little villas made of condensed milk boxes, but the feathered tyrants have grown too pernickety to inhabit these. They come closer still, and make our homes their own. They take the grossest liberties.

I am fond of birds, but I think the line must be drawn somewhere. The clothes-line, for instance. The other day Titania sent me out to put up a new clothesline; I found that a shrike or a barn swallow or some other veery had built a nest in the clothespin basket. That means we won't be able to hang out our laundry in the fresh Monday air and equally fresh Monday sunshine until the nesting season is over.

Then there is a gross, fat, indiscreet robin that has taken a home in an evergreen or mimosa or banyan tree just under our veranda railing. It is an absurdly exposed, almost indecently exposed position, for the confidential family business she intends to carry on. The iceman and the butcher and the boy who brings up the Sunday ice cream from the apothecary can't help seeing those three big blue eggs she has laid. But, because she has nested there for the last three springs, while the house was unoccupied, she thinks she has a perpetual lease on that bush. She hotly resents the iceman and the butcher and the apothecary's boy, to say nothing of me. So these worthy merchants have to trail round a circuitous route, violating the neutral ground of a neighbor, in order to reach the house from behind and deliver their wares through the cellar. We none of us dare use the veranda at all for fear of frightening her, and I have given up having the morning paper delivered at the house because she made such shrill protest.

Frightening her, do I say? Nay, it is _we_ who are frightened. I go round to the side of the house to prune my benzine bushes or to plant a mess of spinach and a profane starling or woodpecker bustles off her nest with shrewish outcry and lingers nearby to rail at me. Abashed, I stealthily scuffle back to get a spade out of the tool bin and again that shrill scream of anger and outraged motherhood. A throstle or a whippoorwill is raising a family in the gutter spout over the back kitchen. I go into the bathroom to shave and Titania whispers sharply, "You mustn't shave in there. There's a tomtit nesting in the shutter hinge and the light from your shaving mirror will make the poor little birds crosseyed when they're hatched." I try to shave in the dining-room and I find a sparrow's nest on the window sill. Finally I do my toilet in the coal bin, even though there is a young squeaking bat down there. A bat is half mouse anyway, so Titania has less compassion for its feelings. Even if that bat grows up bow-legged on account of premature excitement, I have to shave somewhere.

We can't play croquet at this time of year, because the lawn must be kept clear for the robins to quarry out worms. The sound of mallet and ball frightens the worms and sends them underground, and then it's harder for the robins to find them. I suppose we really ought to keep a stringed orchestra playing in the garden to entice the worms to the surface. We have given up frying onions because the mother robins don't like the odor while they're raising a family. I love my toast crusts, but Titania takes them away from me for the blackbirds. "Now," she says, "they're raising a family. You must be generous."

If my garden doesn't amount to anything this year the birds will be my alibi. Titania makes me do my gardening in rubber-soled shoes so as not to disturb the birds when they are going to bed. (They begin yelping at 4 a.m. right outside the window and never think of my slumbers.) The other evening I put on my planting trousers and was about to sow a specially fine pea I had brought home from town when Titania made signs from the window. "You simply mustn't wear those trousers around the house in nesting season. Don't you know the birds are very sensitive just now?" And we have been paying board for our cat on Long Island for a whole year because the birds wouldn't like his society and plebeian ways.

Marathon has come to a pretty pass, indeed, when the commuters are to be dispossessed in this way by a lot of birds, orioles and tomtits and yellow-bellied nuthatches. Some of these days a wren will take it into its head to build a nest on the railroad track and we'll all have to walk to town. Or a chicken hawk will settle in our icebox and we'll starve to death.

As I have said before, I believe in keeping nature in its proper place. Birds belong in trees. I don't go twittering and fluffing about in oaks and chestnuts, perching on the birds' nest steps and getting in their way. And why should some swarthy robin, be she never so matronly, swear at me if I set foot on my own front porch?

A MESSAGE FOR BOONVILLE

When corncob pipes went up from a nickel to six cents, smoking traditions tottered. That was a year or more ago, but one can still recall the indignation written on the faces of nicotine-soaked gaffers who had been buying cobs at a jitney ever since Washington used one to keep warm at Valley Forge. It was the supreme test of our determination to win the war: the price of Missouri meerschaums went up 20 per cent and there was no insurrection.

Yesterday we went out to buy our annual corncob, and were agreeably surprised to learn that the price is still six cents; but our friend the tobacconist said that it may go up again soon. We took the treasure, gleaming yellow with fresh varnish, back to our kennel, and we are smoking it as we set down these words. A corncob is sadly hot and raw until it is well sooted, but the ultimate flavor is worth persecution.

The corncob pipes we always buy come from Boonville, Mo., and we don't see why we shouldn't blow a little whiff of affection and gratitude toward that excellent town. Moreover, Boonville celebrated its centennial recently: it was founded in 1818. If the map is to be believed, it is on the southern bank of the Missouri River, which is there spanned by a very fine bridge; it is reached by two railroads (Missouri Pacific and M., K. and T.) and stands on a bluff 100 feet above the water. According to the two works of reference nearest to our desk, its population is either 4252 or 4377. Perhaps the former census omits the 125 men of the town who are so benighted as to smoke briars or clays.

Delightful town of Boonville, seat of Cooper County, you are well named. How great a boon you have conferred upon a troubled world! Long after more ambitious towns have faded in the memory of man your quiet and soothing gift to humanity will make your name blessed. I like to imagine your shady streets, drowsing in the summer sun, and the rural philosophers sitting on the verandas of your hotels or on the benches of Harley Park ("comprising fifteen acres"--New International Encyclopedia), looking out across the brown river and puffing clouds of sweet gray reek. Down by the livery stable on Main street (there must be a livery stable on Main street) I can see the old creaky, cane-bottomed chairs (with seats punctured by too much philosophy) tilted against the sycamore trees, ready for the afternoon gossip and shag tobacco. I can imagine the small boys of Boonville fishing for catfish from the piers of the bridge or bathing down by the steamboat dock (if there is one), and yearning for the day when they, too, will be grown up and old enough to smoke corncobs.

What is the subtle magic of a corncob pipe? It is never as sweet or as mellow as a well-seasoned briar, and yet it has a fascination all its own. It is equally dear to those who work hard and those who loaf with intensity. When you put your nose to the blackened mouth of the hot cob its odor is quite different from that fragrance of the crusted wooden bowl. There is a faint bitterness in it, a sour, plaintive aroma. It is a pipe that seems to call aloud for the accompaniment of beer and earnest argument on factional political matters. It is also the pipe for solitary vigils of hard and concentrated work. It is the pipe that a man keeps in the drawer of his desk for savage hours of extra toil after the stenographer has powdered her nose and gone home.

A corncob pipe is a humble badge of philosophy, an evidence of tolerance and even humor. It requires patience and good cheer, for it is slow to "break in." Those who meditate bestial and brutal designs against the weak and innocent do not smoke it. Probably Hindenburg never saw one. Missouri's reputation for incredulity may be due to the corncob habit. One who is accustomed to consider an argument over a burning nest of tobacco, with the smoke fuming upward in a placid haze, will not accept any dogma too immediately.

There is a singular affinity among those who smoke corncobs. A Missouri meerschaum whose bowl is browned and whose fiber stem is frayed and stringy with biting betrays a meditative and reasonable owner. He will have pondered all aspects of life and be equally ready to denounce any of them, but without bitterness. If you see a man on a street corner smoking a cob it will be safe to ask him to watch the baby a minute while you slip around the corner. You would even be safe in asking him to lend you a five. He will be safe, too, because he won't have it.

Think, therefore, of the charm of a town where corncob pipes are the chief industry. Think of them stacked up in bright yellow piles in the warehouse. Think of the warm sun and the wholesome sweetness of broad acres that have grown into the pith of the cob. Think of the bright-eyed Missouri maidens who have turned and scooped and varnished and packed them. Think of the airy streets and wide pavements of Boonville, and the corner drug stores with their shining soda fountains and grape-juice bottles. Think of sitting out on that bluff on a warm evening, watching the broad shimmer of the river slipping down from the sunset, and smoking a serene pipe while the local flappers walk in the coolness wearing crisp, swaying gingham dresses. That's the kind of town we like to think about.

MAKING MARATHON SAFE FOR THE URCHIN

The Urchin and I have been strolling about Marathon on Sunday mornings for more than a year, but not until the gasolineless Sabbaths supervened were we really able to examine the village and see what it is like. Previously we had been kept busy either dodging motors or admiring them as they sped by. Their rich dazzle of burnished enamel, the purring hum of their great tires, evokes applause from the Urchin. He is learning, as he watches those flashing chariots, that life truly is almost as vivid as the advertisements in the _Ladies' Home Journal_, where the shimmer of earthly pageant first was presented to him.

Marathon is a village so genteel and comely that the Urchin and I would like to have some pictures of it for future generations, particularly as we see it on an autumn morning when, as I say, the motors are kenneled and the landscape has ceased to vibrate. In the douce benignance of equinoctial sunshine we gaze about us with eyes of inventory. Where my observation errs by too much sentiment the Urchin checks me by his cooler power of ratiocination.

Marathon is a suburban Xanadu gently caressed by the train service of the Cinder and Bloodshot. It may be recognized as an aristocratic and patrician stronghold by the fact that while luxuries are readily obtainable (for instance, banana splits, or the latest novel by Enoch A. Bennett), necessaries are had only by prayer and advowson. The drug store will deliver ice cream to your very refrigerator, but it is impossible to get your garbage collected. The cook goes off for her Thursday evening in a taxi, but you will have to mend the roof, stanch the plumbing and curry the furnace with your own hands. There are ten trains to take you to town of an evening, but only two to bring you home. Yet going to town is a luxury, coming home is a necessity. The supply of grape juice seems almost unlimited, yet coal is to be had catch-as-catch-can.

Another proof that Marathon is patrician at heart is that nothing is known by its right name! The drug store is a "pharmacy," Sunday is "the Sabbath," a house is a "residence," a debt is a "balance due on bill rendered." A girls' school is a "young ladies' seminary," A Marathon man is not drafted, he is "inducted into selective service." And the railway station has a porte cochère (with the correct accent) instead of a carriage entrance. A furnace is (how erroneously!) called a "heater." Marathon people do not die--they "pass away." Even the cobbler, good fellow, has caught the trick; he calls his shop the "Italo-American Shoe Hospital."

This is an innocent masquerade! If Marathon prefers not to call a flivver a flivver, I shall not expostulate. And yet this quaint subterfuge should not be carried quite so far. Stone walls are made for sunny lounging; yet stone walls in Marathon are built with uneven vertical projections to discourage the sedentary. Nothing is more delightful than a dog; but there are no dogs in Marathon. They are all airedales or spaniels or mastiffs. If an ordinary dog should wag his tail up our street the airedales would cut him dead. Bless me, Nature herself has taken to the same insincerity. The landscape round Marathon is lovely, but it has itself well in hand. The hills all pretend to be gentle declivities. There is a beautiful little sheet of water, reflecting the trailery of willows, a green salute to the eye. In a robuster community it would be a swimming hole--but with us, an ornamental lake. Only in one spot has Nature forgotten herself and been so brusque and rough as to jut up a very sizable cliff. This is the loveliest thing in Marathon: sunlight and shadow break and angle in cubist magnificence among the oddly veined knobs and prisms of brown stone. Yet this cliff or quarry is by common consent taboo among us. It is our indelicacy, our indecency. Such "residences" as are near modestly turn their kitchens toward it. Only the blacksmith and the gas tanks are hardy enough to face this nakedness of Mother Earth--they, and excellent Pat Lemon, Marathon's humblest and blackest citizen, who contemplates that rugged and honest beauty as he tills his garden on the land abandoned by squeamish burghers. That is our Aceldama, our Potter's Field, only approached by the athletic, who keep their eyes from Nature's indiscretion by vigorous sets of tennis in the purple shadow of the cliff.

Life is queerly inverted in Marathon. Nature has been so bullied and repressed that she fawns about us timidly. No well-conducted suburban shrubbery would think of assuming autumn tints before the ladies have got into their fall fashions. Indeed none of our chaste trees will even shed their leaves while any one is watching; and they crouch modestly in the shade of our massive garages. They have been taught their place. In Marathon it is a worse sin to have your lawn uncut than to have your books or your hair uncut. I have been aware of indignant eyes because I let my back garden run wild. And yet I flatter myself it was not mere sloth. No! I want the Urchin to see what this savage, tempestuous world is like. What preparation for life is a village where Nature comes to heel like a spaniel? When a thunderstorm disorganizes our electric lights for an hour or so we feel it a personal affront. Let my rearward plot be a deep-tangled wild-wood where the happy Urchin may imagine something more ferocious lurking than a posse of radishes. Indeed, I hardly know whether Marathon is a safe place to bring up a child. How can he learn the horrors of drink in a village where there is no saloon? Or the sadness of the seven deadly sins where there is no movie? Or deference to his betters where the chauffeurs, in their withered leather legs, drive limousines to the drug store to buy expensive cigars, while their employers walk to the station puffing briar pipes?

I had been hoping that the war would knock some of this topsy-turvy nonsense out of us. Maybe it has. Sometimes I see on the faces of our commuters the unaccustomed agitation of thought. At least we still have the grace to call ourselves a suburb, and not (what we fancy ourselves) a superurb. But I don't like the pretense that runs like a jarring note through the music of our life. Why is it that those who are doing the work must pretend they are not doing it; and those not doing the work pretend that they are? I see that the motor messenger girls who drive high-powered cars wear Sam Browne belts and heavy-soled boots, whereas the stalwart colored wenches who labor along the tracks of the Cinder and Bloodshot console themselves with flimsy waists and light slippers. (A fact!) By and by the Urchin will notice these things. And I don't want him to grow up the kind of chap who, instead of running to catch a train, loiters gracefully to the station and waits to be caught.

THE SMELL OF SMELLS

I Smelt it this morning--I wonder if you know the smell I mean?

It had rained hard during the night, and trees and bushes twinkled in the sharp early sunshine like ballroom chandeliers. As soon as I stepped out of doors I caught that faint but unmistakable musk in the air; that dim, warm sweetness. It was the smell of summer, so wholly different from the crisp tang of spring.

It is a drowsy, magical waft of warmth and fragrance. It comes only when the leaves and vegetation have grown to a certain fullness and juice, and when the sun bends in his orbit near enough to draw out all the subtle vapors of field and woodland. It is a smell that rarely if ever can be discerned in the city. It needs the wider air of the unhampered earth for its circulation and play.

I don't know just why, but I associate that peculiar aroma of summer with woodpiles and barnyards. Perhaps because in the area of a farmyard the sunlight is caught and focused and glows with its fullest heat and radiance. And it is in the grasp of the relentless sun that growing things yield up their innermost vitality and emanate their fragrant essence. I have seen fields of tobacco under a hot sun that smelt as blithe as a room thick with blue Havana smoke. I remember a pile of birch logs, heaped up behind a barn in Pike County, where that mellow richness of summer flowed and quivered like a visible exhalation in the air. It is the goodly soul of earth, rendering her health and sweetness to her master, the sun.

Every one, I suppose, who is a fancier of smells, knows this blithe perfume of the summer air that is so pleasant to the nostril almost any fine forenoon from mid-June until August. It steals pungently through the blue sparkle of the morning, fading away toward noon when the moistness is dried out. But when one first issues from the house at breakfast time it is at its highest savor. Irresistibly it suggests worms and a tin can with the lid jaggedly bent back and a pitchfork turning up the earth behind the cow stable. Fishing was first invented when Adam smelt that odor in the air.

The first fishing morning--can't you imagine it! Has no one ever celebrated it in verse or oils? The world all young and full of unmitigated sweetness; the Garden of Eden bespangled with the early dew; Adam scrabbling up a fistful of worm's and hooking them on a bent thorn and a line of twisted pampas grass; hurrying down to the branch or the creek or the bayou or whatever it may have been; sitting down on a brand-new stump that the devil had put there to tempt him; throwing out his line; sitting there in the sun dreaming and brooding....

And then a tug, a twitch, a flurry in the clear water of Eden, a pull, a splash, and the First Fish lay on the grass at Adam's foot. Can you imagine his sensations? How he yelled to Eve to come--look--see, and, how annoyed he was because she called out she was busy....

Probably it was in that moment that all the bickerings and back-talk of husbands and wives originated; when Adam called to Eve to come and look at his First Fish while it was still silver and vivid in its living colors; and Eve answered she was busy. In that moment were born the men's clubs and the women's clubs and the pinochle parties and being detained at the office and Kelly pool and all the other devices and stratagems that keep men and women from taking their amusements together.

Well, I didn't mean to go back to the Garden of Eden; I just wanted to say that summer is here again, even though the almanac doesn't vouch for it until the 21st. Those of you who are fond of smells, spread your nostrils about breakfast time tomorrow morning and see if you detect it.

A JAPANESE BACHELOR

The first obligation of one who lives by writing is to write what editors will buy. In so doing, how often one laments that one cannot write exactly what happens. Suppose I were to try it--for once!

I have been lying on the bed--where the landlady has put a dark blue spread, instead of the white one, because I drop my tobacco ashes--smoking, and thinking about a new friend I met today. His name is Kenko, a Japanese bachelor of the fourteenth century, who wrote a little book of musings which has been translated under the title "The Miscellany of a Japanese Priest." His candid reflections are those of a shrewd, learned, humane and somewhat misogynist mind. I have been lying on the bed because his book, like all books that make one ponder deeply on human destiny, causes that feeling of mind-sickness, that swimming pain of the mental faculties--or is it caused by too much strong tobacco?

My acquaintance with Kenko began only last night, when I sat in bed reading Mr. Raymond Weaver's very pleasant article about him in a recent _Bookman_. My last act before turning out the light was to lay the magazine on the table, open at Mr. Weaver's essay, to remind me to get a copy of Kenko the first thing this morning. Happily to-day was Saturday. I don't know what I should have done if it had been Sunday. I felt that I could not wait another day without owning that book. I suspected it was a good deal in the mood of another bachelor, an Anglo-American Caleb of to-day--Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, whose whimsical "Trivia" belongs on the same shelf.

This morning I tried to argue myself out of the decision. It may be a very expensive book, I thought; it may cost two or three dollars; I have been spending a lot of money lately, and I certainly ought to buy some new undershirts. Moreover, this has been a bad week; I have never written those paragraphs I promised a certain editor, and I haven't paid the rent yet. Why not try to find the book at a library? But I knew the only library where I would have any chance of finding Kenko would be the big pile at Fifth avenue and Forty-second street, and I could not bear the thought of having to read that book without smoking. I felt instinctively (from what Mr. Weaver had written) that it was the kind of book that requires a pipe.

Well, I thought, I won't decide this too hastily; I'll walk down to the post office (four blocks) and make up my mind on the way. I knew already, however, that if I didn't go downtown for that book it would bother me all day and ruin my work.

I walked down to the post office (to mail to an editor a sonnet I thought fairly well of) saying to myself: That book is imported from England, it may be a big book, it may even cost four dollars. How much better to exhibit the stoic tenacity of all great men, go back to my hall bedroom (which I was temporarily occupying) and concentrate on matters in hand. What right, I said, has a Buddhist recluse, born either in 1281 or 1283, to harass me so? But I knew in my heart that the matter was already decided. I walked back to the corner of Hallbedroom street, and stood vacillating at the newsstand, pretending to glance over the papers. But across six centuries the insistent ghost of Kenko had me in its grip. Annoyed, and with a sense of chagrin, I hurried to the subway.

In the dimly lit vestibule of the subway car, a boy of sixteen or so sat on an up-ended suitcase, plunged in a book. I can never resist the temptation to try to see what books other people are reading. This innocent curiosity has led me into many rudenesses, for I am short-sighted and have to stare very close to make out the titles. And usually the people who read books on trolleys, subways and ferries are women. How often I have stalked them warily, trying to identify the volume without seeming too intrusive. That weakness deserves an essay in itself. It has led me into surprising adventures. But in this case my quarry was easy. The lad--I judged him a boarding school boy going back to school after the holidays--was so absorbed in his reading that it was easy to thrust my face over his shoulder and see the running head on the page--"The Light That Failed."

I left the subway at Pennsylvania Station. Just to appease my conscience, I stopped in at the agreeable Cadmus bookshop on Thirty-third street to see if by any chance they might have a second-hand copy of Kenko. But I know they wouldn't; it is not the kind of book at all likely to be found second-hand. I tarried here long enough to smoke one cigarette and pay my devoirs to the noble profession of second-hand bookselling. I even thought, a little wildly, of buying a copy of "The Monk" by M.G. Lewis, which I saw there. So does the frenzy rage when once you unleash it. But I decided to be content with paying my devoirs to the proprietor, a friend of mine, and not go on (as the soldier does in Hood's lovely pun) to devour my pay. I hurried off to the office of the Oxford University Press, Kenko's publishers.

It should be stated, however, that owing to some confusion of doors I got by mistake into the reception room of the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Billiard Table Company, which is on the same corridor as the salesroom of the Oxford Press. It was a pleasant reception room, not very bookish in aspect, but in my agitation I was too eager to feel surprised by the large billiard table in the offing. I somewhat startled a young man at an adding machine by demanding, in a husky voice, a copy of "The Miscellanies of a Japanese Priest." I was rather nervous by this time, lest for some reason I should not be able to buy a copy of Kenko. I feared the publishers might be angry with me for not having made a round of the bookstores first. The young man saw that I was chalking the wrong cue, and forwarded me.