Chapter XVI

A fugitive fine day which had strayed into the month from the approaching spring appeared the next morning, and Miss Alicia was uplifted by the enrapturing suggestion that she should join her new relative in taking a walk, in fact that it should be she who took him to walk and showed him some of his possessions. This, it had revealed itself to him, she could do in a special way of her own, because during her life at Temple Barholm she had felt it her duty to “try to do a little good” among the villagers. She and her long-dead mother and sister had of course been working adjuncts of the vicarage, and had numerous somewhat trying tasks to perform in the way of improving upon “dear papa’s” harrying them into attending church, chivying, the mothers into sending their children to Sunday-school, and being unsparing in severity of any conduct which might be construed into implying lack of appreciation of the vicar or respect for his eloquence.

It had been necessary for them as members of the vicar’s family--always, of course, without adding a sixpence to the household bills--to supply bowls of nourishing broth and arrowroot to invalids and to bestow the aid and encouragement which result in a man of God’s being regarded with affection and gratitude by his parishioners. Many a man’s career in the church, “dear papa” had frequently observed, had been ruined by lack of intelligence and effort on the part of the female members of his family.

“No man could achieve proper results,” he had said, “if he was hampered by the selfish influence and foolishness of his womenkind. Success in the church depends in one sense very much upon the conduct of a man’s female relatives.”

After the deaths of her mother and sister, Miss Alicia had toiled on patiently, fading day by day from a slim, plain, sweet-faced girl to a slim, even plainer and sweeter-faced middle-aged and at last elderly woman. She had by that time read aloud by bedsides a great many chapters in the Bible, had given a good many tracts, and bestowed as much arrowroot, barley-water, and beef-tea as she could possibly encompass without domestic disaster. She had given a large amount of conscientious, if not too intelligent, advice, and had never failed to preside over her Sunday-school class or at mothers’ meetings. But her timid unimpressiveness had not aroused enthusiasm or awakened comprehension. “Miss Alicia,” the cottage women said, “she’s well meanin’, but she’s not one with a head.” “She reminds me,” one of them had summed her up, “of a hen that lays a’ egg every day, but it’s too small for a meal, and it ’u’d never hatch into anythin’.”

During her stay at Temple Barholm she had tentatively tried to do a little “parish work,” but she had had nothing to give, and she was always afraid that if Mr. Temple Barholm found her out, he would be angry, because he would think she was presuming. She was aware that the villagers knew that she was an object of charity herself, and a person who was “a lady” and yet an object of charity was, so to speak, poaching upon their own legitimate preserves. The rector and his wife were rather grand people, and condescended to her greatly on the few occasions of their accidental meetings. She was neither smart nor influential enough to be considered as an asset.

It was she who “conversed” during their walk, and while she trotted by Tembarom’s side, looking more early-Victorian than ever in a neat, fringed mantle and a small black bonnet of a fashion long decently interred by a changing world, Tembarom had never seen anything resembling it in New York; but he liked it and her increasingly at every moment.

It was he who made her converse. He led her on by asking her questions and being greatly interested in every response she made. In fact, though he was quite unaware of the situation, she was creating for him such an atmosphere as he might have found in a book, if he had had the habit of books. Everything she told him was new and quaint and very often rather touching. She remembered things about herself and her poor little past without knowing she was doing it. Before they had talked an hour he had an astonishing clear idea of “poor dear papa” and “dearest Emily” and “poor darling mama” and existence at Rowcroft Vicarage. He “caught on to” the fact that though she was very much given to the word “dear,”--people were “dear,” and so were things and places,--she never even by chance slipped into saying “dear Rowcroft,” which she would certainly have done if she had ever spent a happy moment in it. As she talked to him he realized that her simple accustomedness to English village life and its accompaniments of county surroundings would teach him anything and everything he might want to know. Her obscurity had been surrounded by stately magnificence, with which she had become familiar without touching the merest outskirts of its privileges. She knew names and customs and families and things to be cultivated or avoided, and though she would be a little startled and much mystified by his total ignorance of all she had breathed in since her birth, he felt sure that she would not regard him either with private contempt or with a lessened liking because he was a vandal pure and simple.

And she had such a nice, little, old polite way of saying things. When, in passing a group of children, he failed to understand that their hasty bobbing up and down meant that they were doing obeisance to him as lord of the manor, she spoke with the prettiest apologetic courtesy.

“I’m sure you won’t mind touching your hat when they make their little curtsies, or when a villager touches his forehead,” she said.

“Good Lord! no,” he said, starting. “Ought I? I didn’t know they were doing it at me.” And he turned round and made a handsome bow and grinned almost affectionately at the small, amazed party, first puzzling, and then delighting, them, because he looked so extraordinarily friendly. A gentleman who laughed at you like that ought to be equal to a miscellaneous distribution of pennies in the future, if not on the spot. They themselves grinned and chuckled and nudged one another, with stares and giggles.

“I am sorry to say that in a great many places the villagers are not nearly so respectful as they used to be,” Miss Alicia explained. “In Rowcroft the children were very remiss about curtseying. It’s quite sad. But Mr. Temple Barholm was very strict indeed in the matter of demanding proper respectfulness. He has turned men off their farms for incivility. The villagers of Temple Barholm have much better manners than some even a few miles away.”

“Must I tip my hat to all of them?” he asked.

“If you please. It really seems kinder. You--you needn’t quite lift it, as you did to the children just now. If you just touch the brim lightly with your hand in a sort of military salute--that is what they are accustomed to.”

After they had passed through the village street she paused at the end of a short lane and looked up at him doubtfully.

“Would you--I wonder if you would like to go into a cottage,” she said.

“Go into a cottage?” he asked. “What cottage? What for?”

He had not the remotest idea of any reason why he should go into a cottage inhabited by people who were entire strangers to him, and Miss Alicia felt a trifle awkward at having to explain anything so wholly natural.

“You see, they are your cottages, and the people are your tenants, and--”

“But perhaps they mightn’t like it. It might make ’em mad,” he argued. “If their water-pipes had busted, and they’d asked me to come and look at them or anything; but they don’t know me yet. They might think I was Mr. Buttinski.”

“I don’t quite--” she began. “Buttinski is a foreign name; it sounds Russian or Polish. I’m afraid I don’t quite understand why they should mistake you for him.”

Then he laughed--a boyish shout of laughter which brought a cottager to the nearest window to peep over the pots of fuchsias and geraniums blooming profusely against the diamond panes.

“Say,” he apologized, “don’t be mad because I laughed. I’m laughing at myself as much as at anything. It’s a way of saying that they might think I was ‘butting in’ too much--pushing in where I wasn’t asked. See? I said they might think I was Mr. Butt-in-ski! It’s just a bit of fool slang. You’re not mad, are you?”

“Oh, no!” she said. “Dear me! no. It is very funny, of course. I’m afraid I’m extremely ignorant about--about foreign humor.” It seemed more delicate to say “foreign” than merely “American.” But her gentle little countenance for a few seconds wore a baffled expression, and she said softly to herself, “Mr. Buttinski, Butt-in--to intrude. It sounds quite Polish; I think even more Polish than Russian.”

He was afraid he would yell with glee, but he did not. Herculean effort enabled him to restrain his feelings, and present to her only an ordinary-sized smile.

“I shouldn’t know one from the other,” he said; “but if you say it sounds more Polish, I bet it does.”

“Would you like to go into a cottage?” she inquired. “I think it might be as well. They will like the attention.”

“Will they? Of course I’ll go if you think that. What shall I say?” he asked somewhat anxiously.

“If you think the cottage looks clean, you might tell them so, and ask a few questions about things. And you must be sure to inquire about Susan Hibblethwaite’s legs.”

“What?” ejaculated Tembarom.

“Susan Hibblethwaite’s legs,” she replied in mild explanation. “Susan is Mrs. Hibblethwaite’s unmarried sister, and she has very bad legs. It is a thing one notices continually among village people, more especially the women, that they complain of what they call ‘bad legs.’ I never quite know what they mean, whether it is rheumatism or something different, but the trouble is always spoken of as ‘bad legs.’ And they like you to inquire about them, so that they can tell you their symptoms.”

“Why don’t they get them cured?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure. They take a good deal of medicine when they can afford it. I think they like to take it. They’re very pleased when the doctor gives them ‘a bottle o’ summat,’ as they call it. Oh, I mustn’t forget to tell you that most of them speak rather broad Lancashire.”

“Shall I understand them?” Tembarom asked, anxious again. “Is it a sort of Dago talk?”

“It is the English the working-classes speak in Lancashire. ‘Summat’ means ‘something.’ ‘Whoam’ means ‘home.’ But I should think you would be very clever at understanding things.”

“I’m scared stiff,” said Tembarom, not in the least uncourageously; “but I want to go into a cottage and hear some of it. Which one shall we go into?”

There were several whitewashed cottages in the lane, each in its own bit of garden and behind its own hawthorn hedge, now bare and wholly unsuggestive of white blossoms and almond scent to the uninitiated. Miss Alicia hesitated a moment.

“We will go into this one, where the Hibblethwaites live,” she decided. “They are quite clean, civil people. They have a naughty, queer, little crippled boy, but I suppose they can’t keep him in order because he is an invalid. He’s rather rude, I’m sorry to say, but he’s rather sharp and clever, too. He seems to lie on his sofa and collect all the gossip of the village.”

They went together up the bricked path, and Miss Alicia knocked at the low door with her knuckles. A stout, apple-faced woman opened it, looking a shade nervous.

“Good morning, Mrs. Hibblethwaite,” said Miss Alicia in a kind but remote manner. “The new Mr. Temple Barholm has been kind enough to come to see you. It’s very good of him to come so soon, isn’t it?”

“It is that,” Mrs. Hibblethwaite answered rapidly, looking him over. “Wilt tha coom in, sir?”

Tembarom accepted the invitation, feeling extremely awkward because Miss Alicia’s initiatory comment upon his goodness in showing himself had “rattled” him. It had made him feel that he must appear condescending, and he had never condescended to any one in the whole course of his existence. He had, indeed, not even been condescended to. He had met with slanging and bullying, indifference and brutality of manner, but he had not met with condescension.

“I hope you’re well, Mrs. Hibblethwaite,” he answered. “You look it.”

“I deceive ma looks a good bit, sir,” she answered. “Mony a day ma legs is nigh as bad as Susan’s.”

“Tha ’rt jealous o’ Susan’s legs,” barked out a sharp voice from a corner by the fire.

The room had a flagged floor, clean with recent scrubbing with sandstone; the whitewashed walls were decorated with pictures cut from illustrated papers; there was a big fireplace, and by it was a hard-looking sofa covered with blue-and-white checked cotton stuff. A boy of about ten was lying on it, propped up with a pillow. He had a big head and a keen, ferret-eyed face, and just now was looking round the end of his sofa at the visitors.

“Howd tha tongue, Tummas!” said his mother.

“I wun not howd it,” Tummas answered. “Ma tongue’s the on’y thing about me as works right, an’ I’m noan goin’ to stop it.”

“He’s a young nowt,” his mother explained; “but he’s a cripple, an’ we conna do owt wi’ him.”

“Do not be rude, Thomas,” said Miss Alicia, with dignity.

“Dun not be rude thysen,” replied Tummas. “I’m noan o’ thy lad.”

Tembarom walked over to the sofa.

“Say,” he began with jocular intent, “you’ve got a grouch on, ain’t you?”

Tummas turned on him eyes which bored. An analytical observer or a painter might have seen that he had a burning curiousness of look, a sort of investigatory fever of expression.

“I dun not know what tha means,” he said. “Happen tha ’rt talkin’ ’Merican?”

“That’s just what it is,” admitted Tembarom. “What are you talking?”

“Lancashire,” said Tummas. “Theer’s some sense i’ that.”

Tembarom sat down near him. The boy turned over against his pillow and put his chin in the hollow of his palm and stared.

“I’ve wanted to see thee,” he remarked. “I’ve made mother an’ Aunt Susan an’ feyther tell me every bit they’ve heared about thee in the village. Theer was a lot of it. Tha coom fro’ ’Meriker?”

“Yes.” Tembarom began vaguely to feel the demand in the burning curiosity.

“Gi’ me that theer book,” the boy said, pointing to a small table heaped with a miscellaneous jumble of things and standing not far from him. “It’s a’ atlas,” he added as Tembarom gave it to him. “Yo’ con find places in it.” He turned the leaves until he found a map of the world. “Theer’s ’Meriker,” he said, pointing to the United States. “That theer’s north and that theer’s south. All the real ’Merikens comes from the North, wheer New York is.”

“I come from New York,” said Tembarom.

“Tha wert born i’ the workhouse, tha run about the streets i’ rags, tha pretty nigh clemmed to death, tha blacked boots, tha sold newspapers, tha feyther was a common workin’-mon--and now tha’s coom into Temple Barholm an’ sixty thousand a year.”

“The last part’s true all right,” Tembarom owned, “but there’s some mistakes in the first part. I wasn’t born in the workhouse, and though I’ve been hungry enough, I never starved to death--if that’s what ‘clemmed’ means.”

Tummas looked at once disappointed and somewhat incredulous.

“That’s the road they tell it i’ the village,” he argued.

“Well, let them tell it that way if they like it best. That’s not going to worry me,” Tembarom replied uncombatively. Tummas’s eyes bored deeper into him.

“Does na tha care?” he demanded.

“What should I care for? Let every fellow enjoy himself his own way.”

“Tha ’rt not a bit like one o’ the gentry,” said Tummas. “Tha ’rt quite a common chap. Tha ’rt as common as me, for aw tha foine clothes.”

“People are common enough, anyhow,” said Tembarom. “There’s nothing much commoner, is there? There’s millions of ’em everywhere--billions of ’em. None of us need put on airs.”

“Tha ’rt as common as me,” said Tummas, reflectively. “An’ yet tha owns Temple Barholm an’ aw that brass. I conna mak’ out how the loike happens.”

“Neither can I; but it does all samee.”

“It does na happen i’ ’Meriker,” exulted Tummas. “Everybody’s equal theer.”

“Rats!” ejaculated Tembarom. “What about multimillionaires?”

He forgot that the age of Tummas was ten. It was impossible not to forget it. He was, in fact, ten hundred, if those of his generation had been aware of the truth. But there he sat, having spent only a decade of his most recent incarnation in a whitewashed cottage, deprived of the use of his legs.

Miss Alicia, seeing that Tembarom was interested in the boy, entered into domestic conversation with Mrs. Hibblethwaite at the other side of the room. Mrs. Hibblethwaite was soon explaining the uncertainty of Susan’s temper on wash-days, when it was necessary to depend on her legs.

“Can’t you walk at all?” Tembarom asked. Tummas shook his head. “How long have you been lame?”

“Ever since I weer born. It’s summat like rickets. I’ve been lyin’ here aw my days. I look on at foak an’ think ’em over. I’ve got to do summat. That’s why I loike the atlas. Little Ann Hutchinson gave it to me onct when she come to see her grandmother.”

Tembarom sat upright.

“Do you know her?” he exclaimed.

“I know her best o’ onybody in the world. An I loike her best.”

“So do I,” rashly admitted Tembarom.

“Tha does?” Tummas asked suspiciously. “Does she loike thee?”

“She says she does.” He tried to say it with proper modesty.

“Well, if she says she does, she does. An’ if she does, then you an’ me’ll be friends.” He stopped a moment, and seemed to be taking Tembarom in with thoroughness. “I could get a lot out o’ thee,” he said after the inspection.

“A lot of what?” Tembarom felt as though he would really like to hear.

“A lot o’ things I want to know about. I wish I’d lived the life tha’s lived, clemmin’ or no clemmin’. Tha’s seen things goin’ on every day o’ thy loife.”

“Well, there’s been plenty going on,” Tembarom admitted.

“I’ve been lying here for ten year’,” said Tummas, savagely. “An’ I’ve had nowt i’ the world to do an’ nowt to think on but what I could mak’ foak tell me about the village. But nowt happens but this chap gettin’ drunk an’ that chap deein’ or losin’ his place, or wenches gettin’ married or havin’ childer. I know everything that happens, but it’s nowt but a lot o’ women clackin’. If I’d not been a cripple, I’d ha’ been at work for mony a year by now, ’arnin’ money to save by an’ go to ’Meriker.”

“You seem to be sort of stuck on America. How’s that?”

“What dost mean?”

“I mean you seem to like it.”

“I dun not loike it nor yet not loike it, but I’ve heard a bit more about it than I have about the other places on the map. Foak goes there to seek their fortune, an’ it seems loike there’s a good bit doin’.”

“Do you like to read newspapers?” said Tembarom, inspired to his query by a recollection of the vision of things “doin’” in the Sunday “Earth.”

“Wheer’d I get papers from?” the boy asked testily. “Foak like us hasn’t got the brass for ’em.”

“I’ll bring you some New York papers,” promised Tembarom, grinning a little in anticipation. “And we’ll talk about the news that’s in them. The Sunday ‘Earth’ is full of pictures. I used to work on that paper myself.”

“Tha did?” he cried excitedly. “Did tha help to print it, or was it the one tha sold i’ the streets?”

“I wrote some of the stuff in it.”

“Wrote some of the stuff in it? Wrote it thaself? How could tha, a common chap like thee?” he asked, more excited still, his ferret eyes snapping.

“I don’t know how I did it,” Tembarom answered, with increased cheer and interest in the situation. “It wasn’t high-brow sort of work.”

Tummas leaned forward in his incredulous eagerness.

“Does tha mean that they paid thee for writin’ it--paid thee?”

“I guess they wouldn’t have done it if they’d been Lancashire,” Tembarom answered. “But they hadn’t much more sense than I had. They paid me twenty-five dollars a week--that’s five pounds.”

“I dun not believe thee,” said Tummas, and leaned back on his pillow short of breath.

“I didn’t believe it myself till I’d paid my board two weeks and bought a suit of clothes with it,” was Tembarom’s answer, and he chuckled as he made it.

But Tummas did believe it. This, after he had recovered from the shock, became evident. The curiosity in his face intensified itself; his eagerness was even vaguely tinged with something remotely resembling respect. It was not, however, respect for the money which had been earned, but for the store of things “doin’” which must have been acquired. It was impossible that this chap knew things undreamed of.

“Has tha ever been to the Klondike?” he asked after a long pause.

“No. I’ve never been out of New York.”

Tummas seemed fretted and depressed.

“Eh, I’m sorry for that. I wished tha’d been to the Klondike. I want to be towd about it,” he sighed. He pulled the atlas toward him and found a place in it.

“That theer’s Dawson,” he announced. Tembarom saw that the region of the Klondike had been much studied. It was even rather faded with the frequent passage of searching fingers, as though it had been pored over with special curiosity.

“There’s gowd-moines theer,” revealed Tummas. “An’ theer’s welly nowt else but snow an’ ice. A young chap as set out fro’ here to get theer froze to death on the way.”

“How did you get to hear about it?”

“Ann she browt me a paper onct.” He dug under his pillow, and brought out a piece of newspaper, worn and frayed and cut with age and usage. “This heer’s what’s left of it.” Tembarom saw that it was a fragment from an old American sheet and that a column was headed “The Rush for the Klondike.”

“Why didn’t tha go theer?” demanded Tummas. He looked up from his fragment and asked his question with a sudden reflectiveness, as though a new and interesting aspect of things had presented itself to him.

“I had too much to do in New York,” said Tembarom.

Tummas silently regarded him a moment or so.

“It’s a pity tha didn’t,” he said. “Happen tha’d never ha’ coom back.”

Tembarom laughed the outright laugh.

“Thank you,” he answered.

Tummas was still thinking the matter over and was not disturbed.

“I was na thinkin’ o’ thee,” he said in an impersonal tone. “I was thinkin’ o’ t’other chap. If tha’d gone i’stead o’ him, he’d ha’ been here i’stead o’ thee. Eh, but it’s funny.” And he drew a deep breath like a sigh having its birth in profundity of baffled thought.

Both he and his evident point of view were “funny” in the Lancashire sense, which does not imply humor, but strangeness and the unexplainable. Singular as the phrasing was, Tembarom knew what he meant, and that he was thinking of the oddity of chance. Tummas had obviously heard of “poor Jem” and had felt an interest in him.

“You’re talking about Jem Temple Barholm I guess,” he said. Perhaps the interest he himself had felt in the tragic story gave his voice a tone somewhat responsive to Tummas’s own mood, for Tummas, after one more boring glance, let himself go. His interest in this special subject was, it revealed itself, a sort of obsession. The history of Jem Temple Barholm had been the one drama of his short life.

“Aye, I was thinkin’ o’ him,” he said. “I should na ha’ cared for the Klondike so much but for him.”

“But he went away from England when you were a baby.”

“The last toime he coom to Temple Barholm wur when I wur just born. Foak said he coom to ax owd Temple Barholm if he’d help him to pay his debts, an’ the owd chap awmost kicked him out o’ doors. Mother had just had me, an’ she was weak an’ poorly an’ sittin’ at the door wi’ me in her arms, an’ he passed by an’ saw her. He stopped an’ axed her how she was doin’. An when he was goin’ away, he gave her a gold sovereign, an’ he says, ‘Put it in the savin’s-bank for him, an’ keep it theer till he’s a big lad an’ wants it.’ It’s been in the savin’s-bank ever sin’. I’ve got a whole pound o’ ma own out at interest. There’s not many lads ha’ got that.”

“He must have been a good-natured fellow,” commented Tembarom. “It was darned bad luck him going to the Klondike.”

“It was good luck for thee,” said Tummas, with resentment.

“Was it?” was Tembarom’s unbiased reply. “Well, I guess it was, one way or the other. I’m not kicking, anyhow.”

Tummas naturally did not know half he meant. He went on talking about Jem Temple Barholm, and as he talked his cheeks flushed and his eyes lighted.

“I would na spend that sovereign if I was starvin’. I’m going to leave it to Ann Hutchinson in ma will when I dee. I’ve axed questions about him reet and left ever sin’ I can remember, but theer’s nobody knows much. Mother says he was fine an’ handsome, an’ gentry through an’ through. If he’d coom into the property, he’d ha’ coom to see me again. I’ll lay a shillin’, because I’m a cripple an’ I cannot spend his sovereign. If he’d coom back from the Klondike, happen he’d ha’ towd me about it.” He pulled the atlas toward him, and laid his thin finger on the rubbed spot. “He mun ha’ been killed somewheer about here,” he sighed. “Somewheer here. Eh, it’s funny.”

Tembarom watched him. There was something that rather gave you the “Willies” in the way this little cripple seemed to have taken to the dead man and worried along all these years thinking him over and asking questions and studying up the Klondike because he was killed there. It was because he’d made a kind of story of it. He’d enjoyed it in the way people enjoy stories in a newspaper. You always had to give ’em a kind of story; you had to make a story even if you were telling about a milk-wagon running away. In newspaper offices you heard that was the secret of making good with what you wrote. Dish it up as if it was a sort of story.

He not infrequently arrived at astute enough conclusions concerning things. He had arrived at one now. Shut out even from the tame drama of village life, Tummas, born with an abnormal desire for action and a feverish curiosity, had hungered and thirsted for the story in any form whatsoever. He caught at fragments of happenings, and colored and dissected them for the satisfying of unfed cravings. The vanished man had been the one touch of pictorial form and color in his ten years of existence. Young and handsome and of the gentry, unfavored by the owner of the wealth which some day would be his own possession, stopping “gentry-way” at a cottage door to speak good-naturedly to a pale young mother, handing over the magnificence of a whole sovereign to be saved for a new-born child, going away to vaguely understood disgrace, leaving his own country to hide himself in distant lands, meeting death amid snow and ice and surrounded by gold-mines, leaving his empty place to be filled by a boot-black newsboy--true there was enough to lie and think over and to try to follow with the help of maps and excited questions.

“I wish I could ha’ seen him,” said Tummas. “I’d awmost gi’ my sovereign to get a look at that picture in the gallery at Temple Barholm.”

“What picture?” Tembarom asked. “Is there a picture of him there?”

“There is na one o’ him, but there’s one o’ a lad as deed two hundred year’ ago as they say wur the spit an’ image on him when he wur a lad hissen. One o’ the owd servants towel mother it wur theer.”

This was a natural stimulus to interest and curiosity.

“Which one is it? Jinks! I’d like to see it myself. Do you know which one it is? There’s hundreds of them.”

“No, I dun not know,” was Tummas’s dispirited answer, “an’ neither does mother. The woman as knew left when owd Temple Barholm deed.”

“Tummas,” broke in Mrs. Hibblethwaite from the other end of the room, to which she had returned after taking Miss Alicia out to complain about the copper in the “wash-’us’--” “Tummas, tha ’st been talkin’ like a magpie. Tha ’rt a lot too bold an’ ready wi’ tha tongue. The gentry’s noan comin’ to see thee if tha clacks the heads off theer showthers.”

“I’m afraid he always does talk more than is good for him,” said Miss Alicia. “He looks quite feverish.”

“He has been talking to me about Jem Temple Barholm,” explained Tembarom. “We’ve had a regular chin together. He thinks a heap of poor Jem.”

Miss Alicia looked startled, and Mrs. Hibblethwaite was plainly flustered tremendously. She quite lost her temper.

“Eh,” she exclaimed, “tha wants tha young yed knocked off, Tummas Hibblethwaite. He’s fair daft about the young gentleman as--as was killed. He axes questions mony a day till I’d give him the stick if he was na a cripple. He moithers me to death.”

“I’ll bring you some of those New York papers to look at,” Tembarom said to the boy as he went away.

He walked back through the village to Temple Barholm, holding Miss Alicia’s elbow in light, affectionate guidance and support, a little to her embarrassment and also a little to her delight. Until he had taken her into the dining-room the night before she had never seen such a thing done. There was no over-familiarity in the action. It merely seemed somehow to suggest liking and a wish to take care of her.

“That little fellow in the village,” he said after a silence in which it occurred to her that he seemed thoughtful, “what a little freak he is! He’s got an idea that there’s a picture in the gallery that’s said to look like Jem Temple Barholm when he was a boy. Have you ever heard anything about it? He says a servant told his mother it was there.”

“Yes, there is one,” Miss Alicia answered. “I sometimes go and look at it. But it makes me feel very sad. It is the handsome boy who was a page in the court of Charles II. He died in his teens. His name was Miles Hugo Charles James. Jem could see the likeness himself. Sometimes for a little joke I used to call him Miles Hugo.”

“I believe I remember him,” said Tembarom. “I believe I asked Palford his name. I must go and have a look at him again. He hadn’t much better luck than the fellow that looked like him, dying as young as that.”

(To be continued)

WAR AGAINST WAR

TACTICS THAT THE FRIENDS OF PEACE MAY LEARN FROM THE MILITARISTS

Through Matthew Arnold we have been made familiar with one of the figures clearly limned by Clarendon. It is that of Falkland, whose humane spirit and love of peace made the casting of his lot in the time of the civil war in England seem peculiarly tragic. Often in the course of that bitter and bloody conflict he was heard to “ingeminate” the word “peace.”

A similar feeling of grief and frustration in the presence of war is one of the distinguishing marks of our own day. The best and wisest in the world hold peace congresses and conferences on arbitration (as they are to do soon in St. Louis), and seem to gain painful inches only to have all their efforts made apparently vain by some inrush of the war spirit. The Hague Tribunal is founded and The Hague agreement solemnly entered into, but that does not prevent one of the covenanting nations from seizing another’s land by the sword. Projects for universal arbitration are mooted, amid the applause of Christendom, and plans for the judicial settlement of international disputes are ripening, at the very time when tens of thousands of men are about to be killed in battle.

So it is that peace seems to be to the civilized world only an unattainable longing. We think of war to-day, in the Scripture phrase, with groanings that cannot be uttered. Never so hated, it sometimes appears as if it were never so fated.

It is well for peace-lovers now and then to put the case thus strongly, in order that they may face the difficulty at its darkest. The fact that the evil they struggle against is persistent is but one argument more for their own persistence. Pacifists must be as ready and resourceful as the militarists. If ever it is right to learn from an enemy, it surely is in this instance. Something has been gained in this way. The late William James, for example, contended that we must admit that there are some good, human weapons in the hands of the war party, and that the peace men must study, not only how to appreciate them, but how to use them. Professor James would have sought in peaceful pursuits the equivalents of the appeal which war makes to certain manly qualities. Heroism in private life, in scientific pursuits, in exploration, in reform--this is what he urged. The patriotic impulse transmuted into great engineering works, vast plans for sanitation, campaigns against disease and misery--that is what peace can offer to ardent youth. All this is sound, and good as far as it goes; but the question arises to-day whether there is not need of something more positive and aggressive, whether the spirit of militarism cannot be turned against itself; whether, in a word, there should not be war against war.

The conduct of a military campaign calls for an enormous amount of preparation and organization. Let the advocates of peace take this to heart. They cannot win simply by wishing to win. It is for them, too, to be far-sighted, to lay careful plans, to enlist every modern method of working in unison to a definite end. War mobilizes men. Peace must muster ideas, sentiments, influences. In the _Kriegspiel_ the strategist seeks to mass his troops upon the enemy’s weakest point. The tactics of peace should be similar. Argument and persuasion and appeal should be made to converge upon the exposed flank of the militarists. This may be found, at one moment, in the pressure of taxation, which needlessly swollen armaments would make unbearable. At another time, it may appear that the thing to hammer upon is the pressing need of social reforms, even attention to which will be endangered if all the available money and time are squandered upon preparing for a war that may never come. Let peace, too, acquire a General Staff, whose duty it shall be to survey the whole field, to work out fruitful campaigns, to tell us where to strike and how, to lay down the principles of the grand strategy to be followed.

Nor need individual effort be ruled out. Despite the large and coördinated movements of soldiers in a modern battle, there yet remains room for personal initiative and daring. The shining moment comes when some one in the ranks or in command is called upon to risk all with the possibility of gaining all. And there are still “forlorn hopes” to be led. Why should not these methods and appeals of war be imitated by those who are fighting for peace? They can point to many services calling for volunteers. There is ridicule to be faced, unpopular opinion to be stood up for calmly in the teeth of opposition and even scorn, testimony to be borne, questions to be asked, protests to be made. There is, in short, every opportunity to import from war the heroic element and give it scope and effect in the propaganda of peace. The very wrath of man can be made to praise the growth of civilization.

War against war can be made very concrete and practical. Committees can be formed to watch the military authorities and Congress, and to elicit an expression of opinion when it will be most useful. It is a matter of frequent lamenting on the part of peace men in the House of Representatives that their hands are so feebly held up by the opponents of war. The other side is alert and active. When big-navy or big-army bills are pending, the mail of congressmen is loaded with requests--usually, of course, interested requests--to vote for them. The lovers of peace, on the other hand, appear to be smitten with writer’s cramp. They act as if they were indifferent. This state of things should not be permitted to go on. There should be minute-men of the cause all over the land ready to spring into action. That a sound opinion of the country exists, only needing concerted effort to call it forth, has been shown again and again. It was proved at the time when President Taft’s treaties of universal arbitration were pending in the Senate. In those days the desire of the best people of the United States came to Washington like the sound of the voice of many waters. Schools and colleges, chambers of commerce and churches, sent in petition piled on petition, and remonstrance heaped on protest. One of the senators who opposed ratification admitted to the President that he had never had so formidable a pressure from his own State as on this question.

That lesson should not be lost. By organization, by watchfulness, by determination, the peace spirit of the land can be given much more effective expression than it has yet had. The situation is not at all one that justifies discouragement; it simply calls for fresh and more intelligent action, with heightened resolution. If only the genius of a Von Moltke could be devoted to organizing and directing the forces that make against war, we might reasonably hope for a realization of the poet’s vision of peace lying like level shafts of light across the land.

THE GREAT FLOODS IN THE MIDDLE WEST

WITH THE RENEWED SUGGESTION OF A WIDE-REACHING PROJECT OF FLOOD-MITIGATION

One cannot read of the recent disastrous overflow of the rivers of the Ohio Valley watershed without a sinking of the heart, to think how near is happiness to grief. That thousands, apparently through no fault of their own, should be overwhelmed by the relentless powers of nature, takes us back to a pagan conception of the universe, until we begin to sum up the unpagan-like solidarity in the sympathy of mankind, the touch of human nature that makes the whole world kin. Senator Root recently said that “the progress of civilization is marked by the destruction of isolation,” meaning, of course, by the drawing together of men through common ideas, interests, and even sorrows. It is no perfunctory thought that out of such calamities come many of the heroisms, the sacrifices, the lightning-like-flashes of spiritual revelation that ennoble humanity.

With becoming awe at what seems to have been unpreventable, it is sadly appropriate to inquire what might have been done in past years to lessen the recurrent tragedy of the western floods. To be sure, one cannot by a gesture bid the tempest stand, but nothing is more demonstrable than that the greed and neglect of man have greatly contributed to the destructiveness of floods. The devastation of the ax leads direct to the devastation of the waters. The excessive deforesting of Ohio and Indiana for a hundred years is no illusory or negligible factor in the crisis of death and desolation that has fallen upon those States.

In this magazine for August, 1912, in an article entitled “A Duty of the South to Itself,” written apropos of the Mississippi floods of last year, we renewed a suggestion which we first made in 1904 and have since several times repeated, looking toward the mitigation of the annual peril to the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. It presented the urgent necessity of setting on foot a policy of coöperation among the Eastern States to save from destruction the flood-restraining upper reaches of the entire Appalachian range. As a matter of public interest, this article was sent to all senators and members of Congress, to the Southern and other newspapers, and to the governors and Chambers of Commerce in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Although the suggestion was in the plainest conformity with scientific opinion, it apparently fell upon deaf ears. The imagination of no governor or legislator has been roused to the point of action. After we have reckoned up the cost of the recent floods in lives and money, shall we lie down again to pleasant dreams, oblivious of the fact that to sow neglect is to reap calamity?

COMMON SENSE IN THE WHITE HOUSE

NON-PARTIZAN QUESTIONS ON WHICH PRESIDENT WILSON BEGINS WELL

He is a poor patriot who can wish a new administration anything but success--at least in policies unrelated to party differences--and it is creditable to the American people that the new President enters upon his difficult task amid general good-will. His lack of previous acquaintance with “the way the thing is done” in Washington, though it excited the apprehension of some of his warmest friends, proves to be a positive advantage. If precedents are broken they are not his, and sometimes the breaking is done with a naïveté just this side of innocence, as in the discountenancing of the time-honored but expensive and meaningless inaugural ball. The President evidently realizes his responsibilities and the conventional obstacles that must be cleared out of his path if he is to accomplish much for the good of the country. The idealism of his inaugural address, with its appeal for the coöperation of “honest, patriotic, and forward-looking men,” is already being supplemented by practical action so fraught with “saving common sense” as to seem revolutionary.

Seen in the retrospect, what could be done more wise or simple than the shunting of the office-seekers to the heads of departments? What more useful or self-respecting than the announced policy of disapproval of legislation carrying “riders”--of which, by the way, a flagrant example is found in the Panama tolls exemption, to which both the President and the Vice-President have announced their opposition? What more direct or reassuring than the kindly words of warning to Central American revolutionists? What more prompt than the announcement through the Secretary of State that the United States cannot ignore its responsibilities toward Cuba? or, again, through the Postmaster-General, that there is to be no wholesale looting of the offices, with the object-lesson of the retention or promotion of several public servants of marked efficiency? or, still again, the immediate action through the Secretary of War and the Attorney-General toward the safeguarding of the public interests in Niagara Falls? What more prudent than the disentanglement of our relations in the Far East from financial loans to China? These events, occurring in the first fortnight of the administration, display a point of view of government as an instrument of public service which, though it may do violence to traditions, makes thoughtful citizens exclaim, “Why not?”

It is not to be expected that we are to have another Era of Good Feeling, or that, when questions of party policy arise, Mr. Wilson’s opponents will yield their convictions. He cannot fail to meet with many a storm, within and without party lines; but he will do much to advance his ideas if he shall preserve the poise of direct and unsophisticated common sense which he has shown at the beginning.

LAWLESSNESS IN ART

THE EXPLOITATION OF WHIMSICALITY AS A PRINCIPLE

The recent admirably arranged exhibition in New York made by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, and including a full representation of the work of the Cubists and the Post-Impressionists, has proved in one respect a veritable success, namely, in point of attendance. If not, as one critic puts it, a _succès de scandale_, it has been a _succès de curiosité_. It contained pieces of historic work of great beauty by eminent painters of France and America--Ingres, Daumier, Puvis de Chavannes, Childe Hassam, Alden Weir, and others, but no great point was made of their inclusion and they were not the attraction for the crowds. What drew the curious were certain widely talked-of eccentricities, whimsicalities, distortions, crudities, puerilities, and madnesses, by which, while a few were nonplussed, most of the spectators were vastly amused.

At the spring exhibition of the National Academy of Design, which followed, one unaccustomed visitor was heard to say to another, “Oh, come on, Bill, there’s nothing to laugh at here.” It will be impossible to repeat the Parisian sensation another season; and, happily, the eccentricities have served to awaken a new interest in genuine types of art, both in and out of their own exhibition, and have furnished that element of contrast which is useful if not essential in the formation of a robust taste.

Meanwhile, for the benefit of the young and unthinking, it is well to keep on inculcating the fact that while art is not a formula, nor even a school, it is subject, whether in painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture, or music, to certain general principles tending to harmony, clarity, beauty, and the stimulus of the imagination. A fundamental error is that its laws are hampering, the fact being that it is only as one learns them that he can acquire the freedom of individual expression. The exploitation of a theory of discords, puzzles, uglinesses, and clinical details, is to art what anarchy is to society, and the practitioners need not so much a critic as an alienist. It is said that a well-known Russian musician has begun a new composition with (so to speak) a keynote of discord involving the entire musical scale, as a child might lay his hand sidewise upon all the notes of the piano it can cover. A counterpart of this could have been found in more than one ward of the recent exhibition. One can fancy the laughter over the absinthe in many a Latin Quarter café of those who are not mentally awry, but are merely imitators, poseurs, or charlatans, at learning that their monstrosities, which have exhausted the interest of Paris, have been seriously considered by some American observers. They have only been trying to see how far they could go in fooling the public. But he laughs best who laughs last, and we believe that Americans have too much sense of humor not to see the point of this colossal joke of eccentricity, or to endure its repetition.

NIAGARA AGAIN IN DANGER

THE COMMERCIALIZING OF GREAT SCENERY

One need not be afraid of exaggerating the peril to the beauty of Niagara in allowing its waters to be used for commercial purposes when a man of such moderation and public esteem as Senator Burton of Ohio says, as he did in the Senate on the fourth of March:

I want to say, Mr. President, that in all my experience in either
house of Congress I have never known such an aggregation of persons
to come here seeking to rob and to despoil as those who have come
here after this power. If there is any one who wishes them to
succeed he must answer to the country for it. They not only desired
the water above the Falls, but they now desire to withdraw the
waters below in the rapids, which are second in beauty only to the
Falls themselves. Persons have come here under the guise of public
spirit, or even of philanthropy, when it was but a thin veil to
conceal a scheme to get possession of the waters of the Niagara
River. We ask that for a year this law be continued to stay the
hand of the despoiler.

The law referred to was the Burton Act under which for three years the assaults of the commercial interests have been stayed. Even with a concession to the companies of 250,000 horse-power instead of 160,000, Mr. Burton, owing to a filibuster by Senator O’Gorman, was not able to secure the desired extension, and the Falls seem to be at the mercy of those who are interested in turning great scenery into dividends. We are much mistaken if the new administration does not find some way of thwarting this form of vandalism. Meanwhile it is well that public opinion should be directed upon senators and representatives.

Of the damage that has already been done Senator Burton says: “... The ruthless hand of the promoter has been laid upon this river; and thus the cataract has been diminished in size and the scenic effect has been impaired not only by diminishing the flow and the quantity of the water, but by structures on the banks.” A question of jurisdiction has been raised as between the State of New York and the National Government, though the river as a boundary line has long been the subject of an international treaty. The fact that the taking of water for commercial purposes whether on the Canadian or the American side has virtually the same effect on the river makes joint action of the two countries imperative.

The willingness to destroy or impair great scenery by commercializing it, whether at Niagara or in the Yosemite National Park, makes it necessary that the fight for our natural treasures should be kept up with vigilance. Happily, the good judgment of the late Secretary of the Interior, Warren L. Fisher, has blocked the attempt of the city of San Francisco to destroy the wonderful Hetch Hetchy valley by converting it into a reservoir of water for drinking and power purposes,--which confessedly can be had elsewhere in the Sierra “by paying for it,”--the Secretary wisely holding that such a diversion of the valley from the original purpose of its reservation is too important a matter to be determined by any power but Congress. Three Secretaries of the Interior--Hitchcock, Ballinger, and Fisher--are thus on record against the ruthless project of the city authorities, and we believe it will not be more successful with Secretary Lane. Should its advocates go to Congress, it must be remembered that the same principle underlies the defense of Niagara and of Hetch Hetchy--the conservation of great scenery for the ultimate benefit of mankind.

ON THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTERNATIONAL CLUB

_My dear MacWhittlesey_:

No, I have not become a pessimist. If I ever was an optimist, I am certainly one still. But to my mind the only use of being an optimist about the universe is that one can the more boldly be a pessimist about the world. That you may see I can discern the good signals as well as the bad, I will tell you three recent things with which I am thoroughly delighted. With brazen audacity, I will even put first the one topic you know all about and I know nothing about. I am thoroughly delighted with the election of the American President, with the election of the French President, and with the victory in the Balkans. You may think these three things have nothing to do with one another. Wait till I have done explaining things; it will not last long or hurt much.

Don’t imagine I have any newspaper illusions about any of the three. I am a journalist and never believe the newspapers. I know there will be a lot of merely fashionable fuss about the American and the French presidents; I know we shall hear how fond Mr. Wilson is of canaries or how interested M. Poincaré is in yachting. It is truer still, of course, about the Balkan War. I have been anti-Turk through times when nearly every one else was pro-Turk. I may therefore be entitled to say that much of the turnover of sympathy is pure snobbery. Silly fashions always follow the track of any victory. After 1870 our regiments adopted Prussian spikes on their helmets, as though the Prussians had fought with their heads, like bisons. Doubtless there will be a crop of the same sort of follies after the Balkan War. We shall see the altering of inscriptions, titles, and advertisements. Turkish baths may be called Bulgarian baths. The sweetmeat called Turkish Delight may probably be called Servian Delight. A Turkey carpet, very much kicked about and discolored, may be sold again as a Montenegro carpet. These cheap changes may easily occur, and in the same way the international world (which consists of hotels instead of homes) may easily make the same mistake about the French and American presidents. Thousands of Englishmen will read the American affair as a mere question of Colonel Roosevelt. Thousands will read of the Poincaré affair as a mere echo of the Dreyfus case. Thousands have never thought of the near East except as the sultan and Constantinople. For such masses of men Roosevelt is the only American there ever was. For them the Dreyfus question was the only French question there ever was. They had never heard that the Servians had a country, let alone an army.

The fact in which the three events meet is this: they are all realities on the spot. Most Englishmen have never heard of Mr. Woodrow Wilson; so they know that Americans really trust him. Most Englishmen have never heard of M. Poincaré; so they know that Frenchmen know he is a Frenchman. Neither is a member of the International Club, the members of which advertise one another.

Do you know what I mean? Do you not know that International Club? Like many other secret societies, it is unaware of its own existence. But there is a sort of ring of celebrities known all over the world, and more important all over the world than any of them are at home. Even when they do not know one another, they talk about one another. Let me see if I can find a name that typifies them. Well, I have no thought of disrespect to the memory of a man I liked and admired personally, and who died with a tragic dignity fitted for one who had always longed to be a link between your country and mine; but I think the late W. T. Stead was the unconscious secretary of that unconscious International Club. The other members, roughly speaking, were Colonel Roosevelt, the German Emperor, Tolstoy, Cecil Rhodes, and somebody like Mr. Edison. In an interview with Roosevelt, Rhodes would be the most important man in England, the Kaiser (or Tolstoy) the most important man in Europe. In an interview with Rhodes, the Kaiser would be important, Mr. Edison more important, Mr. Stead rather important; Bulgaria and M. Poincaré not important at all. Interview the Kaiser, and you will probably find the only interviewer he remembers is Stead. Could Rhodes have been taken to Russia you would probably find the only Russian he had really heard of was Tolstoy. For the rest, the Nobel prize, the Harmsworth newspaper group, the Marconi inventions, the attempts at a universal language--all these strike the note. I forgot the British Empire, on which the sun never sets, a horribly unpoetical state of things. Think of having a native land without any sunsets!

This International Club is breaking up. Men are more and more trusting men they know to have been honest in a small way; men faithful in one city to rule over many cities. Imperialists like Roosevelt and Rhodes stood for unrealities. Please observe that I do not for one moment say insincerities. Tolstoy was splendidly sincere; but the cult of him was an unreality to this extent, that it left large masses in America and England with a general idea that he was the only Christian in the east of Europe. Since then we have seen Christianity on the march as it was in the Middle Ages, a thing of thousands, ready for pilgrimage and crusade. I don’t ask you to like it if you don’t like it. I only say it’s jolly different from Tolstoy, and equally sincere. It is a reality on the spot.

Well, just as Russia and the Slavs meant for us Tolstoy, so France and French literature meant for many of us Zola. Poincaré’s election represents a France that hates Zola more than the Balkans hate the Turk. The old definite, domestic, patriotic Frenchman has come to the top. I can’t help fancying that with you the old serious, self-governing, idealistic, and really republican American has come to the top, too. But there I speak of things I know not, and await your next letter with alarm.

Faithfully yours,
_G. K. Chesterton_.

ON HOW TO GET SOMETHING BY GIVING SOMETHING UP

_From a Victim of the Comparative-Statistics Habit_

_My dear Harold_:

Can a man go in for tobacco and do his duty by the United States Navy? Life seems to be getting more difficult every day. I can no longer enjoy my after-dinner cigar as I used to. The trouble is not physical. My nerves are in good condition. My heart behaves quite as it should, occasionally rising into my mouth with fear, sometimes sinking toward my diaphragm with anticipation, but for the most part going about its work without attracting notice. I sleep as soundly as I ever did. The quality of the tobacco they put into cigars nowadays may be deteriorating, but I am easy to please. No; the trouble is with my conscience. I simply find it impossible to smoke without feeling that I am recreant to my social obligations.

Don’t imagine I am referring to my family. It is old-fashioned practice to show how the money disbursed upon tobacco by the head of a household might buy a home in the suburbs and endowment insurance for the children. To-day the sociological implications of a box of cigars are much more serious. To-day no man of conscience can light his pipe without inflicting injury on the United States Navy. All the comfort goes out of a cigar when one reflects upon what one might be doing for the encouragement of education among the Southern mountaineers. Now and then I like the feel of a cigarette between my lips; but can a man go in for cigarettes as long as the country stands in such bitter need of a comprehensive system of internal waterways?

I imagine I am not making myself quite clear. What I mean is that there are so many good causes abroad nowadays, and the advocates of each and every cause have no trouble in showing how easily they might manage to attain the specific thing they are after if only you would consent to sacrifice something that your own heart is rather set upon. Just imagine if all the money that is burned up in tobacco were devoted to the expansion of the fleet! Can there be any doubt that within a year we should take first place among the naval powers? Provided, that is, the English and the Germans and the Japanese did not give up smoking at the same time that we did. It may seem far-fetched to argue any close connection between a ten-cent cigar and a ten-million-dollar dreadnought. That is what I have been trying to say to myself. But I cannot help feeling that if the day of Armageddon does arrive, and the Japanese fleet comes gliding out of Magdalena Bay, and the star of our national destiny goes down into defeat, I shall never be able to forgive myself for the cigar I insisted on lighting every night after the children had been put to bed. As it is, I suffer by anticipation. The Japanese fleet keeps popping out at me from my tobacco-jar.

You will say I am oversensitive to outside suggestion. Perhaps I am. The fact remains that the naval situation in the Pacific is what it is. And there are so many other national obligations. We do need a fifteen-foot channel from the lakes to the gulf. We do need free schools for the poor whites in the Tennessee mountains. We do need millions to rebuild our railroads. All these demands press upon me as I sit facing my wife across the table and timidly light my cigar. Yes, I smoke; but I look at my wife and wonder how she can live in unconscious proximity to such startling moral degradation.

Perhaps I am oversensitive, as you say, but these suggestions from the outside keep pouring in on one in an irresistible stream from many different directions. You simply cannot escape the logic of the comparative mathematicians. A naval officer of high rank shows that because of the wanton destruction of bird-life in the United States our farmers lose $800,000,000 a year from the ravages of insect pests; “so that good bird laws would enable us to sustain an enormous navy.” Not so big a navy as this distinguished officer imagines, of course, because the internal-waterways people will want a great deal of that bird money, and the Southern education people will ask for a handsome share. It does not matter that personally I have never slain birds either for their flesh or their plumage, but I share in the indirect responsibility. Instead of idling in my chair with a cigar, I ought to be writing to my congressman, demanding the enactment of adequate bird laws in the name of our naval supremacy in the Pacific and the defense of the Panama Canal.

Such is the established mode of procedure to-day. If one is planning the expenditure of a very large amount of public money, let him point out how easily the money may be saved or earned by somebody else. If I have seemed to harp too much on the man with the cigar, it is because he is the classic type of the victim in the case. Just consider what a trifling favor one is asked for--merely to give up a nasty, unsanitary habit, and not only be happier oneself, but bring happiness to the big-navy man, the internal-waterways man, the Association for the Encouragement of Grand Opera among the Masses, the Society for the Pensioning of Decayed Journalists, the Society for Damming the Arctic Current on the Banks of Newfoundland, the Society for the Construction of Municipal Airships. These enthusiastic gentry find no habit too hard for the other man to break, no economy too difficult for the other man to adopt, and no remedy too complicated for the other man to put into effect. Smith is amazed that any one could refuse him $200,000,000 for the navy.

“Why, look at your birds and your insect-ridden crops!”

“You grudge me the money for a hundred-foot automobile highway from New York to San Francisco?” says Jones. “Why, consider your wasteful steam-engines, with their ridiculous loss of ninety-seven per cent. of the latent coal energy!”

“Double the efficiency of your steam-engines, and you have enough for a dozen automobile highways.”

You see, that is all that stands in the way, Harold, a mere trifle like doubling the efficiency of the steam-engine.

“I want $5,000,000 to build a monument twelve hundred feet high to Captain John Smith and Pocahontas,” says Robinson. “You can’t spare the money? Sir, take the revolving storm-doors in New York City alone, which now represent so much wasted human energy, and harness these doors to a series of storage batteries, and you will have your $5,000,000 back in the course of a year.”

Will some one kindly run out and electrify all the revolving doors in New York City?

I have a confession to make. My heart goes out to the shiftless American farmer. He is responsible for almost as many good causes dying of lack of nutrition as is the habitual smoker.

If the American farmer would plow deep instead of merely scratching the soil, we could blow Japan out of the water. If he would study the chemistry of soils, we could give free railroad rides to every man and woman in the United States between the ages of thirty and forty-five. If we would build decent roads, we could pay off the national debt.

In other words, if the American farmer could be persuaded to make his land produce, say, only ten times its present yield, the millennium would be here in a jump.

I sometimes think that to the truly social-minded person the most immoral spectacle in life is an unscientific American farmer smoking a five-cent cigar in a buggy mired up to the axle on a country road.

Yours,
_Simeon Strunsky_.

OLD DADDY DO-FUNNY’S WISDOM JINGLES

BY RUTH MC ENERY STUART

THE MOSQUITO

Wid so much Christian blood in ’is veins,
You’d think Brer ’Skitty would take some pains
To love ’is neighbor an’ show good-will,
But he’s p’izenin’ an’ backbitin’ still.
An’ he ain’t by ’isself in dat, in dat--
No, he ain’t by ’isself in dat.

THE RAT

Brer Rat in de corn-bin overfed
An’ underworked, an’ now he’s dead;
He craved to live lak a bloated chief,
An’ now he ain’t nothin’ but a ol’ dead thief.
An’ he ain’t by ’isself in dat, in dat--
An’ he ain’t by ’isself in dat.

MAY, FROM MY WINDOW

BY FRANCES ROSE BENÉT

A sparkling morning after weeks of rain;
All fresh and fragrant glows my world, new-made.
Bluebirds sing ballads; sparrows chirp refrain;
Old Mother Spider, peering from the shade,
With gastronomic joy surveys a fly,
Her table-cloth hung on a bush to dry.

A little lizard creeps from out his crack
To bask in sunshine till he’s done quite brown;
A butterfly starts on her breathless track,
Her errand gay, to lure a lad from town;
Even the garden’s foe, the slimy snail,
Leaves on the walk an iridescent trail.

Fat Doctor Robin now comes hurrying by,
His neat attire touched up with claret vest.
“Important case!” I see it in his eye.
“No time to sing, with babies in that nest.”
Quick! little doctor! _Will_ he catch the train?
Sudden he stops; my heart jumps to my throat.
“Thunder and Mars!” I hear him say quite plain,
“I’ve left my wallet in my other coat!”

~Waiter~ (to single gentleman):--“Excuse me, sir, but that lady and gentleman wish me to recommend to you one of those new Maxim soup silencers!”]

LIFE’S ASPIRATION

(A more-than-symbolic sonnet for a picture of the same sort by George Wolfe Plank)

BY LOUIS UNTERMEYER

Urged by the peacocks of our vanity,
Up the frail tree of life we climb and grope;
About our heads the tragic branches slope,
Heavy with time and xanthic mystery.

Beyond, the brooding bird of fate we see
Viewing the world with eyes forever ope’,
And lured by all the phantom fruits of hope,
We cling in anguish to this fragile tree.

O lowering skies! O clouds, that point in scorn,
With the lean fingers of a wrinkled wrath!
O dedal moon, that rears its ghostly horn!

O hidden stars, that tread the cosmic path!
Shall we attain the glory of the morn,
Or sink into some awful aftermath!

THE NEW ART

(With apologies to Rossetti)

BY CORINNE ROCKWELL SWAIN

The cubist damosel leaned out
From a neurotic heaven;
Her face was stranger than the dreams
Of topers filled at even:
She had four facets to her nose,
And the eyes in her head were seven.

Her robe, concrete from clasp to hem,
Six angles did adorn,
With a white parallelogram
For trimming neatly worn:
Her hair rose up in pentagons,
Like yellow ears of corn.

It was a post-impression house
That she was standing on;
While maudlin quadrilateral clouds
O’er mystic gardens spun,
And three denatured greyhounds ran
Circlewise round the sun.

“I wish that they could draw,” she moaned,
“Nor throw such fits as this;
Souza-Cardosa, and the five
Who love weird symphonies:
Fiebig, Picabia, Picasso,
D’Erlanger, and Matisse.”

She smiled, though her amorphous mouth
Was vague beyond her ears;
Then cast her beveled arms along
The rhomboid barriers,
And shedding asymmetric plinths,
She wept. (I heard her tears.)

LIMERICKS

TEXT AND PICTURES BY OLIVER HERFORD

THE SOMNOLENT BIVALVE

Said the oyster: “To-morrow’s May-day;
But don’t call me early, I pray.
Just tuck me instead
In my snug oyster-bed,
And there till September I’ll stay.”

THE OUNCE OF DETENTION

Once a pound-keeper chanced to impound
An ounce that was straying around.
The pound-keeper straight
Was fined for false weight,
Since he’d only once ounce in his pound.

THE DE VINNE PRESS, NEW YORK

FOOTNOTES:

[1] At a meeting held at Chickering Hall on the evening of November 12, 1891, to sympathize with Governor Nichols’s war on the Louisiana lottery system, the late Abram S. Hewitt was one of the speakers. In the course of his remarks in denunciation of the lottery gambling in Louisiana, Mr. Hewitt said:

“I can’t find words strong enough to express my feelings regarding
this brazen fraud.

“This scheme of plunder develops a weak spot in the government of
the United States, which I would not mention were it not for the
importance of the issue. We all know that a single State frequently
determines the result of a presidential election. The State of
Louisiana has determined the result of a presidential election. The
vote of that State was offered to me for money, and I declined to
buy it. But the vote of that State was sold for money!”

[2] Read before the joint meeting of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, December 13, 1912. Now first published.

[3] I doubt if “Winchester,” previously known as “Rienzi,” could have outwalked Sherman’s “Sam,” a terror to staff-officers, General Meade’s “Baldy,” or McClellan’s “Black Dan,” for it was asserted they could all walk five miles an hour.

[4] ~The Century~ for July, 1882.

[5] ~The Century~ for July, 1887.

[6] Federal Reporter, Vol. 110, page 660.

[7] Since this was written a device accomplishing the same purpose has been placed in public service.

[8] Reprinted from “Scribner’s Monthly” (now ~The Century~) for March, 1874.