Transcriber’s Note

Larger versions of most illustrations may be seen by right-clicking them and selecting an option to view them separately, or by double-tapping and/or stretching them.

Cover created by Transcriber and placed into the Public Domain.

THE POWDER OF
SYMPATHY

OTHER BOOKS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Fiction

Parnassus on Wheels
The Haunted Bookshop
Kathleen
Tales from a Rolltop Desk
Where the Blue Begins

Essays

Shandygaff
Mince Pie
Pipefuls
Plum Pudding
Travels in Philadelphia

Poetry

Songs for a Little House
The Rocking Horse
Hide and Seek
Chimneysmoke
Translations from the Chinese

THE POWDER OF
SYMPATHY

BY
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.

—Max Beerbohm

ILLUSTRATED
BY
WALTER JACK DUNCAN

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1923

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

COPYRIGHT, 1921, 1922, BY THE NEW YORK EVENING POST, INC.
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

First Edition

DEDICATION

TO FELIX RIESENBERG and FRANKLIN ABBOTT

Dear Felix, dear Frank:—It is a pleasant circumstance that as one sets about collecting material for a book, scissoring night after night among scrapbooks to determine what may or may not be worth revisiting the glimpses of the press, there comes to mind with perfect naturalness who should carry the onus of the dedication. For a book is a frail and human emanation, and has its own instinctive disposition toward a certain kind of people. These Powders of Sympathy I hopefully sprinkle in your direction.

Another good friend warned me seriously, some time ago, against the danger of being too apologetic in a preface. For, said he, people always read prefaces and dedications, even if nought else; if you deprecate, you at once persuade them to the same attitude. And to you two, of all readers, I need not explain just how these pieces were written, day by day, out of the pressure and hilarity and contention of the mind. I have made no attempt to conceal their ephemeral origin. They were almost all written for a newspaper, and contain many references to journalism. And, if I may speak my inmost heart, I have had a sincere hope that they might, in collected form, play some small part in encouraging the youngest generation of journalists to be themselves and set things down as they see them. If these powders have any pharmacal virtue—other than that of Seidlitz—it is likely to be relative, not absolute. I mean, it is remarkable that they should have been written at all: remarkable that any newspaper should take the pains to offer space to speculations of this sort. I have not scrupled, on occasion, to chaff some of the matters newspapers are supposed to hold sacred. And it is my privilege, by the way, to say my gratitude and affection to Mr. Edwin F. Gay, editor of the New York Evening Post, under whose jurisdiction these were written. With the generosity of the ideal employer he has encouraged my ejaculations even when he did not agree with them.

But a columnist (it is frequently said) is not a real Newspaper Man: he is only a deboshed Editorial Writer, a fallen angel abjected from the secure heaven of anonymity. That is true. The notable increase, in recent years, of these creatures, has been held to be a sign that the papers required more scapegoats, or safety valves through whom readers might blow off their disrespect. And that by posting these innocent effigies as decoys, the wicked press might go about its privy misdeeds with more security, and conspire unobserved with the dangerous minions of Capital (or Labour, or the Agrarian Bloc).

However that may be, and unsuspecting whether intended by his scheming employer as a decoy, or a doormat, or a gargoyle, or a lightning rod (how is he to know, never having been given instruction of any sort except to go ahead and write as he pleases?) the columnist pursues his task and gradually distils a philosophy of his own out of his duties. Oddly enough, instead of growing more cautious by reason of his exposure, he becomes almost dangerously candid. He knows that if he is wrong he will be set right the next morning by a stack of letters varying in number according to the nature of his indiscretion. If he is wrong about shall and will, he will get five letters of reproof. If about some nautical nicety, ten letters. If about the Republican Party, twenty letters. If about food, thirty-two. If about theology or Ireland, sixty to seventy. In all cases most of these letters will be wittier and wiser than anything he could have composed himself. Surely there is no other walk of life in which mistakes are so promptly retrovolant.

I have christened these soliloquies after dear old Sir Kenelm Digby’s famous nostrum, the Powder of Sympathy. But in spite of its amiable name and properties that powder was not a talcum. Its basis was vitriol; and I fear that in some of these prescriptions I have mixed a few acid crystals. It was either Lord Bacon or Don Marquis (two deep thinkers whose maxims are occasionally confounded in my mind) who told a story about a dog of low degree who made his reputation by biting a circus lion—thinking him only another dog, though a large one. Two or three times herein I have snapped at circus lions; and probably escaped only because the lion was too proud to return the indenture. Let it be remembered, though, that often you may love a man even while you dispute with him.

But the chief consideration (Frank and Felix) that seems to emerge from our friendship is that the eager squabbles of critics and littérateurs are of minor account; that the great thing is to circulate freely in the surrounding ocean of inexhaustible humanity, enjoying with our own eyes and ears the gay and tragic richness of life. We have had expeditions together, not commemorated in print, that have been both doctrine and delight. The incident of the Five-Dollar Bill we hid in a certain bookshop will recur to your minds; the day spent in New York Harbour aboard Tug Number 18, and her skipper’s shrewd, endearing sagacity. Then consider the Mystery of the House on 71st Street; the smell of Gorgonzola cheese on a North River pier; the taste of asti spumante; the arguments on the Test of Courage! These are matters it pleases me to set down, just as a secret among us. And though I am (you are aware) no partisan of the telephone, there are especially two voices I have learned to hear with a thrill. They say: “Hello! This is Frank;” or “Hello! This is Felix!” And I reply with honest excitement, for so often those voices are an announcement of Adventure.

Give me a ring soon.

Christopher Morley.

New York City,
November 24, 1922.

CONTENTS

THE POWDER OF
SYMPATHY

AN OXFORD SYMBOL

When in October, 1910, we arrived, in a hansom, at the sombre gate of New College, Oxford; trod for the first time through that most impressive of all college doorways, hidden in its walled and winding lane; timidly accosted Old Churchill, the whiskered porter, most dignitarian and genteel of England’s Perfect Servants; and had our novice glimpse of that noble Front Quad where the shadow of the battlemented roof lies patterned across the turf—we were as innocently hopeful, modestly anxious for learning and eager to do the right thing in this strange, thrilling environment as ever any young American who went looking for windmills. No human being (shrewd observers have remarked) is more beautifully solemn than the ambitious Young American. And, indeed, no writer has ever attempted to analyze the shimmering tissue of inchoate excitement and foreboding that fills the spirit of the juvenile Rhodes Scholar as he first enters his Oxford college. He arrives with his mind a gentle confusion of hearsay about Walter Pater, Shelley, boat races, Mr. Gladstone, Tom Brown, the Scholar Gypsy, and Little Mr. Bouncer. Kansas City or Sheboygan indeed seem far away as he crosses those quadrangles looking for his rooms.

But even Oxford, one was perhaps relieved to find, is not all silver-gray mediæval loveliness. The New Buildings, to which Churchill directed us, reached through a tunnel and a bastion in a rampart not much less than a thousand years elderly, were recognizably of the Rutherford B. Hayes type of edification. Except for the look-off upon gray walls, pinnacles, and a green tracery of gardens, and the calculated absence of plumbing (a planned method of preserving monastic hardiness among light-minded youth), the immense cliff of New Buildings might well have been a lobe of the old Johns Hopkins or a New York theological seminary. At the top of four flights we found our pensive citadel. Papered in blue, upholstered in a gruesome red, with yellow woodwork, and a fireplace which (we soon learned) was a potent reeker. It would be cheerful to describe those two rooms in detail, for we lived in them two years. But what first caught our eye was a little green pamphlet lying on the red baize tablecloth. It was lettered

NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD
Information and Regulations
Revised October, 1910

Our name was written upon it in ink, and we immediately sat down to study it. Here, we thought, is our passkey to this new world of loveliness.

First we found the hours of college chapel. Then, “All Undergraduates are required to perform Exercises.” In our simplicity we at first supposed this to be something in the way of compulsory athletics, but then discovered it to mean intellectual exercises. Fair enough, we thought. That is what we came for.

“Undergraduates are required, as a general rule, to be in College or their Lodgings by 11 p. m., and to send their Strangers out before that time.... No Undergraduate is allowed to play on any musical instrument in College rooms except between the hours of 1 and 9 p. m., unless special leave has been obtained beforehand from the Dean.... No games are allowed in the College Quadrangles, and no games except bowls in the Garden.” Excellent, we meditated; this is going to be a serious career, full attention to the delights of the mind and no interruption by corybantic triflers.

“A Term by residence means pernoctation within the University for six weeks in Michaelmas or in Hilary Term, and for three weeks in Easter or in Trinity (or Act) Term.”... We felt a little uncertain as to just what time of year Hilary and Act happened. But we were not halting, just now, over technicalities. We wanted to imbibe, hastily, the general spirit and flavour of our new home.... “Every member of the College is required to deposit Caution-money. Commoners deposit £30, unless they signify in writing their intention to pay their current Battels weekly; in this case they deposit £10. An undergraduate battling terminally cannot withdraw part of his Caution-money and become a weekly battler without the authority of his parent or guardian.” We at once decided that it was best to be a weekly battler. Battling, incidentally, is a word that we believe exists only at Eton and Oxford; dictionaries tell us that it comes from “an obsolete verb meaning to fatten.” Sometimes, however, in dispute with the Junior Bursar, it comes near its more usual sense. We wondered, in our young American pride, whether we were a Commoner? We were pleased to note, however, that the alternative classification was not a Lord but a Scholar.

We skimmed along through various other instructions. “A fine of 1s. is charged to the owner of any bicycle not put away before midnight.” The owner, or the bicycle, we mused? Never mind—we would soon learn. Coals and faggots, we noted, were variable in price. “The charge for a cold bath is 2d., for a hot 4d., inclusive of bath-towel.” The duties of a mysterious person named as the Bedmaker (but always, in actual speech, the Scout) were punctually outlined. But now we found ourself coming to Kitchen, Buttery, and Store-Room Tariffs. This, evidently, was the pulse of the machine. With beating heart we read on, entranced:

There was something significant, we felt by instinct, in the fact that Treble X was obtainable only by the glass. Vital stuff, evidently. Our education was going to come partly in casks, perhaps? In the Kitchen Tariff we read, gloatingly, magnificent syllables. Grilled Sausages and Bacon, commons, 1/2. Devilled Kidneys, commons, 1/. (A “commons,” we judged, was a large portion; if you wanted a lesser serving, you ordered a “small commons.”) Chop with Chips, 11d. Grilled Bones, 10d. Kedgeree, plain or curried, commons, 9d. (Oh noble kedgeree, so nourishing and inexpensive, when shall we taste your like again?) Herrings, Bloaters, Kippers, each 3d. (To think that, then, we thought the Junior Bursar’s tariff was a bit steep.) Jelly, Compôte of Fruit, Trifle, Pears and Cream. Creams ... commons, 6d. “Gentlemen’s own birds cooked and served ... one bird, 1/. Two birds, 1/6.”

We went on, with enlarging appreciation, to the Store Room and Cellar Tariffs: Syphons, Seltzer or Soda-water, 4½d. Ginger-beer, per bottle, 2d. Cakes: Genoa, Cambridge, Madeira, Milan, Sandringham, School, each 1/. Foolscap, per quire, 10d. Quill Pens, per bundle, 1/6. Cheroots, Cigars, Tobacco, Cigarettes—and then we found what seemed to be the crown and cream of our education, LIST OF WINES.

Port, 4/ per bottle. Pale Sherry, 3/. Marsala, 2/. Madeira, 4/. Clarets: Bordeaux, 1/6. St. Julien, 2/. Dessert, 4/. Hock or Rhenish Wine: Marcobrunner, 4/. Niersteiner, 3/. Moselle, 2/6. Burgundy, 2/ and 4/. Pale Brandy, 5/. Scotch Whisky, 4/. Irish Whisky, 4/. Gin, 3/. Rum, 4/.

It is really too bad to have to compress into a few paragraphs such a wealth of dreams and memories. We sat there, with our little pamphlet before us, and looked out at that great panorama of spires and towers. We have always believed in falling in with our environment. The first thing we did that afternoon was to go out and buy a corkscrew. We have it still—our symbol of an Oxford education.

SCAPEGOATS

The man who did most (I am secretly convinced) to deprive American literature of some really fine stuff was Mr. John Wanamaker. It was in his store, some years ago, that I bought a kind of cot-bed or couch, which I put in one corner of my workroom and on which it is my miserable habit to recline when I might be getting at those magnificent writings I have planned. Every evening I pile up the cushions and nestle there with The Gentle Grafter or some detective story (my favourite relaxation), saying to myself: “Just ten minutes of loafing”....

But perhaps Messrs. Strawbridge and Clothier (also of Philadelphia) are equally at fault. When I wake up, on my Wanamaker divan, it is usually about 2 A. M. Not too late, even then, for a determined spirit to make incision on its tasks. But I find myself moving towards a very fine white-enamelled icebox which I bought from Strawbridge and Clothier in 1918. With that happy faculty of self-persuasion I convince myself it is only to see whether the pan needs emptying or the doors latching. But by the time I have scalped a blackberry pie and eroded a platter of cold macaroni au gratin, of course work of any sort is out of the question.

So do the Philistines of this world league themselves cruelly against the artist, plotting temptation for his carnal deboshed instincts, joying to see him succumb. Once the habit of yielding is established, Wanamaker, Strawbridge and Clothier (dark trio of Norns) have it their own way. Just as surely as robins will be found on a new-mown lawn, as certainly as bonfire smoke veers all round the brush pile to find out the eyes of the suburban leaf burner, so inevitably do the Divan and the Icebox exert their cruel dominion over us when we ought to be pursuing our lovely and impossible dreams. Wanamaker and Strawbridge and Clothier have blueprints of the lines of fissure in our frail velleity. As William Blake might have said:

Let Flesh once get a lead on Spirit,

It’s hard for Soul to reinherit:

When supper’s laid upon a plate

Mind might as well abdicate.

But one of the things I think about, just before I drop off to sleep on that couch, is My Anthology. Like every one else, I have always had an ambition to compile an anthology of my own; several, in fact. One of them I call in my own mind The Book of Uncommon Prayer, and imagine it as a kind of secular breviary, including many of those beautiful passages in literature expressing the spirit of supplication. This book, however, it will take years to collect; it will be entirely non-sectarian and so truly religious that many people will be annoyed. People do not care much for books of real beauty. That anthology edited by Robert Bridges, for instance—The Spirit of Man—how many readers have taken the trouble to hunt it out?

But the Uncommon Prayer Book is not the kind of anthology I have in mind at the moment. What I need is a book that would boil down the best of all the books I am fond of and condense it into a little bouillon cube of wisdom. I have always had in mind the possibility that I might go travelling, or the house might burn down, or I might have to sell my library, or something of that sort. I should like to have the meat and essence of my favourites in permanent form, so that wherever I were I could write to the publisher and get a fresh copy.

This thought came with renewed emphasis the other day when I was talking to Vachel Lindsay. He was saying that he had lately been rereading Swinburne, for the first time in nearly twenty years, and was grieved to see how the text of the poet had become corrupted in his memory. He had been misquoting Swinburne for years and years, he said, and the errors had been growing more and more firmly into his mind. That led me to think, suppose we had only memory to rely on, how long would the text of anything we loved remain unblurred? Suppose I were on a desert island and yearned to solace myself by spouting some of the sonnets of Shakespeare? How much could I recapture? Honestly, now, and with no resort to the book on the shelf at my elbow, let me try an old friend:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

That alters when it alteration finds

Or bends with the remover to remove.

Oh no, it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken—

Love is the star to every wandering bark

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Then there’s something about a sickle, but I can’t for the life of me quite get it. Presently I’ll look it up in the book and see how near I came.

Before opening the Shakespeare, however, let’s have one more try:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I wail the lack of many a thing I sought

... my dear time’s waste——

And all the rest of that sonnet that I can think of is something about “death’s dateless night.” A pretty poor showing. Of course, I should do better on a desert island: there would be the wide expanse of shining sand to walk upon, and I could throw myself into it with more passion and fury. The secret of remembering poetry is to get a good barytone start and obliterate the mind of its current freight of trifles. The metronomic prosody of the surf would help me, no doubt, and the placid frondage of the breadfruit trees. But even so, the recension of Shakespeare’s sonnets that I would write down upon slips of bark would be a very corrupt and stumbling text. Favourite lines would be scrambled into the wrong sonnets, and the whole thing would be a pitiful miscarriage of memory.

The only sagacious conduct of life is to prepare for every possible emergency. I have taken out life insurance, and fire insurance, and burglary insurance, and automobile insurance. I have always insured myself against losing my job by taking care not to work too hard at it, so I wouldn’t miss it too bitterly if it were suddenly jerked from under me. But what have I done in the way of Literary Insurance? Suppose, to-morrow, Adventure should carry me away from these bookshelves? How pleasant to have a little microcosm of them that I could take with me! And yet, unless I can shake off the servitude of those three Philadelphia mandarins, Wanamaker and Strawbridge and Clothier, I shall never have it.

When I think of the plays that I would have written if it weren’t for those three rascals.

TO A NEW YORKER A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE

I wonder, old dear, why my mind has lately been going out towards you? I wonder if you will ever read this? They say that wood-pulp paper doesn’t last long nowadays. But perhaps some of my grandchildren (with any luck, there should be some born, say twenty-five years hence) may, in their years of tottering caducity, come across this scrap of greeting, yellowed with age. With tenderly cynical waggings of their faded polls, perhaps they will think back to the tradition of the quaint vanished creatures who lived and strove in this city in the year of disgrace, 1921. Poor old granfer (I can hear them say it, with that pleasing note of pity), I can just remember how he used to prate about the heyday of his youth. He wrote pieces for some paper, didn’t he? Comically old-fashioned stuff my governor said; some day I must go to the library and see if they have any record of it.

You seem a long way off, this soft September morning, as I sit here and sneeze (will hay fever still exist in 2021, I wonder?) and listen to the chime of St. Paul’s ring eleven. Just south of St. Paul’s brown spire the girders of a great building are going up. Will that building be there when you read this? What will be the Olympian skyline of your city? Will poor old Columbia University be so far downtown that you will be raising money to move it out of the congested slums of Morningside? Will you look up, as I do now, to the great pale shaft of Woolworth; to the golden boy with wings above Fulton Street? What ships with new names will come slowly and grandly up your harbour? What new green spaces will your street children enjoy? But something of the city we now love will still abide, I hope, to link our days with yours. There is little true glory in a city that is always changing. New stones, new steeples are comely things; but the human heart clings to places that hold association and reminiscence. That, I suppose, is the obscure cause of this queer feeling that impels me to send you so perishable a message. It is the precious unity of mankind in all ages, the compassion and love felt by the understanding spirit for those, its resting kinsmen, who once were glad and miserable in these same scenes. It keeps one aware of that marvellous dark river of human life that runs, down and down uncountably, to the unexplored seas of Time.

You seem a long way off, I say—and yet it is but an instant, and you will be here. Do you know that feeling, I wonder (so characteristic of our city) that a man has in an elevator bound (let us say) for the eighteenth floor? He sees 5 and 6 and 7 flit by, and he wonders how he can ever live through the interminable time that must elapse before he will get to his stopping place and be about the task of the moment. It is only a few seconds, but his mind can evolve a whole honeycomb of mysteries in that flash of dragging time. Then the door slides open before him and that instantaneous eternity is gone; he is in a new era. So it is with the race. Even while we try to analyze our present curiosities, they whiff away and disperse. Before we have time to turn three times in our chairs, we shall be the grandparents and you will be smiling at our old-fashioned sentiments.

But we ask you to look kindly on this our city of wonder, the city of amazing beauties which is also (to any man of quick imagination) an actual hell of haste, din, and dishevelment. Perhaps you by this time will have brought back something of that serenity, that reverence for thoughtful things, which our generation lost—and hardly knew it had lost. But even Hell, you must admit, has always had its patriots. There is nothing that hasn’t—which is one of the most charming oddities of the race.

And how we loved this strange, mad city of ours, which we knew in our hearts was, to the clear eye of reason and the pure, sane vision of poetry, a bedlam of magical impertinence, a blind byway of monstrous wretchedness. And yet the blacker it seemed to the lamp of the spirit, the more we loved it with the troubled eye of flesh. For humanity, immortal only in misery and mockery, loves the very tangles in which it has enmeshed itself: with good reason, for they are the mark and sign of its being. So you will fail, as we have; and you will laugh, as we have—but not so heartily, we insist; no one has ever laughed the way your tremulous granfers did, old chap! And you will go on about your business, as we did, and be just as certain that you and your concerns are the very climax of human gravity and worth. And will it be any pleasure to you to know that on a soft September morning a hundred years ago your affectionate great-grandsire looked cheerfully out of his lofty kennel window, blew a whiff of smoke, smiled a trifle gravely upon the familiar panorama, knew (with that antique shrewdness of his) a hawk from a handsaw, and then went out to lunch?

A CALL FOR THE AUTHOR

But who will write me the book about New York that I desire? The more I think about it, the more astonished I am that no one attempts it. I don’t mean a novel. I would not admit any plot or woven tissue of story to come between the reader and my royal heroine, the City herself. Not to be a coward, should I try to write it myself? It is my secret dream; but, better, it should be written by some sturdy rogue of a bachelor, footfree, living in the very heart of the uproar. Some fellow with a taste and nuance for the vulgar and vivid; a consort of both parsons and bootleggers; a Beggar’s Opera kind of rascal. I can think of three men in this city who have magnificent powers for such a book; but they are getting perhaps a little elderly—yes, they are over forty! Ginger must be very hot in the mouth of my imagined author. He must be young (dashed if I don’t think about 32 is the ideal age to write such a book), but not one of the Extremely Brilliant Young Men. They are too clever; and they are not lonely enough. For this is a lonely job. It’s got to be done solus, slowly, with an eye only upon the subject. It has got to show the very tremble and savour of life itself.

The man who will write this book will not necessarily enjoy it. To get into the secret of Herself he has got to have a peculiar feeling about her. For years he must have wrestled with her almost as a personal antagonist. He must have vowed, since he first saw her imperial skyline serrated on blue, to make her his own; a mistress worthy of him, and yet he himself her master. But he must know, in his inward, that in the end she triumphs, she tramples down mind and heart and nerve. Loveliest enemy in the world, implacable victor over reason and peace and all the quieter sanities of the spirit, her mad, intolerable beauty crazes or silences the sensitive mind that woos her. If you think this is only fine writing and romantic tall-talk, then you know her only with the eye, not with the imagination. With good reason, perhaps, her poets have, for the most part, kept mum. Enough for them to see and cherish in imagination her little sudden glimpses. A girl, slender, gayly unconscious of admiration, poises on one foot at the edge of the subway platform, leaning over to see if the train is coming. That gallant figure is perhaps something of a symbol of the city’s own soul.

There must be many who feel about Herself as I do—and, more wisely, are tacit. There are many whose minds have trembled on the steep sills of truth, have felt that golden tremble of reality almost within touch, and rather than mar the half-apprehended fable, have turned troubled away. But there is such poetry in her, and such fine, glorious animal gusto—why is there not some determined attempt to set it down, not with “rhetoricating floscules,” but as it is? Day after day one comes to the attack; and returning, as the sloping sunlight and fresh country air flood the dusty red plush of the homeward smoking-car, readmits the expected defeat. Here is a target for you, O generation of snipers. Let us have done with pribbles and prabbles. Who is the man who will write me the book I crave—that vulgar, jocund, carnal, beautiful, rueful book!

Pepys’ House at Brampton

MR. PEPYS’S CHRISTMASES

Christmas being the topic, suppose we call upon Mr. Samuel Pepys for testimony. The imperishable Diarist had as keen a faculty of enjoyment as any man who ever lived. He wrote one of the world’s greatest love stories—the story of his own zealous, inquisitive, jocund love of life. Surely it is not amiss to inquire what record be left as to the festival of cheer.

On seven of the nine Christmases in the Diary, Mr. Pepys went to church—sometimes more than once, though when he went twice he admits he fell asleep. The music and the ladies’ finery were undoubtedly part of the attraction. “Very great store of fine women there is in this church, more than I know anywhere else about us,” is his note for Christmas, 1664. But in that generously mixed and volatile heart there was a valve of honest aspiration and piety. One can imagine him sitting in his pew (on Christmas, 1661, he nearly left the church in a huff because the verger didn’t come forward to open the pew door for him), his alert mind giving close attention to the sermon of his favourite Mr. Mills, busy with sudden resolutions of virtue and industry, yet happily conscious of any beauty within eyeshot.

The giving of presents was not a large part of Christmas in those days. In 1662 Mr. Gauden gave Pepys “a great chine of beef and three dozen of tongues,” but this had its drawbacks. Pepys had to give five shillings to the man who brought it and also half a crown to the porters. Drink and food were the important part of the festival. At Christmas, 1660, Mr. and Mrs. Pepys, with Tom Pepys as guest, enjoyed “a good shoulder of mutton and a chicken.” This was a brave Christmas for Mrs. Pepys—she had “a new mantle.” We must remember that the fair Elizabeth, though already married five years, was then only twenty years old. Not all Mrs. Pepys’s Christmases were as merry as that, I fear. On Christmas, 1663, she was troubled by anxious thoughts——

My wife began, I know not whether by design or chance, to enquire what she should do, if I should by any accident die, to which I did give her some slight answer, but shall make good use of it to bring myself to some settlement for her sake.

Why haven’t the ingenious life insurance advertisers made use of this telling bit of copy?

Christmas, 1668, seems to have been poor Mrs. Pepys’s worst Yule, but perhaps it was only her natural feminine frivolity that caused the sadness. Samuel says:

Dinner alone with my wife, who, poor wretch! sat undressed all day, till 10 at night, altering and lacing of a noble petticoat.

This noble petticoat was perhaps to be worn at the play they attended the next day, “Women Pleased.” What a pleasant Christmas card that scene would make: Mrs. Pepys sitting, négligée, over the niceties of her needlework, with Samuel beside her “making the boy read to me the Life of Julius Cæsar.” But we do not “get” (as the current phrase is) Mrs. Pepys at all if we think of her as merely the irresponsible girl. For, at Christmas, ’66, we read:

Lay pretty long in bed, and then rose, leaving my wife desirous to sleep, having sat up till 4 this morning seeing her maids make mince-pies.

Ah, we have no such mince pies nowadays. Mrs. Pepys’s mince pies were evidently worthy the tradition of that magnificent delicacy, for at Christmas, 1662, when Elizabeth was ill abed, Samuel records—with an evident touch of regret—that he had to “send abroad” for one.

* * * * *

Which brings us back to the Christmas viands. In 1662, besides the mince pie from abroad, he “dined by my wife’s bedside with great content, having a mess of brave plum-porridge and a roasted pullet.” We are tempted to think 1666 was Samuel’s best Christmas. Parson Mills made a good sermon. “Then home and dined well on some good ribs of beef roasted and mince pies; only my wife, brother, and Barker, and plenty of good wine of my own, and my heart full of true joy.” After dinner they had a little music; and he spent the evening making a catalogue of his books (“reducing the names of all my books to an alphabet”), which is probably the happiest task a man of Pepys’s temperament could enjoy.

Christmas Eve, 1667, was evidently a cheerful evening. Mr. Pepys stopped in at the Rose Tavern for some “burnt wine”; walked round the city in the moonlight, and homeward early in the morning in such content that “I dropped money in five or six places, which I was the willinger to do, it being Christmas Day, and so home, and there find my wife in bed, and Jane and the maid making pies.” The evening of that Christmas Mrs. Pepys read aloud to him—The History of the Drummer of Mr. Mompesson, apparently a kind of contemporary Phillips Oppenheim—“a strange story of spies, and worth reading, indeed.” It was only in 1660 that the Christmas cheer was a little too much for our Diarist. December 27, 1660, “about the middle of the night I was very ill—I think with eating and drinking too much—and so I was forced to call the maid, who pleased my wife and I in her running up and down so innocently in her smock.”

* * * * *

It is painful to this tracker of Mr. Pepys’s vestiges to note that on Christmas Day, 1662, Bishop Morley at the Chapel Royal “made but a poor sermon.” The Bishop apparently rebuked the levity of the Court. “It was worth observing how far they are come from taking the reprehensions of a Bishop seriously, that they all laugh in the chapel when he reflected on their ill-actions and courses. He did much press us to joy in these public days of joy, and to hospitality; but one that stood by whispered in my ear that the Bishop do not spend one groat to the poor himself.” In 1665 we fear that Samuel indulged himself in church with some rather cynical thoughts:

Saw a wedding in the church, and the young people so merry one with another; and strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling at them.

One could continue for some space recounting the eupeptic Pepys in his Christmas merriments—so large an edifice of pleasing conjecture can be built upon even his slightest notes. One observes, for instance, that on December 27, 1664, when “my wife and all her folks” came “to make Christmas gambols,” Samuel left the party and went to bed. This was very different from his usual habit when there was fun going. He was annoyed also that on this occasion his wife revelled all night, not coming to bed until 8 the next morning, “which vexed me a little, but I believe there was no hurt in it at all, but only mirth.”

So we take leave of the Christmases of the Pepyses; 1668 is the last one recorded—the time when Elizabeth stayed at home all day altering her petticoat. After supper, the boy played some music on the lute, and Samuel’s mind was “in mighty content.” Let us think kindly of the good fellow; and not forget that he coined one of the enduring phrases of English literature—a phrase that is no such ineffective summary of all the lives of men—And so to bed.

CHILDREN AS COPY

Titania said: “You haven’t written a poem about the baby yet.”

It is quite true. She is now thirteen months old, and has not yet had a poem written about her. Titania considers this deplorable. The first baby was hardly a week old before all sorts of literary studies were packing the mails, speeding to such editors as were known to be prompt pay. (I hope, indeed I hope, you never saw that astounding essay—published anonymously in Every Week which expired soon after—called “The Expectant Father,” which was written when the poor urchin was some twenty-four hours old. It was his first attempt to earn money for his parent. If any child ever paid his own hospital bills—C. O. D., as you might say—it was he. I believe in bringing up my children to be self-supporting.)

And the second baby was only three weeks old when the first poem about her was written.

But here is this third morsel, thirteen months old and no poem yet. Titania, I say, considers this a kind of insult to the innocent babe. No, not at all, my dear. I admit that it would be very helpful if H. (I will call her that, for baby is a word that cannot be repeated in print very often without all hands growing maudlin; and I don’t like to use her own name, which seems too personal; just remember, then, that H. stands for a small brown-eyed creature who is still listed in the Bureau of Records of the Department of Health [certificate No. 43515, anno 1920] as Female Morley, because when the birth was registered by the doctor her name had not been decided, and ever since then I have been too busy to go round to call on Dr. Copeland, the Health Commissioner, and ask him to have her more specifically enrolled)—I admit it would be very helpful if she were to turn to and lend a hand in paying the coal bill by having some verses written about herself. I have looked at her with admiration every day for these thirteen months, trying, as one might say, to get some angle on her that would lead to a poem. She does not seem very angular.

I insist that my not having written a poem about her is really very creditable. Titania seems to think that it implies my having become, in some sense, blasé about children. Again, not so, not so at all. I must confess that in my enthusiasm I rather made use of the two older urchins as copy. But H., droll infant that she is, is too subtle for me. I’ll come to that in a minute.

I talked all this matter over (being of a cautious turn, and fond of getting experienced advice) with two eminent author-parents—Mr. Tom Masson and Mr. Tom Daly—long ago, before Titania and I began putting on heirs. Both these gentlemen have made a lot of use of their children in earning, or at any rate gaining, a living. Their advices coincided. I myself was worried, but Mr. Tom Masson insisted that there was nothing like having offspring as a source of copy; he said that he would pay ten cents a word, in Life, for anything about the then shortly arriving urchin. (He said it would be fifteen cents a word if it was a girl, because girls cost you so much more later on. He has had experience in that matter, I believe.) Mr. Tom Daly, who has run rather to boys, said very much the same thing; but he was not in a position to buy my stuff, so I paid less attention to him.

But to get back to H. There never was a more enchanting infant. Mr. Walter de la Mare, who is also an authority, has written me delightful letters about her, although he has never seen her. But even a prose letter from a poet like Mr. de la Mare is more valuable, I think, than an actual poem from most other poets, so darling H. cannot say she has been neglected. But she is much too delicious for me to be able to sit down easily and write something that would do her justice. The night before she was born her mother and I did two things. We went to Huyler’s for chocolate ice-cream soda, and we read aloud Bernard Shaw’s autobiography, which is printed in Frank Harris’s Contemporary Portraits. I dislike to bring Mr. Harris into this, for certainly I can think of no one who has less in common with H., that celestial nugget. But I have to tell the truth, don’t I? Mr. Harris wrote an essay about Shaw; and Shaw, feeling that it was not adequate, wrote a really amusing sketch to show how Harris should have done it. Well, there is something symbolic about this, for H. is as sweet as anything Huyler ever compounded; and she is even more enigmatic than Shaw. (I can see now it should have been Page and Shaw instead of Huyler.)

But I feel that pretty soon I shall be writing a poem about her. I have felt it coming for some time. But it has got to come; I am not going to bring it. That shows how I have matured by associating with H. Sometimes I wish I could hire a really great poet to write about her. Swinburne might do for the rough draft. “Oh, what a bee-yootiful babby!” he used to cry when he saw them in their prams up at Putney—so, I think, Max Beerbohm describes. But I should want to have his rough draft polished and refined by someone else. I can only think of Mr. Walter de la Mare. He alone has just the right insight. For babies thirteen months old—the best age of all—must not be treated condescendingly, nor fulsomely, nor adoringly, nor sugarishly. William Blake, if left alone in the room with H., would have understood her. What an infant, I give you my word! Living with children is largely a contest of endurance. It is a question of which one can tire the other out first. (This is a great secret; never before made plain.) Start in early in the morning, and take things with a rush. If you are strong, austere, resolute, you may be able to wear them down and exhaust them by dusk. If you can do so, without prostrating yourself, then you may get them to bed safely and have a few hours of cheerful lassitude. But take every possible advantage. Let them run and frolic, yourself sitting down as much as you can. Favour yourself, and snatch a little rest while they are not looking. Even so, the chances are you will crack first.

This applies to older children; after they gain the use of their limbs and minds. But H. has not reached that harrowing stage. Placable, wise, serene, she sits in her crib. She has four teeth (beauties). To hear her cry is so rare that I hardly know what her voice of sorrow sounds like. Sometimes, for an instant, she looks a little frightened. Then I like her best, for I know she is human, and has in her the general capsule of frailty.

You may be quite sure of one thing, I shall never print that poem unless I feel that it comes somewhere near doing her justice.

HAIL, KINSPRIT!

The keenest pleasure in life, of course, is to find a Kindred Spirit—one whose mind glows and teeters with delight at the same queer things that rouse us to excitement. We have just found one, and yet we shall never know him, except by his address, which is Y. 1926, the Times, E. C. 4, London. For we are much too busy to write to any one, even to a Kindred Spirit.

We will tell you why we feel sure he is a Kindred Spirit; but in parenthesis, it was Mr. Pearsall Smith who lamented the fact that the English language contains no satisfactory word for “a person who is enthusiastic about the same things that you are enthusiastic about.” It is too grossly clumsy to say fellow-fan or co-enthusiast; so Mr. Smith, a philologist of charming finesse (have you read his little book The English Language published by Henry Holt?) boldly proposed to fill the vacancy by coining the word milver. This, he said, would be useful to poets, since there is no rhyme in English for silver.

The word milver, alas, leaves us cool, in spite of its usefulness as a rhyme. It does not strike down in the great subsoil of the language—the dark deep skein of inherited word-roots from which our present meanings blossom and put forth. We suggest—without much thought—a mere contraction. How would kinsprit do? We rather like the look of it; it has a droll, benign, elvish appearance as we put it down. A couplet occurs to us—

They pledged their bond with joyful oath—

A kinsprit passion knit them both.

That shows you it could be used as an adjective as well. Come, now, if we all pull together very likely we can get Messrs. Merriam to put it in the next edition of Webster:

Kinsprit, n and a. (orig. obscure: perh. contracted from kin[dred] sprit[e])—A fellow-enthusiast, one impassioned with the same zeal or hobby or enthusiasm.

The reason why we know that Y. 1926 is a kinsprit is in the following notice in the Personal column of the London Times:

Lost in Taxi last week, SMALL PORTFOLIO containing colour diagrams and newspaper print of Lamb’s portrait of Lytton Strachey. Finder rewarded. Y. 1926, The Times, E. C. 4.

Well, well, we say to ourself: then there is one other person in the world who felt just as we did about that gloriously entertaining portrait of Mr. Strachey, and who carried it about with him just as we did ours, clipped from the Manchester Guardian. But we are luckier than poor Y. 1926, because in an access of enthusiasm we wrote to Mr. Henry Lamb, the artist, and begged from him a photo-print of the picture, which is in front of us now. We think that Mr. Alfred Harcourt, Mr. Strachey’s publisher, should implore the loan of the canvas for a few months, and have it exhibited in a Fifth Avenue window where we could all have a good look at it.

We are consumed with curiosity to know more about Y. 1926—where he was going in that taxi, and what the colour diagrams were (they sound interesting) and what are his general comments on life?

ROUND MANHATTAN ISLAND

We were talking with an American who had just come back after living several years in Europe. He expressed with some dismay his resensitized impression of the furious ugliness and clamour of American life; the ghastly wastes of rubbish and kindling-wood suburbs fringing our cities; and suggested that the trouble is that we have little or no instinctive sense of beauty.

To which we replied that perhaps the truth of it is that the American temperament is more likely to see opportunities for beauty in large things than in small. But we were both talking bosh. Only an extraordinarily keen and trained philosophic perception—e. g., a Santayana—can discuss such matters without gibbering. A recent book on young American intellectualism recurs to us as an example of the futility of undigested prattle about æsthetics. Even the word æsthetics itself has come to have a windy savour by reason of much sophomore talk.

But, though we have laid by our own copy of that particular book as a permanent curio in the realm of well-meant gravity, its author was obeying a sound and praisable instinct in trying to think about these things—beauty, imagination, the mind’s freedom to create, the meaning of our civilization. We are all compelled to such an attempt: shallow, unversed, clumsily intuitive, we grope into them because we are sincerely hungry to understand. The same wise, brave, gracious spirit that moved Mr. Montague to write his exquisite book Disenchantment is tremulously and tentatively alert in thousands of less competent minds. And we, for our own part, grow just a little impatient with those who are quick to damn this wildly energetic and thronging civilization because it shows a poverty of settled, tranquil loveliness. We look out of our window into this morning where Mrs. Meynell’s “wind of clear weather” tosses the Post Office flags and the rooftop plumes of steam; we see the Woolworth pinnacle hanging over our head—and ask, is it possible that this great spectacle breathes from her towers only the last enchantments of a muddled age?

Aristotle remarked that “the flute is not an instrument which has a good moral effect; it is too exciting.” And very likely New York civilization falls under the same reproach. But even if it is all madness, what a gallant raving! You cannot see the beauty in anything until you love it for its own sake. Take the sightseeing boat round Manhattan if you want to get a mental synthesis of this strangest of islands. From a point in the East River off Coenties Slip you will see those cubed terraces of building rising up and upward, shelves and ledges of rectangular perspective like the heaven of a modernist painter. Nor do we deny the madness and horror. Farther up the river you will see the ragged edges of the city, scows loading their tons of jetsam and street scourings, wizened piers, grassless parks, all the pitiful makeshift aquatics of the Harlem region. And yet, all along that gruesome foreshore, boys—and girls, too—bathing gayly in the scum-water, flying ragged kites from pier-bollards, merry and naked on slides of rock or piles of barrels. Only on the three grim islands of Blackwell, Ward, and Randall will you see any touch of beauty. There, grass and trees and beds of canna and salvia (the two great institutional flowers) to soothe the criminal and the mad. When your mind or your morals or your muscles give way, the city will allow you a pleasant haven of greenery and air. It is odd to see the broad grounds of the Children’s Hospital—on Randalls Island, is it?—with no child in sight; but across the river the vile and scabby shore is thick with them. And the bases of the Harlem swing-bridges, never trod by any one, are carefully grassed and flowered.

So the history of every modern city consists of a painful, slow retracing of its errors, an attempt to undo painfully and at vast expense the slattern stupidities it has allowed to accumulate. But to see only these paradoxes and uglinesses is to see less than the whole. He cannot have lived very long or thoughtfully with humanity for neighbour who does not ruefully accept greeds and blindnesses as part of its ineradicable habit. It takes a strong stretch of the imagination to grasp this island entire; to see, even in its very squalors and heedlessnesses, an integral portion of its brave teeming life. You must love it for what it is before you have a right to love it for what it may be. We have never been able to think this thing out, but there seems to us to be some vital essence, some miraculous tremor of human energy and folly in the whole scene that condones and justifies the ugliness. It is queer, but the hideous back-lots of the city do not trouble us so greatly: we have a feeling that they are on their way towards being something else. We do not praise them, but we feel in an obscure way they are part of the picture. Zealous passion and movement always present, to the eye of dispassion, aspects either grotesque or terrible, according to that eye’s focus. In this ugly hurly-burly we feel daily (though we cannot define it) that there is a beauty so overriding that it does not depend on beautiful particulars. And, to feel that beauty fully, one must discard all hankerings to improve humanity, or to preach to it, or even understand it—simply (as Uncle Remus said) “make a great ’miration”—accept it as it thrillingly is, and admire.

THE UNKNOWN CITIZEN

We shall never forget being in Washington when the great celebration was held in honour of the Unknown Citizen.

The day was proclaimed a National Fête. On that day the Unknown Citizen—chosen after long investigation by a secret committee sworn to silence—arrived at the Union Station. He and his wife had been quietly lured away from their home on a plausible pretext and then kidnapped into a gaudy special train, where everything had been explained to them. Halts had been made at big cities en route for the crowds to pay homage.

It would take too long to describe the clever selective process by which the Citizen had been chosen. Suffice it to say that he was a typical homo Americanus—a worthy and slightly battered creature, who had raised a family of four children and plugged along at his job and paid his taxes and cranked his flivver and set up a radio on the roof and planted sunflowers in the back yard and lent his wife a hand at the washing and frequently mended the kitchen stove-pipe. He had never broken open the china pigs containing the children’s money.

We saw him arrive at the great station in Washington. He was strangely troubled and anxious, a bit incredulous, too, believing this was all some sort of put-up job. Also, somewhere on the train he had lost one of his elastic sleeve-suspenders, and one cuff kept on falling round his wrist. He walked uneasily along the red velvet carpet and was greeted by President Harding and the Ambassadors of Foreign Powers. Mr. Sousa’s band was there, and struck up an uproarious anthem composed for the occasion. The tactful committee of Daughters of the American Bourgeoisie had made all arrangements and taken all possible precautions. It had been feared that perhaps the Citizen’s Wife might be overcome, and an ambulance was waiting behind potted palms in case of any emergency. But it is always the unexpected that happens. It was Senator Lodge, who had been appointed to read the telegrams from prominent people, who swooned. President Harding, with kindly readiness, stepped into the breach. As they were handed to him he read aloud the messages from M. Clemenceau, Mr. Lloyd George, William Allen White, Samuel Gompers, Dr. Frank Crane, President Ebert, Paul Poiret, M. Paderewski, M. Venizelos, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Isaac Marcosson. Mr. Harding then spoke in the most friendly and charming way, appraising the value of preserved nationality, the solid virtue of the Founding Fathers, and the services of the Unknown Citizen to his country.

For a moment there was an awkward pause, but the Citizen’s Wife, evidently a strong-minded woman, nudged him sharply, and the Citizen tottered forward. Fortunately some New York newspaper men had been on the train with him, and had written a little speech for him to deliver. He read it, a bit tremulously. It stated that he was aware this tribute was not meant for him personally, but for the great body of middle-class citizenship he had been chosen to represent. There was great speculation in the audience as to what part of the country the Citizen came from: his accent was perhaps a trifle Hoosierish, but wiseacres insisted that his general fixings were plainly Sears-Roebuck and not identifiable with any section.

Accompanied by a troop of cavalry and the national colours, the Unknown Citizen was taken to the Capitol, where Congress, convened in joint session, awaited to do him honour. He was presented to the great body by Senator Lodge, who had now completely recovered. After being introduced, the Citizen stammered a few words of embarrassment. During the buffet lunch in the lobbies, however, he began to pluck up heart, for he found the Congressmen very human. He even ventured to express, very politely, a few sentiments about the bonus, the tariff, the income tax, the shipping subsidy, and the coal strike. Gathering confidence, he might have grown almost eloquent over these topics, but the Senatorial committee, foreseeing trouble, hastened him along to see the gifts that had been sent from all over the world. They were all laid out for inspection. Henry Ford had sent a new sedan, with a self-starter and the arms of the United States gilded on the door. William Randolph Hearst had sent a bound volume of Arthur Brisbane’s editorials. The Prince of Wales, perhaps misunderstanding the exact nature of the ceremony, had sent a solid gold punch bowl engraved Dieu et Mon Drought. The Premier of New Zealand had sent a live kangaroo. The Bailiff of Angora had sent a large silky goat. Mayor Hylan had sent a signed photograph of himself wearing overalls. The Shipping Board had sent a silver flask. But we have not space for the full list of presents.

Tea was served at the White House. All the corps diplomatique were there, and were presented to the Citizen and his Wife. It was a great afternoon. The Marine Band played in the garden; Senator Borah and William Jennings Bryan, beginning to see a sort of prickly heat burn out upon the Unknown Citizen’s forehead, tactfully played a tennis match to keep the crowd in good humour. Laddie Boy, wagging his tail vigorously, kept at the Unknown Citizen’s heels and did much to cheer him. The Unknown Citizen liked Mr. Harding greatly and found him easy to talk to; but some of the Special Representatives from abroad, such as Mr. Balfour and M. Tardieu, he found difficult.

The monument in Potomac Park was dedicated at sunset. After that the committee on Savoir Faire, observing the wilted collar of the Unknown Citizen, thought it the truest courtesy to let him escape. We ourself managed to follow him through the crowds. He and his wife looked nervously over their shoulders now and then, but they had shaken off pursuit. At a little stationery store they bought some postcards. Then they went to the movies.

SIR KENELM DIGBY

Sir Kenelm Digby, of whose acquaintance all his contemporaries seem to have been ambitious.

—Dr. Johnson, Life of Cowley.

Prohibition, I dare say, is going to make fashionable the private compilation of just such delightful works as The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Opened; London, at the Star in Little Britain, 1669. Sir Kenelm, “the friend of kings and the special friend of queens,” crony of such diverse spirits as Bacon, Ben Jonson, and Oliver Cromwell, kept this notebook of his jocund experiments in home brewing and cookery. Just as nowadays a man will jot down the formula of some friend’s shining success in the matter of domestic chianti, so did the admirable Kenelm record “Sir Thomas Gower’s Metheglin for Health,” or “My Lord Hollis’ Hydromel,” or “Sir John Colladon’s Oat-Meal Pap,” or “My Lady Diana Porter’s Scotch Collops;” and adding, of course, his own particular triumphs—e. g., “Hydromel as I Made it Weak for the Queen Mother,” “A Good Quaking Bag-Pudding,” and “To Fatten Young Chickens in a Wonderful Degree.” Sir Kenelm’s official duty at the court of Charles the First was Gentleman of the Bed-chamber; but if I had been Charles, I should have transferred him to the Pantry.

The Closet Opened (which was not published until after Sir Kenelm’s death; he was born 1603, died 1665) is the kind of book delightfully apt for the sad, sagacious, and solitary, for one cannot spend an hour in it without deriving a lively sense of the opulence and soundness of life. The affectionate attention Sir Kenelm pays the raisin makes him seem almost a Volsteadian figure: in his pages that excellent and powerful fruity capsule plays, perhaps for the first time in history, a heroic and leading rôle. Consider this:

TO MAKE ALE DRINK QUICK

When small Ale hath wrought sufficiently, draw into bottles; but first put into every bottle twelve good raisins of the Sun split and stoned. Then stop up the bottle close and set it in sand (gravel) or a cold dry Cellar. After a while this will drink exceedingly quick and pleasant. Likewise take six Wheat-corns, and bruise them, and put into a bottle of Ale; it will make it exceeding quick and stronger.

Kenelm was not only a good eater; he was a devilish good writer. The fine lusty root of English prose was in him. If this is not true literature, we know it not:

ANOTHER CLOUTED CREAM

Milk your Cows in the evening about the ordinary hour, and fill with it a little Kettle about three quarters full, so that there may be happily two or three Gallons of Milk. Let this stand thus five or six hours. About twelve a Clock at night kindle a good fire of Charcoal, and set a large Trivet over it. When the fire is very clear and quick, and free from all smoak, set your Kettle of Milk over it upon the Trivet, and have in a pot by a quart of good Cream ready to put in at the due time; which must be, when you see the Milk begin to boil simpringly. Then pour in the Cream in a little stream and low, upon a place, where you see the milk simper....

To simper—a word of sheer genius! There are many such in his recipes.

We find the raisin again at work in his directions:

TO MAKE EXCELLENT MEATHE

To every quart of Honey, take four quarts of water. Put your water in a clean Kettle over the fire, and with a stick take the just measure, how high the water cometh, making a notch, where the superficies toucheth the stick. As soon as the water is warm, put in your Honey, and let it boil, skiming it always, till it be very clean; Then put to every Gallon of water, one pound of the best Blew-raisins of the Sun, first clean picked from the stalks, and clean washed. Let them remain in the boiling Liquor, till they be throughly swollen and soft; Then take them out, and put them into a Hair-bag, and strain all the juice and pulp and substance from them in an Apothecaries Press; which put back into your liquor, and let it boil, till it be consumed just to the notch you took at first, for the measure of your water alone. Then let your Liquor run through a Hair-strainer into an empty Woodden-fat, which must stand endwise, with the head of the upper-end out; and there let it remain till the next day, that the liquor be quite cold. Then Tun it up into a good Barrel, not filled quite full, and let the bung remain open for six weeks. Then stop it up close, and drink not of it till after nine months.

This Meathe is singularly good for a Consumption, Stone, Gravel, Weak-sight, and many more things. A Chief Burgomaster of Antwerpe, used for many years to drink no other drink but this; at Meals and all times, even for pledging of healths. And though He were an old man he was of an extraordinary vigor every way, and had every year a Child, had always a great appetite and good digestion; and yet was not fat.

One of good Sir Kenelm’s most famous instructions, which has become fairly well-known, does honour not only to his delicate taste but also to his religious devotion. It is his advice on the brewing of tea—“The water is to remain upon it no longer than whiles you can say the Miserere Psalm very leisurely.” This advice occurs in the recipe

TEA WITH EGGS

The Jesuite that came from China, Ann. 1664, told Mr. Waller, That there they use sometimes in this manner. To near a pint of the infusion, take two yolks of new laid-eggs, and beat them very well with as much fine Sugar as is sufficient for this quantity of Liquor; when they are very well incorporated, pour your Tea upon the Eggs and Sugar, and stir them well together. So drink it hot. This is when you come home from attending business abroad, and are very hungry, and yet have not conveniency to eat presently a competent meal. This presently discusseth and satisfieth all rawness and indigence of the stomack, flyeth suddainly over the whole body and into the veins, and strengthenth exceedingly and preserves one a good while from necessity of eating. Mr. Waller findeth all those effects of it thus with Eggs. In these parts, He saith, we let the hot water remain too long soaking upon the Tea, which makes it extract into itself the earthy parts of the herb. The water is to remain upon it no longer than whiles you can say the Miserere Psalm very leisurely. Thus you have only the spiritual parts of the Tea, which is much more active, penetrative, and friendly to nature.

Sometimes, it is true, one suspects Sir Kenelm of a tendency to gild the lily. In the matter of perfuming his tobacco, this was his procedure:—

Take Balm of Peru half an ounce, seven or eight Drops of Oyl of Cinamon, Oyl of Cloves five drops, Oyl of Nutmegs, of Thyme, of Lavender, of Fennel, of Aniseeds (all drawn by distillation) of each a like quantity, or more or less as you like the Odour, and would have it strongest; incorporate with these half a dram of Ambergrease; make all these into a Paste; which keep in a Box; when you have fill’d your Pipe of Tobacco, put upon it about the bigness of a Pin’s Head of this Composition.

It will make the Smoak most pleasantly odoriferous, both to the Takers, and to them that come into the Room; and ones Breath will be sweet all the day after. It also comforts the Head and Brains.

It is a great temptation to go on quoting these seductive formulæ. I feel sure that my tenderer readers would relish instructions for the Beautifying Water or Precious Cosmetick,—for the secret of which ladies of high degree pursued Sir Kenelm all over Europe. (He does not include in the Closet any details of the Viper Wine for the Complection which was said to have caused the death of Lady Digby—a rather painful scandal at the time.) But I fear to trespass on your patience. Let me only add that the ambition of the Three Hours for Lunch Club has long been to hold a DIGBY DINNER, at which all the dishes will be prepared as nearly as possible according to Sir Kenelm’s prescriptions. The project offers various perplexities, and might even have to be consummated at sea, beyond the hundred-fathom curve. But if it ever comes to pass, the following menu, carefully chosen from Sir Kenelm’s delicacies, seems to me promising:—

Portugal Broth, As It Was Made for the Queen
Sack with Clove Gillyflowers
Sucket of Mallow Stalks
A Herring Pye
A Smoothening Quiddany of Quinces
My Lady Diana Porter’s Scotch Collops
Mead, from the Muscovian Ambassador’s Steward
The Queen Mother’s Hotchpot of Mutton
Pease of the Seedy Buds of Tulips
Boiled Rice in a Pipkin
Marmulate of Pippins
Dr. Bacon’s Julep of Conserve of Red Roses
Excellent Spinage Pasties
Pleasant Cordial Tablets, Which Strengthen Nature
Small Ale for the Stone
A Nourishing Hachy
Plague Water
Marrow Sops with Wine
My Lord of Denbigh’s Almond Marchpane
Sallet of Cold Capon Rosted
My Lady of Portland’s Minced Pyes
The Liquor of Life
A Quaking Bag-Pudding
Metheglin for the Colic

But I must not mislead you into thinking that Sir Kenelm was merely a convivial trencherman. His biography as related in the Encyclopædia Britannica is as diverting as a novel—more so than many. Infant prodigy, irresistible wooer, privateer, scientist, religious controversialist, astrologer, and a glorious talker, he made a profound impression on the life of his time. But, as so often happens, his name has been carried down to posterity not by the strange laborious treatise he regarded as his opus maximum, but by his chance association with one of the great books of all time. When Digby was under honorable confinement (as a “Popish recusant”) at Winchester House, Southwark, in 1642, he was busy there with chemical experiment and the MS. of his Of Bodies and Mans Soul (of which more in a moment). Apparently they treated political prisoners with more indulgence in those days. One evening he received a letter from his friend the Earl of Dorset, urging him to read a book that was making a stir among the intellectuals. One may think it was perhaps a trifle niggardly of Dorset merely to have recommended the book. To a friend in jail, surely he might (and it was just before Christmas) have sent a copy as a present. But the liberality of the Earl is not to be called in question: he had made Sir Kenelm at least one startlingly gracious gift—viz. Lady Digby herself, previously Dorset’s mistress. This oddly amusing story, or gossip, may be pursued in Aubrey’s Brief Lives, a fascinating book (published by the Oxford Press)—a sort of Social Register of seventeenth century England.

“Late as it was” when Sir Kenelm received the letter from his benefactor and colleague, he sent out at once (mark the high spirit of the true inquirer; also the sagacity of seventeenth century booksellers, who kept open at night)—

To let you see how the little needle of my Soul is throughly touched at the great Loadstone of yours, and followeth suddenly and strongly, which way soever you becken it.... I sent presently (as late as it was) to Pauls Church-yard, for this Favourite of yours, Religio Medici: which found me in a condition fit to receive a Blessing; for I was newly gotten into my Bed. This good natur’d creature I could easily perswade to be my Bed-fellow, and to wake with me, as long as I had any edge to entertain my self with the delights I sucked from so noble a conversation.

Rarely have the pleasures of reading in bed had such durable result. The following day he spent in pouring out a long, spirited and powerful letter to Dorset (75 printed pages) which has become famous as Observations upon Religio Medici, and a few years later was included as a supplement to that book—where it still remains in most editions. In this tumbling out of his honourable meditations and excitements, Sir Kenelm took issue pretty smartly with Dr. Browne on a number of points, particularly in regard to his own special hobby of Immortality. He, just as much as the Norwich physician, loved to lose himself in an Altitudo; but in some cloudlands of airy doctrine Browne seemed to him too precise. “The dint of Wit,” Digby remarked felicitously of some theological impasse, “is not forcible enough to dissect such tough matter.”

These Observations are of more than casual importance. Dorset, apparently, took steps (unknown to Digby) to have them published; and report of this coming blast roused Browne to protest courteously against “animadversions” based upon the unauthorized and imperfect version of his book—his own “true and intended Originall” being by this time in the printer’s hands. Digby had written his observations without knowing who the author of Religio was. The letters that now passed between him and Browne are an exhilarating model of controversy goldenly conducted between gentlemen of the grand manner. “You shall sufficiently honour me in the vouchsafe of your refute,” writes Browne, “and I obliege the whole world in the occasion of your Pen.” To which Digby, avowing that his comments were written without thought of print and merely as a “private exercitation,” charmingly disclaims any ambition to enter public argument with so superior a scholar. “To encounter such a sinewy opposite, or make Animadversions upon so smart a piece as yours is, requireth such a solid stock and exercise in school learning. My superficial besprinkling will serve only for a private letter, or a familiar discourse with Lady auditors. With longing I expect the comming abroad of the true copy of the Book, whose false and stoln one hath already given me so much delight.” The delightful remark about lady auditors causes one to suspect that even in that day the germ of the lecture passion was moving in circles of high-spirited females.

Digby and Browne were evidently kinsprits. They were nearly of an age; Browne was a physician, and Digby—though many considered him a mountebank and charlatan—had a genuine scientific zeal for medical dabblings. His Powder of Sympathy, a nostrum for healing wounds at a distance, has been a cause of merriment among later generations; but Sir Kenelm was no fool and I am not at all sure that there wasn’t much excellent sense in his procedure. The injury itself was washed and kept under a clean bandage. The Powder of Sympathy was to be prepared from a paste of vitriol, and the instructions included necessity for mixing and exposing it in sunshine. Sir Kenelm was quite aware of the public appetite for hocus-pocus, and surely there was a touch of anticipatory Christian Science and Coué in his idea of keeping the patient’s mind off the trouble and giving him this harmless amusement in the open air. For the sympathetic powder, please note, was never to be applied to the wound itself, but only to something carrying the blood of the injured person—a stained bandage, a garment, or even the weapon with which the damage was done. The injury was left to the curative progress of Nature. This theory of treating not the wound but the weapon might well be meditated by literary critics. For instance, when some toxicated energumen publishes an atrocious book, the best course to pursue is not to attack the author but to praise Walter de la Mare or Stella Benson. This may be termed the allopathic principle in criticism; but few of us are steadfast enough to adhere to it.

Digby’s Memoirs—not published until 1827—exhibit him as the swashbuckler, and amorist by no means faint. They are amusing enough but give only a carnal silhouette. Perhaps he did not write the book himself: there is a vein of burlesque in the narrative that makes me suspicious. It purports to be an account of Sir Kenelm’s fidelity to his wife, the lovely Venetia; and we are told that the account was written under Antonian pressure. Importuned by ladies of much personal generosity and recklessness, Sir Kenelm austerely retires to a cave and pens this confession of uxorious loyalty. When you consider that the relations of Sir Kenelm and Lady Venetia were one of the fashionable uproars of the day, you begin to guess that the Memoir (in which all the characters are concealed by romantic pseudonyms) was an elaborate skit intended for private circulation, probably the work of some satirical friend. Exactly so, when any great scandal nowadays is riding on the front pages of the newspapers, do City Room reporters compose humorous burlesques of the printed “stories,” and these have delightful currency round the office.

So you will still find legends in print suggesting that Sir Kenelm was a blend of Casanova and Dr. Munyon. He has been attributed what historians used to call “Froude’s disease”—an insufficient curiosity as to the total of 2 and 2 when added together. But a man whose memory still makes a page and a half of the Encyclopædia Britannica such lively reading, must have had more than mere animal spirits in his make-up. It is easy to find testimony to his potent social and military accomplishments. But the man himself, his earnest scientific passions, his valiant speculation on human destinies, does not emerge from the entries in encyclopædias. For that you must look into his great book Two Treatises: The Nature of Bodies, and The Nature of Mans Soul (1658). By the kindness of Mr. Wilbur Macey Stone, generous and astonishingly Elizabethan explorer of old books, I have an original, tawny and most aromatic copy of this queer treasure. The title page of the Second Treatise is endorsed, with a charming use of the aspirates—

Samuel Mellor’s Book, December 22th 1792.

Samuel Mellor his my Name

and Cheshire is my Nation

and Burton is my Dwellings

Place and Christ is my

Salvation

this Book geven

has A Gift to Samuel Mellor

Sir Kenelm dedicates the volume to his son, in a touching and honourable letter dated “Paris the last of August 1644.” “The calamity of this time” (he says) “hath bereft me of the ordinary means of expressing my affection to you; I have been casting about, to find some other way of doing that in such sort, as you may receive most profit by it. Therein I soon pitched upon these Considerations; that Parents owe unto their children, not only material subsistence for their Body, but much more, spiritual contributions to their better part, their Mind.” Accordingly, with perfect gravity and that sombre and Latinized eloquence which was the peculiar gift of his century, he proceeds to expound in nearly 600 dense pages his observations on what we would call nowadays physics and psychology. It would be agreeable enough, if I did not fear to weary you, to copy down some of Sir Kenelm’s delightful shrewd comments. A few of his section headings will serve to give an idea of his matter. For instance:—

The experience of burning glasses, and of soultry gloomy weather, prove light to be fire.

Philosophers ought not to judge of things by the rules of vulgar people.

The reason why the motion of light is not discerned coming towards us, and that there is some real tardity in it.

The true sense of the Maxim, that Nature abhorreth from vacuity.

The loadstone sendeth forth its emanations spherically. Which are of two kinds: and each kind is strongest in that hemisphere, through whose polary parts they issue out.

The reason why sometimes the same object appears through the prism in two places: and in one place more lively, in the other place more dim.

How the vital spirits sent from the brain, do run to the intended part of the body without mistake.

Of the rainbow, and how by the colour of any body, we may know the composition of the body it self.

How things renewed in the fantasie, return with the same circumstances that they had at first.

Why divers men hate some certain meats, and particularly cheese.

Here, you will agree, was a man who even when he seems naïf, examined phenomena with his own eyes and with notable sharpness. Delving into the “crooked narrow cranies & restrayned flexuous rivolets of corporeal things” was, he insisted, a “difficult & spiny affaire;” he was eager to avoid “meer Chymeras and wild paradoxes,” hoped that “by strong abstraction, and by deep retirement into the closet of judgment” he might win “a favourable doom” from his readers. There is no naïveté so dangerous as that of underestimating the power of another man’s mind. Behind some of his fanciful suggestions there is an astonishing agility of conjecture. On the subject of physiology he is delicious. Hear him (pared down to stark brevity) on the brain:—

We may take notice that it containeth, towards the middle of its substance, four concavities, as some do count them: but in truth, these four, are but one great concavity, in which four, as it were, divers roomes, may be distinguished.... Now, two rooms of this great concavity, are divided by a little body, somewhat like a skin, (though more fryable) which of itself is clear; but there it is somewhat dimmed, by reason that hanging a little slack, it somewhat shriveleth together: and this, Anatomists do call Septum lucidum, or speculum....

This part seemeth to me, to be that and onely that, in which the fansie or common sense resideth ... it is seated in the very hollow of the brain; which of necessity must be the place and receptacle where the species and similitudes of things doe reside, and where they are moved and tumbled up and down, when we think of many things. And lastly, the situation we put our head in, when we think earnestly of any thing, favoureth this opinion: for then we hang our head forwards, as it were forcing the specieses to settle towards our forehead, that from thence they may rebound, and work upon this diaphanous substance.

But it is in the Second Treatise (“Declaring the Nature and Operations of Mans Soul; out of which, The Immortality of Reasonable Souls, is Convinced”) that the darling man rises to really dazzling heights. In this mystical, ecstatic and penitential essay he (in Burton’s phrase) rectifies his perturbations. He is no longer channeled in the “crooked narrow cranies of corporeal things;” he works from withinward and spirals in happy ether:—

To thee then my soul, I now address my speech. For since by long debate, and toilsom rowing against the impetuous tides of ignorance, and false apprehensions, which overthrow thy banks, and hurry thee headlong down the stream, whiles thou art imprisoned in thy clayie mansion; we have with much ado arrived to aim at some little attome of thy vast greatness; and with the hard and tough blows of strict and wary reasoning, we have strucken out some few sparks of that glorious light, which invironeth and swelleth thee: it is high time, I should retire my self out of the turbulent and slippery field of eager strife and litigious disputation, to make my accounts with thee; where no outward noise may distract us, nor any way intermeddle between us, excepting onely that eternal verity, which by thee shineth upon my faint and gloomy eyes.... Existence is that which comprehendeth all things: and if God be not comprehended in it, thereby it is, that he is incomprehensible of us: and he is not comprehended in it, because himself is it.... Which way soever I look, I lose my sight, in seeing an infinity round about me: Length without points: Breadth without Lines: Depth without any surface. All content, all pleasure, all restless rest, all an unquietness and transport of delight, all an extasie of fruition.

So don’t let any one tell you that Sir Kenelm was only a seventeenth century epicure and bootlegger.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF AN AMIABLE VISITOR

We thought of telling you about the things that most interested a British friend of ours during the first hours of his first visit to this country.

Perhaps first of all we should give you an inkling of what kind of chap he is. He’s a Welshman, an Oxford man, served in the war as a captain in the Highland Light Infantry, was awarded the Military Cross, is now in the wholesale tobacco business, is an ardent reader, and we daren’t mention his name. He’s over here to study conditions in the world of tobacco.

We went down the bay and boarded the Baltic in the Narrows. We stood with our friend on what a landsman might call the roof while the ship came up the harbour. We pointed out Liberty, as she emerged from the sunlit wintry haze. At first glimpse, coming in from sea, she has rather a forbidding mien—her gesture seems one of warning. Then, as you come nearer, she seems to be holding up a cocktail shaker. But we promised to give our friend’s impressions, not our own.

The first things he wanted to have pointed out to him were the Woolworth Tower and the Brooklyn Bridge. Brooklyn engaged his fancy more than the Jersey shore—probably on account of the Walt Whitman tradition. “I have rather a feeling for Whitman,” he said. He was quiet as we passed the long profile of downtown skyscrapers, but we saw that he was inwardly meditating. He wanted to know about all the water tanks on top of the buildings, especially on the Jersey side. “You people seem very keen about water,” he said. He was hugely pleased with the way the tugs got the Baltic into her berth.

He wondered whether, before landing, we had better dispose of a little toddy he had in his pocket flask. He had heard that if any usquebaugh were found, the officials would confiscate the flask. We agreed that it would be better not to take any chances on this matter. He was greatly surprised and delighted with the rapidity and courtesy of the customs examination. We got away from the pier with no more trouble, he said, than we would have had in arriving at a railway terminal in London.

We took a taxi, bound for Penn. Station, and then decided to prolong the ride by going down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square, and up again. He remarked that the street paving near the docks was no better than it is in Liverpool. He was charmed by the chauffeur’s air of camaraderie. The latter, hearing through the open window that this was an exploring expedition, began offering most friendly suggestions as to nice long rides we might take, to Central Park, for instance. “Take him to see the skaters, he’ll enjoy that,” said the chauffeur. This friendly informality on the part of brakemen, soda jerkers, cab drivers, ticket choppers, shop girls, and all such public servants delighted him.

Madison Square appealed to him, for he is an admirer of O. Henry. “That’s where the old tramps sit on the benches, isn’t it?” he said. He was anxious to see a “surface car,” for he had read about them in The Four Million. The L did not seem to interest him so much. In a drug store, he was excited by the little whirling instrument that mixed our “frosted chocolate.” The lighting, spaciousness, and attractive display in the department stores tickled him. The Penn. Station gave him extraordinary pleasure. Chiefly, we thought, he was struck by a general spaciousness and lack of hurry everywhere, in the traffic, in the shops, etc. When we asked him what he wanted to see, he said, “I want to see some of you hustling.” We looked everywhere, but could find no one hustling. Like a candid observer, however, he noticed one thing which is not beneath the attention of any student of human manners. “Your people have rather a fine line in legs,” he said.

We pointed proudly to the Public Library (but could not bear to tell him that the City has again cut its appropriation for buying new books). He praised the large windows at the backs of the taxicabs, making it possible to see what was going on behind the car. In Madison Square he was particularly delighted by Diana, who seemed just then to be aiming her gilded arrow at the pale, low-swimming daylight moon. He asked us whether we thought he should subscribe to the Saturday Evening Post and the Literary Digest. Both these journals, in some way or other, had come prominently to his attention at his home in Cheshire. Harper’s and The Century, he said, he frequently reads.

He thought it was a bit unfair of the advertisers (this was in the Long Island train) to take advantage of public attention by issuing a card with the announcement NOTICE TO PASSENGERS, looking very like official information, which turned out to be a chewing gum ad. We told him about the card in the subway which says PASSENGERS CHANGE HERE and then adds “to —— Union Suits.” This amused him, but we could see that he didn’t think it quite sporting. He was highly diverted by the little signs at the subway ticket booths—Sing Out How Many and The Voice with the Smile Wins. He was quite startled to learn that the author of Trivia (one of his favourite books) is an American. He was pleased by the informality of the Long Island conductor, who, seeing a lady friend among the passengers, sat down with her between stations and had a social chat.

Standing at the front of a subway train as it roared through the tunnel from Brooklyn seemed to give him innocent happiness. Again he commented, in the downtown region, on the general air of order and good management in the conduct of the traffic. He could see none of the brutal scurry that he had been taught to expect. Going up the Woolworth Tower was the greatest adventure of these few hours. This, we think, he will not soon forget. He was greatly pleased, being himself a householder, with the American kitchen. He thought it very well planned. Jericho cider he praised without reserve. A revolving apparatus for airing clothes in the back garden pleased him mightily. Delightful fellow, blessings upon him!

It is visits such as his that add to the stock of true international understanding.

IN HONOREM: MARTHA WASHINGTON

An American figure of national consequence has passed away from the scene of her many glories. We refer to Martha Washington, the Independence Hall cat.

When we worked in the old Philadelphia Ledger office, and paragraphs were scarce, we had an unfailing recourse. We would go over to the State House (as they call it in its home town), descend to the cool delightful old cellar underneath the hall, and call on Fred Eckersberg, the engineer. We would see Martha sleeking herself on the flagstones by the cellar steps (she was the blackest cat we ever knew, giving off an almost purple lustre in hot sunlight) or perhaps we would have to search her out among the coal bins where she was fixing a layette for the next batch of kittens. In any case, Martha having been duly admired, Fred Eckersberg would gladly talk about her and tell us what were the latest adventures of her historic life. Which was always good copy, for Fred, having been on friendly terms with Philadelphia reporters for many years, knew the kind of anecdotes that would please them. One of Fred’s unconscious triumphs was the time he told us of his perplexity about ringing in the New Year in the Independence Hall belfry. It was about Christmas time, 1919. “Last January,” he said, “I rang One-Nine-One-Nine to welcome in the New Year. But what am I going to do this time? How can I ring One-Nine-Two-Nought?” We told him we saw no way out of it but to start early in the afternoon of New Year’s Eve and ring the whole One Thousand Nine Hundred and Twenty tolls.

We could say a good deal about Martha Washington: her kittens are surely the most noble in the land, charter members of the Colonial Felines of America, all born in the Hall, directly underneath the lobby where the Bell stands. When the most famous brood of all were swaddled, four fine jetty daughters born in November, 1918, Fred christened them Victory, Freedom, Liberty, and Independence. He paid us the greatest compliment of our life by offering us Victory, but at that time we were living in a small apartment in the city and we didn’t think it would be a sufficiently dignified home for such a kitten, who deserved nothing less than a residence on the Main Line (Oh, Philadelphia!), with scrapple made on the premises.

But it is time to get down to the point of our story. Martha has left the Hall. Poor Fred, in his bereavement, has taken pen in hand. We can see him, sitting at his desk down there in the ancient cellar, with all his emblems, souvenirs, and clippings posted up above him and an oblong of gold-and-green brightness shining down through the doorway from the leafy sunshine of the Square. We can see him talking it over with his comrades “the boys”—the State House carpenter and the gardeners, as they sit at their lunch in the cellar. There is the empty saucer, dry and dusty now; in the good old days Fred always brought in a little bottle of milk every morning for Martha. And this is what Fred writes us, word for word:

Phila Aug 3, 21.

Dear Friend: I thought I would write you a few lines to let you know that I am still at the Hall but the Black cat is gone—without a press agent Martha just became a cat the boys miss her as we had a bag of grass seed the mice got in and they have to hang their lunch on a string but we have a pair of Robbins that sing in the square they would not be long there if Martha was strolling around. We kept one of her kittens when I was on my vacation it was sent to the Morris Refuge with one of the men, on a Friday the next day he got a yellow slip (good bye). Lot of people ask me about her and a Friend of yours left this card: Dear friend It looks as if Martha is going to have a family—Will you save me two kittens if they are black like their ma! But she did not have a black kitten so he did not get one.

She left them for a few days came back when they were sent away this was what got her in wrong, but when a fight between two Thomas cats on the lawn was pulled off Martha’s doom was sealed. She had the same sleek black coat the same bright eyes but she was in wrong with our Superintendant so I called up and had a boy from the cat home call for her they said it would cost 50 cents so I left the cents and the job of putting her in the basket to one of the men, but her picture is still on the wall.

We are making changes and repairs about the buildings if the tower would interest you would be pleased to take you up when over in Phila had a party from New York up and they said they knew you.

The old janitor lived in the tower because he had to ring the bell for fires funerals and most everything that went on they tell me one son was born there he had three children, the rafter alongside the open fireplace is burned and we found some old shoes worn by children under the floor, and some bones we thought ment a Crime but upon investigation turned out to be soup bones from Sheep Legs. This is about all. Your Friend

Fred Eckersberg
Engineer, Independence Hall.

ACCORDING TO HOYLE

“If it be true” (remarks old John Mistletoe, in his little known Life of Edmund Hoyle) “that a happy life leaves behind it little material for the biographer, and only those whose careers have been marked by the pangs of ambition and the wearinesses of achievement offer maxims for the moralist, then there is little to be said of Edmund Hoyle. And yet it is odd that a man whose name has become proverbial, who lived to the age of close upon a century (1672–1769), and who standardized and codified the chief social amusement of his age into an etiquette which remained unchanged for six generations—it is odd, I say, that this great peaceful benefactor has left so slight a trace in biographical annals. For I ask you, which of Hoyle’s contemporaries conferred a more placable and sedentary boon upon the world than he?”

“Hoyle” (continues Mr. Mistletoe) “was a man of very speechless humour. It was his wont to say that he had been lured into the study and metaphysic of whist because it was a silent game. As is well known, the game was originally called whisk; it was Mr. Hoyle who, by his continual utterance of the imperative and hushing monosyllable Whist! when gaming with those whose tongues were apt to wag irrelevantly, caused the diversion, at first only in sport, and then in genuine earnest, to be rechristened. It was a sight not to be forgotten, by contemporary account, to see the Master (as he was known) sitting down at the Three Pigeons tavern for his afternoon rubber. The mornings he spent in tutoring wealthy ladies in the rudiments of the fashionable game, this being the chief source of his income. He was very particular, moreover, as to the standing and rank of his pupils; he was much in demand, and could afford to take only such students as satisfied his fastidious taste for youth and beauty. In fact, he anticipated the doctrine announced many years later by John Keats, who remarked, ‘I intend henceforth to have nothing to do with the society of ladies unless they be handsome. You lose time to no purpose.’

“It was, I repeat, an agreeable spectacle to witness the Master driving up to the Three Pigeons about the hour of (as we would now say) luncheon, in his white hackney coach with his emblem—the Ace of Hearts—blazoned on the panel. Before the gaming began he would always take a leisurely meal; indeed, it was his habit to say that no gentleman would ever spend less than three hours at the table. One of his humours was to insist that warm weather was dangerous to his constitution, and that in summer it was desirable to eat sparingly and with deliberation. On days that had, as someone has put it, the humidity of Uriah Heep, this was an example of his menu, which I have found filed in the old papers kept in the vaults of the Three Pigeons:

Service to Mr. Edmund Hoyle, this 28th July 1730, on acct:

A capon broth, with toasted bread

A flagon of small ale

Fricassee of sweetbreads, with currant jelly

A flask of cool Canary

Rosted wild ducks, with cheesecake and parsnips

A jugg of malmsey, from the special butt

A sallet of shrimpes and candyed cherries

A hot rabbit pye, with buttered pease and a pottle of mulled claret

Rhubarbe pasty, with barley wine to ease Mr. Hoyle’s digestions

Plague water for the hott weather

“Having done suitable homage to this judicious nourishment” (Mr. Mistletoe proceeds), “Mr. Hoyle would have brought to him his own yard of clay, which he would leisurely fill with the best pure Virginia leaf, gazing about him the while upon the impatient faces of his friends who were anxious to get to the cards. ‘Never indulge the carnal appetites immoderately in hot weather,’ he would say, blowing out a long blue whiff into the cool twilight of the old taproom, panelled in magnificent dark walnut. This was the last word uttered, for when the Master took his seat at the card table no man dared speak. A sacred quiet filled the place as he reached for the pasteboards and deftly cut for the deal, tossing back his lace cuffs over his lean yellowish wrists, the colour (he was something bilious) of old piano keys. The rest was silence, with only the fall of the cards and the occasional clink of a bottle when Mr. Hoyle refilled his vase of Burgundy, which he always drank while gaming. A life of abstemious control, he said, was needful for one who must keep his wits alert.”

L. E. W.

We are continually obtaining new and piercing glimpses into human life and character. We are now able to assert, without fear of rebuttal, that even men of unblemished intellect and lofty, serene understanding have always some particular point of frailty at which morals, virtue, and integrity collapse in a dark confusion of spiritual wreckage.

Reconsidering the above sentence it seems to need a little clarification. We shall have to explain what we mean, and can only do so by referring, with painful verity, to the Leading Editorial Writer.

L. E. W. came into our kennel yesterday morning and saw lying on our desk a newly published detective novel that a publisher had sent us. “Oh,” he said, “What’s this?” and began looking it over. We were rather busy at the moment, and paid no particular heed, but looked up a minute later to see him slipping out of our hutch with the book under his arm.

“Here!” we cried, “what are you doing with that book?”

“I’m going to read it,” he said, with bland composure.

“Nothing doing,” we asserted sternly. “We began to read that in the subway this morning, and we’re just getting interested in it. You’ll have to wait until we’ve finished it.”

“But you can’t read it in the office,” he said; “you’re too busy.”

“So are you,” we replied; “but we’re going to read it to-night; after an exhausting day we shall need an innocent diversion of that sort.”

We did not think of it at the time, but we now remember that there was a curious evasive lustre in his eye. We wish we could make it plain to you how this person, generally a highly cultivated and responsible citizen, occasionally exhibits himself as naïvely unscrupulous, in a way so charming and unashamed that, with lesser men than ourself, he successfully gets away with it.

A little later in the day, again comes L. E. W. into our nook. He looks about in an absent-minded way, giving much the appearance of the animula vagula blandula the Roman emperor told about. He made one or two random remarks, and seemed to be pretending that he had intended to say something important but had forgotten what it was. We may say that we penetrated his game immediately. We kept an eye on him, and as soon as he had retired we took the detective story and put several newspapers on top of it.

But after all, one cannot sit around the office all day watching the book one is saving for evening reading. By and by we had to go out to lunch, and thought no more of the matter until 5 o’clock. Then, hastily gathering our effects for the trek uptown, we looked for the novel. It was gone.

We could not quite believe it, at first. We thought we must have mislaid it somewhere on top of our desk. We rummaged briskly. No sign of it. With a sudden vile suspicion we ran to L. E. W.’s room. He was gone, too.

Well, we had to console ourself on the ride uptown by reading something else; but you know how it is—when you have set your heart on finishing a particular story....

This morning L. E. W. has just come into our coop, with his usual enigmatic smile, and laid the book before us. We assailed him with bitter reproach and contumely. But we made no impression on him. There is some mysterious knot of villainy in his bosom that leads him to believe that any detective story left within his reach.... Of course it is true that writing Leading Editorials for a number of years may well undermine a man’s character. But that is what we mean when we say that even men of unblemished intellect and lofty, serene understanding have always some particular point of frailty at which morals, virtue, and integrity collapse in a dark confusion of spiritual wreckage.

We haven’t mentioned the title of the book, because L. E. W. says it isn’t much good. But we are not certain whether that is not just his quaint way of trying to minify the gruesomeness of his offence. It is a perverted form of conscience: he thinks that if he tells us the book is punk we will not regret that our reading was brutally postponed. But we are going to tell him that he missed a trick there. It would have been much more in line with the delightful humour for which he is famous if he had said: “It’s a great yarn. You ought to read it.”

OUR EXTENSION COURSE

This has been a pleasantly serene quiet morning in the office, and we have been sitting here tenderly educating ourself by studying the catalogue of University Extension Courses given at Columbia. We may not have admitted it before, but we are rather ambitious, and find a great deal in this fasciculus that appeals to our necessities.

Among the courses we should like to enroll in, first we come to Business e163—Personnel methods for office executives (Fee $24). This would be highly advantageous to us, to teach us how to get along tactfully with office boys, proof-readers, leading editorial writers, and sudden, unexpected telephone calls. We look somewhat wistfully upon Business e13—Advertising Display and Mechanics, and Business e17—Salesmanship. (“The student is given a grounding in the principles of selling and practice in the presentation of a selling proposition from its inception in the customer’s mind throughout its development and final consummation as a sale.”) But the course for us, austerely denying ourself the lectures on Advanced Advertising Writing, is Business e19-20—Sales promotion (Fee $24). This “includes a thorough study of merchandising, direction of a sales force, methods of breaking down sales resistance.” It specializes in “dealer helps” and regards “consumer advertising” as only secondary. We agree.

The Graduate Courses in Psychology of Advertising and Selling we feel are probably too advanced for us.

So we pass eagerly on to literary topics. English elf-2f has an agreeably elvish sound—Advanced short story writing; but it’s a bit expensive (Fee $48. We might not get that much for the story after we had written it.). Juvenile story writing is only $32; but we elect English e3f-4f—Play Production. The fee for that is only $24, which shows you how much money a lot of theatrical managers waste; moreover, it is held in the Attic of Hamilton Hall, which sounds very jolly. The Attic playwrights were always pretty good. And certainly we must have English e11-12—Public speaking, which is only $16, and gives us “drill in breathing, articulation, gesture and reading aloud, after-dinner speaking; how to stir the emotions and move to action.” Philosophy, of course, must not be neglected: we rather like the look of Philosophy e135—Radical, conservative, and reactionary tendencies in present-day morals, which seems to cover the ground. (Fee $24.) Photoplay composition e3—Advanced course “deals with the finer phases of character delineation” (Fee $24) and ought to be a pleasant relaxation, for “Scenario editors and directors will address the students from time to time.” Physical education eY1-Y2—Swimming ($16) will very happily conclude that part of our course.

A great need in our life would obviously be filled by Secretarial Correspondence e2—Letter writing (Fee $24). This studies the methods adopted by “Huxley, Lanier, Lowell, Henry James, William James, Mark Twain, Cicero, Pliny the Younger, and the letter writers of the World War” in dealing with their correspondence. But we are anxious to get on to even more congenial subjects. Cookery e3L—General Principles of cookery and their application. Lectures and laboratory work (Fee $30) appeals to us. Also Cookery 41xL—Principles of candy making ($10) and Cookery e75L—Large quantity cookery (Fee $30). The only difficulty here is that the costume required for laboratory courses in cooking is “white cotton clothing, plain skirt; tailored waist; plain white collar; long plain white apron with bib.” That presents difficulties.