POST-IMPRESSIONS

POST-IMPRESSIONS

An Irresponsible Chronicle

BY

SIMEON STRUNSKY

Author of "The Patient Observer," "Through

the Outlooking Glass," etc.

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1914

Copyright, 1913,

By THE EVENING POST COMPANY,

Copyright, 1914,

By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

The papers in the present volume were published during 1913 in the Saturday Magazine of the New York Evening Post.

CONTENTS

POST-IMPRESSIONS

[I]

ALMA MATER BROADWAY

He came in without having himself announced, nodded cheerfully, and dropped into a chair across the desk from where I sat.

"I am not interfering with your work, am I?" he said.

"To tell the truth," I replied, "this is the busiest day in the week for me."

"Fine," he said. "That means your mind is working at its best, brain cells exploding in great shape, and you can follow my argument without the slightest difficulty. What I have to say is of the highest importance. It concerns the present condition of the stage."

"In that case," I said, "you want to see Mr. Smith. He is the editor responsible for our dramatic page."

"I want to speak to the irresponsible editor," he said. "I asked and they showed me in here. I think I had better begin at the beginning."

I sighed and looked out of the window. But that made no difference. He, too, looked out of the window and spoke as follows:

"Last night," he said, "I attended the first performance of A. B. Johnson's powerful four-act drama entitled 'H₂O.' It was a remorseless exposure of the phenomena attending the condensation of steam. In the old days before the theatre became perfectly free the general public knew nothing of the consequences that ensue when you bring water to a temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit. The public didn't know and didn't care. Those who did know kept the secret to themselves. I am not exaggerating when I say that there was a conspiracy of silence on the subject. A play like 'H₂O' would have been impossible. The public would not have tolerated such thoroughgoing realism as Johnson employs in his first act, for instance. With absolute fidelity to things as they are he puts before us a miniature reciprocating engine, several turbine engines, and the latest British and German models in boilers, piston-rods, and valve-gears. When the curtain rose on the most masterly presentation of a machine shop ever brought before the public, the house rocked with applause. But this was nothing compared to the delirious outburst that marked the climax of the second act, when the hero, with his arm about the woman he loves, proudly declares that saturated steam under a pressure of 200 pounds shows 843.8 units of latent heat and a volume of 2.294 cubic feet to the pound. The curtain was raised eleven times, but the audience would not be content until the author appeared before the footlights escorted by a master plumber and the president of the steamfitters' union.

"The third act was laid in the reception room of a Tenderloin resort—"

"I don't quite see," I said.

"That followed inevitably from the development of the plot," he replied. "The heroine, you must understand, had been abducted by the president of a rival steamfitters' union and had been sold into a life of shame. She is saved in the nick of time by an explosion of the boiler due to superheated steam. In the old days such a scene would have been impossible and the author's lesson about the effects of condensation and vaporization would have been lost to the world."

"And the play will be a success?" I said.

"It's a knockout," he replied. "No play of real life with a punch like that has been produced since C. D. Brewster put on his three-act tragi-comedy, 'Ad Valorem.' As the title implies, the play sets out to demonstrate the difference between the Payne-Aldrich tariff law and the Underwood law, item by item. I have rarely seen an audience so deeply stirred as all of us were during the long and pathetic scene toward the end of the first act in which the author deals with the chemical and mineral oil schedule. Are you aware that under the Underwood law the duty on formaldehyde is reduced from twenty-five per cent. to one cent a pound?"

"I hardly ever go to the theatre nowadays," I said.

He looked at me reproachfully.

"Some day you will find yourself, quite unexpectedly, facing a crisis in which your ignorance of the duty on formaldehyde will cost you dear, and then you will have cause to regret your indifference toward the progress of the modern drama. However, the third act of 'Ad Valorem' is laid in the reception room of a Tenderloin resort."

"What?" I said.

"It was bound to be," he replied. "Freed from all Puritanical restrictions, the playwright of the present day follows wherever his plot leads him in accordance with the truth of life. In 'Ad Valorem,' for instance, the fabulously rich importer of oils and chemicals who is the villain of the piece has succeeded in smuggling an enormously valuable consignment of formaldehyde out of the Government warehouse. What is more natural than that he should conceal the smuggled goods in the Tenderloin? The case is a perfectly simple one. Forbid a playwright to show the interior of a Tenderloin dive and the public will never know the truth about the Underwood bill. You see, there is nothing about the tariff in the newspapers. There is nothing in the magazines. College professors never mention the subject. Campaign speakers ignore it. There is a conspiracy of silence. Only the theatre offers us enlightenment on the subject. Under such conditions would you keep the playwright from telling us what he knows?"

"Putting it that way—" I said.

"I knew you would agree with me," he went on. "Take, for instance, E. F. Birmingham's realistic drama, 'The Shortest Way,' in which the author has demonstrated with implacable truthfulness and irresistible logic that in any triangle the sum of two sides is greater than the third. In a joint letter to the freshman classes of Columbia University and New York University, the author and the producer of 'The Shortest Way' have pointed out that nowhere have the principles of plane geometry been so clearly formulated as in the second act of the play. The gunman has just shot down his victim on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street. He flees northward on Broadway to Forty-third Street and then doubles backward on Seventh Avenue. The hero, who is a professor of mathematics, recalling his Euclid, runs westward on Forty-second Street, and the curtain descends. At the beginning of the next act we find that the gunman has taken refuge in the reception room of a Tender—"

"I know," I replied. "He was driven there by the irresistible logic of the dramatist's idea."

"Exactly," he said. And so left me.

[II]

THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE

From the chapter entitled "My Milkman," in Cooper's volume of "Contemporary Portraits," hitherto unpublished, through no fault of his own, but because one publisher declined to handle anything but typewritten copy, and another suggested that if cut down by half the book might be accepted by the editor of some religious publication, and still another editor thought that if several chapters were expanded and a love story inserted, the thing might do, otherwise there was no market for essays, especially such as failed to take a cheerful view of life, whereupon Cooper insisted that his book was exceptionally cheerful, inasmuch as it showed that life could be tolerable in spite of being so queer, to which the editor replied that serializing a book of humour was quite out of the question. "Then how about Pickwick?" said Cooper—but let us get back to the chapter on the milkman. I quote:

Would sleep never come! I shifted the pillow to the foot of the bed and back; threw off the covers; pulled them over my head; discarded them; repeated the multiplication table; counted footsteps in the street beneath my window; lit a cigarette; tried to go to sleep sitting up and embracing my knees the way they bury the dead in Yucatan. No use. I would doze off, and immediately that unfortunate column of figures would appear, demanding to be added up, and I unable to determine whether sums written in Roman numerals could be added up at all. That is the disadvantage of taking conversation seriously, after ten in the evening, or at any time. I had been discussing the immigration problem till nearly midnight, and now I was busy adding up the annual influx from Austria-Hungary during the last twelve years expressed in Roman numerals. Some people are different. Their opinions don't hurt them. I have heard people say the most biting things about the need of abolishing religion and the family, and five minutes later ask for a caviare sandwich. Whereas I take the total immigration from Austria-Hungary for the last twelve years to bed with me and cannot fall asleep.

I heard the rattle of wheels under my window. It was nearing daybreak. I looked at my watch and it was close to five. I got up, washed in cold water, dressed, and went outside. As I walked downstairs I heard the clatter of bottles in the hallway below and some one whistling cheerfully. It was the milkman. His wagon was at the curb, and as I passed down the front steps and stopped to breathe in the sharp, clean, mystic air of dawn, the milkman's horse raised his head, gazed at me for a moment with a curious, friendly scepticism, and sank back into thoughtful contemplation of a spot eighteen inches immediately in front of his fore-legs.

(Here one editor had written in the margin: "Amateurish beginning; should have led off with a crisp phrase or two addressed to the milkman and then proceeded to a psychological analysis of the milkman's horse.")

I said to the milkman:

"This life of yours must be wonderfully conducive to seeing things from a new angle. A world of chill and pure half-shadows; the happiest time of the twenty-four hours; the roisterers gone to bed and the factory-workers not stirring for a good hour. I should imagine that men in your line would all be philosophers."

"It does get a bit lonely," he said. "But I always carry an evening paper with me and read a few lines from house to house. Do you think they'll let Thaw off?"

"What do you think about it?" I said. "I haven't been following up the case."

"I have read every bit of the story," he said. "He isn't any more crazy than you or me. He's been punished enough; what's the use of persecuting a man like that?"

If Thaw were as sound in mind as my friend the milkman, there would be no doubt that he deserved his freedom. My new acquaintance was so well set up, so clear-eyed, with that ruddy glow which comes from shaving and washing in cold water before dawn, with the quiet air of peace and strength which comes from working in the silent hours. I thought what an upright, independent life a milkman's must be, so free from the petty chaffering and meanness that make up the ordinary tradesman's routine. He has no competition to contend with. He is no one's servant. He deposits his wares at your doorstep and you take them or leave them as you please. He can work in the dark because he does not need the light to study your face and overreach you. With no one to watch him, with no one to criticise him, with leisure and silence in which to work out his problems—I envied him.

(Here another editor had written: "Tedious; chance for an excellent bit of characterisation in dialogue entirely missed.")

"You're an early riser," he said.

"Can't fall asleep," I said. "This air will do me good."

"A brisk walk," he suggested.

"I'm too tired," I said.

He turned on the wagon step. "Jump in," he said; and when I was seated beside him he clucked to the horse, who raised his drooping head and started off diagonally across the street, apparently confident that he would find another cobblestone to contemplate, eighteen inches in front of his fore-legs.

"A good many more people find it hard to sleep nowadays than ever before," he said. "You can tell by the windows that are lit up. Though very often it's diphtheria or something of the sort. You hear the little things whimper, and sometimes a man will run down the street and pull the night-bell at the drug-store."

"Then you don't read all the time while you are driving?"

"Oh, you notice those things and keep on reading. It isn't very noisy about this time of the day." He laughed.

"I should think you'd be tired," I said.

He said they did not work them too hard in his line. The hours were reasonable. At one time there was an attempt on the part of the dairy companies to make the hours longer; but the milkmen have some union of their own, and there was a strike which ended in the companies agreeing to pay for over-time from 7 to 9 a.m. Their association was more of a social and benefit society than a trade union. Once a month in summer they had an outing with lunch and some kind of a cabaret show and dancing. They were a contented lot. The work was not too exacting. He could read the evening paper when it got light enough, or sometimes he could just sit still and think.

Think what?

Again I envied him. What extraordinary facilities this man had for thinking straight, for seeing things clearly in this crisp morning air, and around him silence and everything as fresh, as frank, as fragrant as when the world was still young.

He blushed and hesitated, but finally confessed that for more than a year he had been carrying about in his head a scenario for a moving-picture play. His story was naturally interrupted at frequent intervals as he went about the distribution of his milk bottles. But stripped of repetitions and ambiguities the plot he had evolved in the course of more than a year's driving through the silent streets was about as follows:

The infant daughter of an extremely wealthy Mexican mine-owner is stolen by the gipsies. When she grows up she is chosen by the gipsy king for his bride. Before the wedding takes place the gipsies plan to rob the house of a Mexican millionaire who is no other than the girl's father. She volunteers to gain entrance into the house by posing as a celebrated Spanish dancer. At night she opens the door to her confederates. Leaving the girl to keep watch over their prisoner, the gipsies go about ransacking the house. The unhappy man groans and cries out, "Ah, if only I could see my little Juanita before I die." Father and daughter recognise each other, she releases him from big bonds, and arming themselves with Browning revolvers they shoot down the gipsy marauders as they enter the room in single file. Juanita marries the young overseer whom the childless old man has designated as his heir.

(Here one editor wrote: "An ordinary plot; nothing in it to show that it was written by a milkman instead of a clergyman or a structural iron worker.")

I think the criticism is a fair one.

[III]

SUMMER READING

Our vacation plans last year were of the simplest. Personally, I said to Emmeline, there was just one thing I longed for—to get away to some quiet place where I could lie on my back under the trees and look up at the clouds. To this Emmeline replied that in this posture (1) I always smoke too much; (2) I catch cold and begin to sneeze; (3) I don't look at the clouds at all, but tire my eyes by studying the baseball page in the full glare of the sun. The newspaper habit is one which I regularly forswear every summer on leaving town. I hold to my resolution to this extent that I refrain from going down to the post office in the morning to buy a paper. But toward eleven o'clock the strain becomes unendurable and I borrow a copy of yesterday's paper after peering wistfully over other people's shoulders. Emmeline thinks this habit all the more inexcusable because, working for a newspaper myself, I ought to know there is never anything in them. She can't imagine what drives me on. I told her, perhaps it is the unconscious hope that some day I shall find in the paper something worth while.

Actually, one soon discovers that the simple act of lying on one's back on the grass and looking up at the clouds involves an extraordinary amount of preparation. I am inclined to think that there must be correspondence courses which teach in ten lessons how to lie on one's back properly and look up. There must be text-books on how to tell the cumuli from the cirrus. There must be useful hints on how to relax and lose yourself in the immensity of the blue void.

The personal equipment one needs to gaze at the clouds, if you believe the department stores, is tremendous. English flannels; French shirtings; native khaki; silks; home-spuns; belts with a monogram buckle; flowered cravats in colours to blend with the foliage; safety razors; extra blades for the razors; strops to sharpen the blades; unguents to keep the strops flexible; nickeled cases to keep the unguents in; and metal polish for the nickeled cases. Arduous labour is involved in going to Maple View Farm from the comparatively simple civilisation of New York. I am not certain whether in the best circles one can properly lie on one's back and look at the clouds without a humidor and a thermos bottle.

Emmeline said I must be sure and not forget my fishing-pole, as that trout in the brook behind the barn would probably be expecting me.

It seems absurd for a full-grown man to speak of hating a trout. But why deny it? When I think of the utterly debased creature in the pool behind the barn, the accumulated results of ten thousand years of civilisation drop from me, and my heart is surcharged with venom. It all came about so gradually. My landlord asked me one morning whether I shouldn't like to try my luck with his rod. I said I should. I took his rod and hooked the blackberry bush on the other side of the stream. I did better on my next try. As my hook sank below the surface, a thrill ran along the line, the slender bamboo stem arched forward, and I waited with my heart in my mouth for an enormous trout to emerge and engage me in a life-and-death struggle. But through three long weeks he refused to emerge. Emmeline said it was the bottom of the soap-box whose upper edge is visible above the surface. But that cannot be. No inanimate object could elicit in any one the rage and the sense of frustrated desire—perhaps I had better say no more. All my better instincts corrode with the thought of that fish. It would have been compensation, at least, if I had ever caught any other fish in that brook. It might have been a near relation, a favourite son perhaps, and I should have had my revenge—but there I go again.

What Emmeline wanted was a chance to catch up in her reading. It had been a hard winter and spring, with the doctor too frequently in the house and books quite out of the question. There were a half-dozen novels Emmeline had in mind, not to mention Mr. Bryce's book on South America, John Masefield, and Strindberg, whom she cordially detests. I do too. I warned her against drawing up too ambitious a list, but she was determined to make a summer of it. She said she felt illiterate and terribly old. All I could do was to mention a few bookshops where she could get the best choice with the least expenditure of energy. Nevertheless she came back from her first day's shopping with a headache.

Éponge is a rough, Turkish-towel fabric, selling in many widths, and eminently desirable for out-of-door wear because of its peculiar adaptability to the slim styles which prevent walking. Éponge has this fatal defect, however, that when it is advertised in ready-made gowns at an astounding reduction from $39.50, all the desirable models sell out some time before ten o'clock in the morning. Hence Emmeline's headache. She took very little supper and expressed the belief that our vacation would be a complete failure. The mountains are always hot and dusty and the crowd is a very mixed one.

After a while Emmeline had a cup of tea and felt better. We went over our list of books for the summer and she wondered whether it wouldn't pay to get a seamstress into the house and avoid the exhausting trips downtown. On second thoughts she decided not to. Next morning she was quite well and asked me to remind her not to forget Robert Herrick's new novel. She said she might drop in at the office for lunch if she got through early at the stores, and we might look at books together.

Charmeuse is a shimmering, silk-like material which lends itself admirably to summer wear, because it stains easily. But in its effect on the shopper's nerves, charmeuse is even worse than éponge. In fact, as a preparation for a summer's reading, I don't know what is more exhausting than charmeuse, unless it be crêpe de Chine. Emmeline did not drop in for lunch that day, and when I came home at night, I found her more depressed than ever. There was nothing to be had downtown. Prices were impossible and anything else wasn't fit to be touched. It might be just as well to stay in town for the summer as go away and take the chance of getting typhoid. The situation was somewhat relieved by the arrival at this juncture of several parcels, some long and narrow, and others short and square. One particularly heavy box felt as if it might contain a set of Strindberg, but turned out to be a really handsome coat in blue chinchilla which Emmeline explained would be just the thing for cool nights in the country. She had bought it in despair at obtaining the kind of crêpe de Chine she wanted. The crêpe de Chine came in a smaller box.

At breakfast the next day we were tremendously cheerful. I told Emmeline of the handsome raincoat I had bought in preparation for lying on my back on the grass and looking up at the clouds. From that we passed to the new Brieux play. But when Emmeline intimated that she was going downtown soon after breakfast, I grew anxious.

"Do you think," I said, "that it will really make any difference to Mr. Galsworthy whether you read him in a voile or in a white cotton ratine?"

"If that is the way you feel about it," said Emmeline, "I can telephone and have them take all these things back. I hate them anyhow."

"What I mean is," I said, "that you don't want to wear yourself out completely before we leave the city. We have a month's reading ahead of us. Let us begin it in peace of mind."

"With nothing to wear?" she said.

Tulle is a partly transparent material, which in the hands of a skilful milliner becomes an invaluable aid to a thorough comprehension of the plays of M. Brieux, especially when studied amid the complexities of life on Maple View Farm. As usual, it is the department stores which have been first to discover this fundamental connection in life. They have everything necessary for the thorough enjoyment of Mr. Bryce's book on South America—blouses, toques, parasols, and tennis shoes. Special bargains in linen crash and batiste are offered on the same day with a cut-rate edition of "Damaged Goods." Reading Brieux in the country is almost as complicated a diversion as lying on one's back and looking up at the clouds.

[IV]

NOCTURNE

Once every three months, with fair regularity, she was brought into the Night Court, found guilty, and fined. She came in between eleven o'clock and midnight, when the traffic of the court is as its heaviest, and it would be an hour, perhaps, before she was called to the bar. When her turn came she would rise from her seat at one end of the prisoners' bench and confront the magistrate.

Her eyes did not reach to the level of the magistrate's desk. A policeman in citizens' clothes would mount the witness stand, take oath with a seriousness of mien which was surprising, in view of the frequency with which he was called upon to repeat the formula, and testify in an illiterate drone to a definite infraction of the law of the State, committed in his presence and with his encouragement. While he spoke the magistrate would look at the ceiling. When she was called upon to answer she defended herself with an obvious lie or two, while the magistrate looked over her head. He would then condemn her to pay the sum of ten dollars to the State and let her go.

She came to look forward to her visits at the Night Court.

The Night Court is no longer a centre of general interest. During the first few months after it was established, two or three years ago, it was one of the great sights of a great city. For the newspapers it was a rich source of human-interest stories. It replaced Chinatown in its appeal to visitors from out of town. It stirred even the languid pulses of the native inhabitant with its offerings of something new in the way of "life." The sociologists, sincere and amateur, crowded the benches and took notes.

To-day the novelty is worn off. The newspapers long ago abandoned the Night Court, clergymen go to it rarely for their texts, and the tango has taken its place. But the sociologists and the casual visitor have not disappeared. Serious people, anxious for an immediate vision of the pity of life, continue to fill the benches comfortably. No session of the court is without its little group of social investigators, among whom the women are in the majority. Many of them are young women, exceedingly sympathetic, handsomely gowned, and very well taken care of.

As she sat at one end of the prisoners' bench waiting her turn before the magistrate's desk, she would cast a sidelong glance over the railing that separated her from the handsomely gowned, gently bred, sympathetic young women in the audience. She observed with extraordinary admiration and delight those charming faces softened in pity, the graceful bearing, the admirably constructed yet simple coiffures, the elegance of dress, which she compared with the best that the windows in Sixth Avenue could show. She was amazed to find such gowns actually being worn instead of remaining as an unattainable ideal on smiling lay figures in the shop windows.

Occupants of the prisoners' bench are not supposed to stare at the spectators. She had to steal a glance now and then. Her visits to the Night Court had become so much a matter of routine that she would venture a peep over the railing while the case immediately preceding her own was being tried. Once or twice she was surprised by the clerk who called her name. She stood up mechanically and faced the magistrate as Officer Smith, in civilian clothes, mounted the witness stand.

She had no grudge against Officer Smith. She did not visualise him either as a person or as a part of a system. He was merely an incident of her trade. She had neither the training nor the imagination to look behind Officer Smith and see a communal policy which has not the power to suppress, nor the courage to acknowledge, nor the skill to regulate, and so contents itself with sending out full-fed policemen in civilian clothes to work up the evidence that defends society against her kind through the imposition of a ten-dollar fine.

To some of the women on the visitors' benches the cruelty of the process came home: this business of setting a two-hundred-pound policeman in citizens' clothes, backed up by magistrates, clerks, court criers, interpreters, and court attendants, to worrying a ten-dollar fine out of a half-grown woman under an enormous imitation ostrich plume. The professional sociologists were chiefly interested in the money cost of this process to the taxpayer, and they took notes on the proportion of first offenders. Yet the Night Court is a remarkable advance in civilisation. Formerly, in addition to her fine, the prisoner would pay a commission to the professional purveyor of bail.

Sometimes, if the magistrate was young or new to the business, she would be given a chance against Officer Smith. She would be called to the witness chair and under oath be allowed to elaborate on the obvious lies which constituted her usual defence. This would give her the opportunity, between the magistrate's questions, of sweeping the court-room with a full, hungry look for as much as half a minute at a time. She saw the women in the audience only, and their clothes. The pity in their eyes did not move her, because she was not in the least interested in what they thought, but in how they looked and what they wore. They were part of a world which she would read about—she read very little—in the society columns of the Sunday newspaper. They were the women around whom headlines were written and whose pictures were printed frequently on the first page.

She could study them with comparative leisure in the Night Court. Outside in the course of her daily routine she might catch an occasional glimpse of these same women, through the windows of a passing taxi, or in the matinée crowds, or going in and out of the fashionable shops. But her work took her seldom into the region of taxicabs and fashionable shops. The nature of her occupation kept her to furtive corners and the dark side of streets. Nor was she at such times in the mood for just appreciation of the beautiful things in life. More than any other walk of life, hers was of an exacting nature, calling for intense powers of concentration both as regards the public and the police. It was different in the Night Court. Here, having nothing to fear and nothing out of the usual to hope for, she might give herself up to the æsthetic contemplation of a beautiful world of which, at any other time, she could catch mere fugitive aspects.

Sometimes I wonder why people think that life is only what they see and hear, and not what they read of. Take the Night Court. The visitor really sees nothing and hears nothing that he has not read a thousand times in his newspaper and had it described in greater detail and with better-trained powers of observation than he can bring to bear in person. What new phase of life is revealed by seeing in the body, say, a dozen practitioners of a trade of whom we know there are several tens of thousands in New York? They have been described by the human-interest reporters, analysed by the statisticians, defended by the social revolutionaries, and explained away by the optimists. For that matter, to the faithful reader of the newspapers, daily and Sunday, what can there be new in this world from the Pyramids by moonlight to the habits of the night prowler? Can the upper classes really acquire for themselves, through slumming parties and visits to the Night Court, anything like the knowledge that books and newspapers can furnish them? Can the lower classes ever hope to obtain that complete view of the Fifth Avenue set which the Sunday columns offer them? And yet there the case stands: only by seeing and hearing for ourselves, however imperfectly, do we get the sense of reality.

That is why our criminal courts are probably our most influential schools of democracy. More than our settlement houses, more than our subsidised dancing-schools for shop-girls, they encourage the get-together process through which one-half the world learns how the other half lives. On either side of the railing of the prisoners' cage is an audience and a stage.

That is why she would look forward to her regular visits at the Night Court. She saw life there.

[V]

HAROLD'S SOUL, I

I agree with the publishers of Miss Amarylis Pater's book, "The New Motherhood," that the subject is one which cannot possibly be ignored. I have not only read the book, but I have discussed it with Mrs. Hogan, and with my eldest son Harold, who will be seven next June. As a result I am confronted with certain remarkable differences of opinion.

Twenty years ago, as I plainly recall, the Sacred Function of Motherhood was not a topic of popular interest. There were a great many mothers then, of course, and there were unquestionably many more children than there are to-day. People, as a rule, spoke of their mothers with fondness, and sometimes even with reverence. The habit had been forming for several thousand years, in the course of which poets and painters never grew tired of describing mothers who were engaged in such highly useful occupations as bending over cradles, watching by sick-beds, baking, mending, teaching, laughing in play-rooms, weeping at the Cross, manipulating with equal dexterity the precious vials of love and sacrifice and the carpet slipper of justice. But though people had thus got into the way of accepting their mothers as an essential part in the scheme of things, they rarely thought it necessary to write to the editor about the Sacred Function of Motherhood. I mean in the impersonal, scientific sense in which Amarylis Pater uses the phrase.

Life in general was a pitifully unorganised, rule-of-thumb affair in those days. People fell in love because every one was doing it and without any expressed intention to advance the purposes of Evolution. They did not marry because they were anxious to render social service; but waited only till they had saved up enough to furnish a home. They bore children without regard to the future of the race. When the child came it was not a sociological event. The family did not consider the occurrence sacred, as Miss Vivian Holborn insists on calling it in her frequent communications to the press. The family contented itself with wishing the mother well and hoping the baby would not look too much like its father.

Here I thought it would be well to confirm my own impressions by the testimony of a competent witness. So I turned and called through the open door into the dining-room.

"Mrs. Hogan," I said, "what do you think of the Sacred Function of Motherhood?"

"What do I think of what?" said Mrs. Hogan.

"Of the Sacred Function of Motherhood," I repeated, rather timidly.

She looked at me with a distrustful eye, her broom suspended in midair.

Mrs. Hogan comes in once a week to help out. Distrust is her chronic attitude toward me. She has all of the busy woman's aversion for a man about the house while domestic operations are under way. But besides, she cannot quite understand why a full-grown and able-bodied man should be lolling at his desk, pen in hand, when he ought to be downtown working for his family. She is aware, of course, that all the members of my family are well-nourished, decently dressed, and apparently quite happy. But that only renders the source of my income all the more dubious. When any one asks Mrs. Hogan how many children she has, she stares for some time at the ceiling before replying. From which I gather that there must be several.

"I refer to the business of being a mother, Mrs. Hogan. Have you never felt what a sacred thing that is?"

"An' what would there be sacred about the same?" she asked, seeing that I was quite serious. "Bearin' a child every other year, an' nursin' them, an' bringin' them through sickness, an' stayin' up nights to sew an' wash an' darn, an' drivin' them out to school, an' goin' out by the day's wurrk, where's the time for anythin' sacred to come into the life of a woman?"

"Just the same it does," I said. "Motherhood, Mrs. Hogan, is so holy a thing nowadays that a great many women are afraid to touch it, preferring to write in the magazines about it. Are you aware that when you married Mr. Hogan you were performing an act of social service?"

"I was not that," said Mrs. Hogan, "I was doin' a service to Jim, besides plazin' myself. 'Twas himself needed some one to take care of him."

"But that would mean," I said, "that you were false to your own highest self. If you had read Miss Pater's book you would know that any marriage entered into without the sense of social service merely means that a woman is selling herself to a man for life for the mere price of maintenance."

"When I married Jim," said Mrs. Hogan, "he was after being out of a job for six months."

She went back to her work more than ever puzzled why my wife and the children should look so well taken care of.

In those days—I mean about the time Mrs. Hogan was married to Jim, and I was at college constructing my world of ideas out of the now forgotten books which Mr. Gaynor was always quoting—I recall distinctly that the sacred things were also the secret things. What burned hot in the heart was allowed to rest deep in the heart. Partly this was because of a common habit of reticence which we have so fortunately outgrown. But another reason must have been that life then, as I have said, was imperfectly organised. To-day we have applied the principle of the division of labour so that we no longer expect the same person to do the work of the world and to feel its sacred significance. Thus, to-day there are women who are mothers and other women who proclaim the sacred function of motherhood. To-day there are women who bring up their children, and other women who, at the slightest provocation, thrill to the clear, immortal soul that looks out of the innocent eyes of childhood.

At this moment the clear, immortal soul of my boy, Harold, finds utterance in a succession of blood-curdling howls. He is playing Indians again. The wailing accompaniment in high falsetto emanates from the immortal soul of the baby. Those two immortalities are at it again.

I call out, "Harold!"

There is a silence.

"Harold!"

With extreme deliberation he appears in the doorway. I recognise him largely by intuition, so utterly smeared up is he from crawling in single file the entire length of the hall on his stomach. Beneath that thick deposit of rich alluvial soil I assume that my son exists. I ask him what he has been doing with the baby.

He had been doing nothing at all. He had merely tied her by one leg to a chair and pretended to scalp her with a pair of ninepins. He had performed a war dance around her and every time his ritual progress brought him face to face with the baby he made believe to brain her, but he only meant to see how near he could come without actually touching her, and he would strike the chair instead. He didn't know why the baby shrieked.

"Harold," I said, "do you feel the sacred innocence of childhood brooding in you?"

He was alarmed, but bravely attempted a smile.

"Ah, father!" he said.

I looked at him severely.

"Do you know what I ought to do to you in the name of the New Parenthood?"

"Ah, father!" and his lip trembled.

"You are a disgrace to the eternal spark in you," I said.

He lowered his head and began to cry. It required an effort to be stern, but I persisted.

"Harold," I said, "you will go into your room and stand in the corner for ten minutes. Close the door behind you. I will tell you when time is up."

He dragged himself away heartbroken and I found it was useless trying to write any more. I had made two people utterly miserable. I threw down my pen and rose to take a book from the shelf, but stopped in the act. Out of Harold's room came music. I stole to the door and looked in. He had not disobeyed orders. He had merely dressed himself in one of the nurse's aprons and the baby's cap, and standing erect in his corner, he sang "Dixie," with all the fervour of his fresh young voice.

About his appearance there was nothing sacred.

[VI]

EDUCATIONAL

Half-minute lessons for up-to-the-minute thinkers:

I. WORD STUDY

Child, noun; a student of sex hygiene; a member of boy scout organisations and girls' camp-fire organisations for the practice of the kind of self-control that parents fail to exercise; a member of school republics for the study of politics while father reads the sporting page; a ward of the State; a student of the phenomena of alcoholism; a handicap carefully avoided by specialists in child-study; one-third of a French family; the holder of an inalienable title to happiness which the Government must supply; in general, a human being under thirteen years of age who must be taught everything so that he will be surprised at nothing when he is thirty years of age. The ignorant and innocent offspring of a human couple, obs. Synonyms: man-child; girl-child; love-child.

Motherhood, noun; a profession once highly esteemed, but rejected by modern spirits as too frequently automatic.

Mother, noun; a female progenitor; a term often employed by the older poets in connection with the ideas of love, sacrifice, and holiness, but now delicately described by writers of the Harper's Weekly temperament as being synonymous with cow.

Eugenics, noun; a condition of intense excitement over the future of the human race among those who are doing nothing to perpetuate it.

Literature, noun; see Sex; White Slave.

Drama, noun; see Sex; White Slave.

Punch, noun; see Drama; Literature; Magazine Advertising.

Adenoids, noun; something that is cut out of children.

Social-mindedness, noun; something that is injected into children.

II. GEOGRAPHY

Argentina; where the tango comes from.

Russia; where Anna Pavlova and ritual murder trials come from.

Persia; where the harem skirt comes from, and other fashions eagerly embraced by a generation which insists that woman shall no longer be man's chattel and plaything.

America; where the profits of all-night restaurants in Montmartre come from.

Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Peru, Yucatan, Patagonia; where the decorations for Broadway lobster-palaces come from.

Equator; the earth's waistline, unfashionably located in the same place year after year.

Tenderloin; where the world's wisdom comes from.

Cambridge, New Haven, Princeton, Morningside Heights; the sites of once celebrated educational institutions whose functions have now been taken over by theatre managers on Broadway.

Underworld; the world now uppermost.

Mountain; a rugged elevation of the earth's surface which comes to every self-constituted little prophet when he snaps his fingers.

Sea; where we are all at.

Mexico City; residence of Huerta, the most eminent living disciple of Nietzsche.

Bulgaria; a nation which scornfully rejected peace and reaped honour, widows, and orphans; where the Servians were the other day.

Servia; where the Bulgarians may be next week.

Chautauqua; any place outside the offices of the State Department.

III. ARITHMETIC

1. A ship carrying 800 passengers and crew is in collision off the banks of Newfoundland, and 700 are saved. Describe the method by which the Evening Journal computes 400 souls lost.

2. The salary of a police lieutenant is about $2,500 a year. At what rate of interest must this sum be invested to produce a million dollars' worth of real estate in ten years?

3. 2+2=4. Show this to be true otherwise than by writing a four-act play with its principal scene laid in a house of ill fame.

4. The loss to the nation from disease has been estimated at $200,000,000 a year. Show the profit that would accrue to the nation from abolishing every form of disease after deducting the cost of maintaining the dependent widows and orphans of 50,000 doctors who have starved to death.

5. In a certain gubernatorial campaign several disinterested gentlemen contributed $10,000 each to the campaign fund; yet the total of campaign contributions was a little over $5,000. Explain this.

6. If you were called upon to build a bridge to the moon, which would you rather use, the total number of postage stamps on rejected magazine contributions laid end to end, or the total number of automobiles shipped from Detroit placed end to end?

7. In a recent article on mortality statistics in the World, the writer omitted to divide his average death rate by 2. Was his argument, because of that, two times as convincing or only half as convincing?

8. Describe the modifications in the laws of arithmetic introduced by Mr. Thomas W. Lawson.

IV. HISTORY

The supporters of Mr. Theodore Roosevelt have frequently remarked that if Abraham Lincoln were alive to-day, he would be with them. Uncle Joe Cannon has expressed the conviction that Abraham Lincoln if he were alive to-day would be on his side. Is there anything in history to indicate that Abraham Lincoln, great man though he was, could be in two places at the same time?

Mention three Republican administrations in which the rainfall was twice as heavy as in any Democratic administration since 1837, and show what this indicates for the prosperity of the country under Mr. Woodrow Wilson.

Julius Cæsar is said to have been in the habit of dictating to three secretaries simultaneously. How does this compare with the literary productivity of Mr. Arnold Bennett and Mr. Jack London?

At the last meeting of the Tammany aldermanic convention of the Fifth Assembly District a speaker declared it to be the most momentous event in the history of the world. Compare the Fifth Assembly District convention with (a) the battle of Marathon; (b) the meeting of the States-General at Versailles in 1789; (c) the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

V. LOGIC

Prove that the department store is the principal cause of prostitution by showing that the department store is fifty-six years old and the social evil is forty thousand years old.

The mortality rate in municipal foundling asylums is 99½ per cent. Develop this into an argument for the maintenance of all children by the State.

Compare the arguments advanced in at least four (4) New York newspapers to show that the Giants would win with the reasons given in the same newspapers why the Athletics won.

Compare Richard Pearson Hobson's last speech on the Japanese peril with Demosthenes's Oration on the Crown.

VI. SCIENCE

The classification of the sciences has always presented peculiar difficulties, but a partial list would include the following:

[VII]

MORGAN

We were speaking of the man whose career was written in terms of huge corporations and incomparable art collections.

"What a life it was!" said Cooper. "From his office-desk he controlled the destinies of one hundred million people. His leisure hours were spent amidst the garnered beauty of five thousand years. Isn't it almost an intolerable thought that the same man should have been master of the Stock Exchange and owner of that marvellous museum in white marble on Thirty-sixth Street?"

"Cooper," I said, "you sound like the I. W. W."

"I am that," he retorted. "I express the Inexhaustible Wonder of the World in the face of this thing we call America. A nation devoted to the principle that all men are born equal has produced the perfect type of financial absolutism. A people given up to material aims has cornered the art treasures of the ages. Need I say more?"

"You needn't," I said. "You have already touched the high-water mark in lyricism."

But Harding waved me aside.

"I have also been thinking of that marble palace on Thirty-sixth Street," he said. "I can't help picturing the scene there on that critical night in the fall of 1907 when Wall Street was rocking to its foundations, and a haggard group of millionaires were seeking a way to stave off ruin. I imagine the glorious Old Masters looking down from their frames on that unhappy assembly of New Masters—the masters of our wealth, our credit, our entire industrial civilisation. I imagine Lorenzo the Magnificent leaning out from the canvas and calling the attention of his neighbour, Grolier, to that white-faced company of great American collectors. The perspiring gentleman at the head of the table had one of the choicest collections of trust companies in existence. The man at his elbow was the owner of an unrivalled collection of copper mines and smelters. Facing him was an amateur who had gone in for insurance companies. Others there had collected railroads, or national banks, or holding companies. No wonder old Lorenzo was moved at the prospect of so many matchless accumulations, representing the devoted labour of years, going under the hammer. Around the walls the wonderful First Editions stood at attention and some one was saying, 'Naturally, on the security of your first mortgage bonds—'"

"Putting poetry aside," I said somewhat impatiently, "what I should like to know is whether this garnered beauty of five thousand years, as Cooper calls it, really has any meaning to its owners. I understand that most of our great collections are bought in wholesale lots, Shakespeare folios by the yard, Chinese porcelains by the roomful. Does a man really take joy in his art treasures in such circumstances?"

"Of course he does," said Cooper. "If we buy masterpieces in the bulk, that again is the American of it. I am certain that this man's extraordinary business success is to be explained by the mental stimulus he derived from his books and his pictures. His business competitors really had no chance. Their idea of recreation was yachts or cards or roof-gardens. But he found rest in the presence of the loveliest dreams of dead painters and poets. Can't you see how a man's imagination in such surroundings would naturally expand and embrace the world? No wonder he thought in billions of dollars. Why, I myself, if I could spend half an hour before a Raphael whose radiant beauty brings the tears to your eyes, could go out and float a $100,000,000 corporation."

"Having first dried your tears, of course," I suggested.

"Well, yes," he said.

Harding had been showing signs of impatience, a common trait with him when other people are speaking.

"When a rich man dies," he said, "the first thing people ask is what will the stock market do. They were putting that question last week. Your Wall Street broker is a sensitive being. Nothing can happen at the other end of the world but he must rush out and sell or buy something. Returning, he says to the junior partner, 'I see there has been a big battle at Scutari. Where's Scutari and what are they fighting about?' 'Search me,' says the junior partner, 'but I think you did right in buying.' 'I sold,' says the broker. 'Who won the battle?' says the junior partner. 'I don't recall,' says the broker. But he is convinced that no big battle should be allowed to pass without being reflected in Wall Street.

"But that is not what I wanted to say. Suppose the market does go up two points or loses two points. What is the effect on the Stock Exchange compared with the crisis that ensues in the art world when a rich American dies? There's where things begin to look panicky. The quotations on Rembrandts and Van Dycks are cut in two. There is consternation in London auction rooms and Venetian palaces. In some half-ruined little Italian town the parish council has almost made up its mind to ship to New York the thirteenth-century altar piece which is the glory of the cathedral. The news comes that Crœsus is dead and the parish authorities see their dreams of new schools and a new chapel and a modern water supply vanish. That is the crisis worth considering."

"Not to speak," I said, "of that little shop on Fourth Avenue where they paint Botticellis."

"I admit that Harding has made a very interesting suggestion, though probably without any deliberate intention on his part," said Cooper. "This steady drain by Wall Street upon Europe's art treasures is a civilising process which scarcely receives the attention it deserves, except when some Paris editor loses his temper and calls us barbarians and despoilers. I am not sure who is the barbarian, the American trust magnate who thinks a million francs is not too much for one of Raphael's Madonnas, or the scion of Europe's ancient nobility who thinks that no Madonna is worth keeping if you can get a million francs for it. According to the European idea, the proper place for a masterpiece is a corner of the lounging-room where the weary guest, after a hard day with the hounds, may be tempted to stare at the canvas for a moment and say, 'Nice little daub, what?' Their masterpieces are made to be seldom seen and never heard of.

"Now see what we do with the same picture over here. Before it is brought into the country all the papers have cable despatches about it, and they have impressed its value on the public mind by multiplying the real price by five. Then we advertise it by raising the question whether it is genuine or a fake. Then we put it into a museum and countless thousands besiege the doorkeeper and ask which is the way to the million-dollar picture. Then the Sunday papers print a reproduction in colours suitable for framing, but it isn't framed very often because the baby destroys it while papa is busy with the comic supplement. Then the New York correspondents of the Chicago papers write columns about the picture. Then it is taken up by women's clubs, the reading circles, and the Chautauqua. Before the process is completed that picture has entered into the daily thought and speech of the American people."

Harding interrupted.

"The members of the European nobility have seldom been interested in art. They have been too busy wearing military uniforms or pursuing the elusive fox all over the landscape."

"But that is just the point I was making," said Cooper indignantly.

"Yes, but not so clearly as I have formulated it," said Harding. "The fact is that art has always flourished under the patronage of the merchant class. The Athenians were a trading people. Lorenzo the Magnificent came from a family of pawn-brokers. Rembrandt sold his pictures to the sturdy, and quite homely, tea and coffee merchants of Holland. It is preposterous to suppose that because a man is lucky in the stock market he is incapable of appreciating the very best things in art. He is not incapable; only he keeps his interests separate. From ten o'clock to three our patron of the arts is busy downtown attending to the unfortunate financiers whom he has caught on the wrong side of the market. If Cooper here were a Cubist painter, and you gave him the run of a great art collector's front office on settlement day, he could produce any number of pictures entitled Nude Speculator Descending a Wall Street Staircase."

"The European aristocracy doesn't always despise us," I said. "Occasionally an American will be decorated by the Grand Duke of Sonderklasse-Ganzgut with the cross of the Bald Eagle of the Third Class, the person thus honoured being worth nine hundred million dollars and the area of the Prince's dominions being eighty-nine square miles."

[VIII]

THE MODERN INQUISITION

Questionnaire: A favourite indoor amusement in uplift circles.

His eyes were bloodshot and he stared forward into vacancy.

"We were married," he said, "shortly after I was graduated from law school. For just five years we were happy. We were in love. I was making good in my profession. Helen took delight in her household duties and her baby. Then one day—the exact date is still engraved in letters of fire on my memory—I received a letter. It was from the Society for the Propagation of Ethical Statistics. It said that a study was being made of the churchgoing habits of college graduates, and there was a printed list of questions which I was requested to answer. I cannot recall the entire list, but these were some of the items:

"Do you go to church willingly or to please your wife?

"Do you stay all through the sermon?

"What is the average amount you deposit in the contribution plate (a) in summer; (b) in winter?

"Is your choice of a particular church determined by (a) creed; (b) the quality of the preaching; (c) ventilation?

"Are you ever overtaken by sleep during the sermon, and if so, at what point in the sermon do you most readily yield to the influence? (Note: In answering this question a state of recurrent drowsiness is to be considered as sleep.)

"Do you go to sleep most easily under (a) an Episcopalian; (b) Presbyterian; (c) Methodist; (d) Rabbi; (e) Ethical Culturist? (Note: Strike out all but one of the above names.)

"Is your awakening attended by a sensation of remorse or merely one of profound astonishment?

"What do you consider to be the ideal length for a sermon, leaving climatic conditions out of account?

"I tossed the letter across the breakfast table to Helen and intimated that I couldn't spare the time for an answer. But Helen insisted it was my duty as a college graduate. If the science of sociology couldn't look to us men of culture for its data, whom could it go to? So I telephoned down to the office that I would be late and sat down to draft my reply. It was much more difficult than I imagined. I was amazed to find how little I knew of my own habits and processes of thoughts. It took the greater part of the morning, and when I finally did get down to the office I learned that my most important client, an aged gentleman of uncertain temper, had gone off in a rage saying he would never come back. He kept his word.

"That letter was the beginning. I had no leisure to worry over this loss of a very considerable part of my income, because the next morning's mail brought a letter from the Association for the Encouragement of the City Beautiful. It contained a very long questionnaire which I was requested to fill out and forward by return mail. I was asked to state whether the character of the telegraph poles in our neighbourhood was such as to reflect credit on the civic spirit of the community, in respect to material (a) wood, (b) ornamental iron; and secondly, as to paint, (a) yellow, (b) red, (c) green, (d) no paint at all. I was also to say whether conditions in our neighbours' back yards were conducive to the propagation of the typhoid-bearing or common house-fly and to give my estimate of the number of flies so propagated in the course of a week, in hundreds of thousands. Finally, was the presence of the house-fly in our community due to the negligence of individual citizens, or was it the direct result of inefficient municipal government? And if the latter, was our municipal administration Republican or Democratic, and what were the popular majorities for mayor since the Spanish-American war?

"With Helen's assistance I managed to send off my reply within two days. But when I came down to my place of business I found that I had missed an important long-distance call from Chicago which the office-boy had promised to transmit to me, but failed to do so because he did not understand it in the first place."

He sighed and stared at the floor. His emaciated fingers beat a rapid tattoo on my desk. He droned on in dull, impersonal tones, as if this story of the wreck of a man's happiness had no special concern for him.

"Well," he said, "you can foresee the end for yourself. Within less than two months my law business disappeared, because I simply could not devote the necessary time to it. I resorted to desperate measures. I wrote to our alumni secretary, asking him to remove my name from the college catalogue; but it was too late. My name was by this time the common property of all the sociological laboratories and research stations in the country. At home, want began to stare us in the face. Worry over my financial condition, added to the long hours of labour involved in filling out questionnaires, undermined my health. I grew morose, ill-tempered, curt in my behaviour to Helen and the child. We still loved each other, but the glow and tenderness of our former relations had disappeared.

"Fortunately Helen did not feel my neglect as she might. For by this time she, too, was getting letters from sociological experiment stations. Helen was graduated from a New England college. Her letters, at first, dealt with problems of domestic economy. She had to write out model dietaries, statements of weekly expenses, the relative merits of white and coloured help. Later she was led into the field of child psychology. Our little Laura was hardly able to go out into the open air, because her mother had to keep her under observation during so many hours of the day. The child grew pale and nervous. Helen grew thin. In her case, poor girl, it was actual lack of food. There was no money in the house. One night as we sat down at table there was just a glass of milk and a slice of bread and butter at Laura's plate; for us there was nothing. At first I failed to understand. Then I looked at Helen and she was trying to smile through her tears."

He sobbed and I turned and stared out of the window.

"That night," he said, "I went out and pawned my watch; my great-grandfather had worn it. People rally quickly under trouble, and the next morning we were fairly cheerful. I set to work on a list of questions from the Bureau of Comparative Eugenics. Helen was busy with a questionnaire on Reaction Time in Children Under Six, from the Psychological Department at Harvard. I was resigned. I looked up and saw Laura playing with her alphabet blocks. I thought: Well, our lives may be spoiled, but there is the child. Life had cast no shadow on the current of her young days. At that moment the hall-boy brought in a letter. It was addressed to Miss Laura Smith—our baby. It was from the Wisconsin Laboratory of Juvenile Æsthetics. It contained a list of questions for the child to answer. How many hours a day did she play? Did she prefer to play in the house or on the street? Did she look into shop windows when she was out walking or at moving-picture posters? Was she afraid of dogs? I was crushed. There was a mist before my eyes. I fell forward on the table and wept."

His lip trembled, but the manhood was not gone from him. He faced me with a show of firmness.

"Mind you," he said, "I am not complaining. The individual must suffer if the world is to move forward. We have suffered, but in a good cause."

I agreed. I recalled the tabulated results of a particularly elaborate questionnaire printed in the morning's news. Questions had been sent to a thousand college graduates. Of that number it appeared that 480 lived in the country, 230 preferred the drama to fiction, 198 were vegetarians, and 576 voted for Mr. Wilson at the last Presidential election. Those who voted the Democratic ticket were less proficient in spelling than those who voted for Colonel Roosevelt. Could anything be more useful?

[IX]

THORNS IN THE CUSHION

I have a confession to make and I have my desk to clean out. One is as hard to go at as the other. If people would only refrain from putting my books and papers in order whenever I am away, I could always find things where I leave them and the embarrassment I am about to relate would have been spared me. After all, there is efficiency and efficiency. If the book I need at any moment is always buried beneath a pile of foreign newspapers, it is only interfering with my work to haul it out during my absence and put it on the desk right in front of me, where I cannot see it.

It was at Harding's place that I met Dr. Gunther. Harding had insisted that we two ought to know each other. After I had spent half an hour in the Doctor's company I agreed that had been worth my while; the rest is for him to say. Gunther is a physician of high standing, but his hobby is astronomy, and it was quite evident that he is as big an expert in that field as in his own profession. We spent a delightful evening. As he rose to say good-night, Gunther turned to me and smiled in a timid fashion that was altogether charming.

"I must confess," he said with a sort of foreign dignity of speech, "that my desire to make your acquaintance was not altogether disinterested. I have here," pulling a large envelope out of his pocket, "a few remarks which I have thrown together at odd moments, and which it occurred to me might be of interest to your readers. It is on a subject which I can honestly profess to know something about. Perhaps you might pass it on to your editor after you have glanced through it and decided that it had a chance. In case it is found unavailable for your purposes, you must be under no compunction about sending it back. You see, I have put the manuscript into a stamped and addressed envelope. I know how busy you journalists are."

I told him I would be delighted to do what I could. I brought the manuscript to the office next morning, laid it on my desk, and forgot about it. It was a Saturday. After I left the office, the janitor's assistant, being new to the place, came in and cleaned up my room. When I looked for the paper on Monday, I could not find it. At first I was not alarmed, because I reasoned that in the course of two or three weeks it would turn up.

But this was evidently Dr. Gunther's first experience as a contributor to the press. He was impatient. Within a week I had a letter from him, dated Boston, where, as he explained, he had been called on a matter of private business which would keep him for some time. Without at all wishing to seem importunate, he asked whether my editor had arrived at any decision with regard to his manuscript. It was a vexing situation. I shrank from writing and confessing how clumsy I had been; and besides the paper was likely to be found at any moment. I saw that I must fight for time.

What I am about to say will confirm many good people in their opinion of the unscrupulous nature of the newspaper profession; but the truth must be told. I determined to write to Dr. Gunther as if I had read his article. The terrible difficulty was that I did not know what it was about. I was fairly sure it had to do with one of two things, medicine or astronomy. He had said, when he gave me the manuscript, that it was a subject on which he could claim special knowledge. But which of the two was it? For some time I hesitated, and then I wrote the following letter:

"Dear Dr. Gunther: Before giving your valuable paper a second and more thorough reading, I must bring up a question which suggests itself even after the most cursory examination. It is this: Will your article go well with illustrations, and if so where are they to be had? You know that ours is a picture supplement, appealing to a general audience, and there is every chance for inserting illustrations into an article of scientific nature abounding in such close-knit argument as you present. Of course there is not the least reason for haste in the matter. A reply from you within the next four weeks will be in time."

Next morning I found a telegram from Boston on my desk. It said: "Naturally no objection to pictures. Suggest you reproduce some of the illustrations from Langley's masterly work on the subject. Gunther."

My ruse had succeeded. I was prepared now to keep up a fairly active correspondence until the missing paper was found. I knew of Samuel Pierpont Langley, one of the greatest of American astronomers and a pioneer of aviation. I turned to the encyclopædia to see which one of Langley's books was likely to be the one Gunther had in mind. There, before me, was a biographical sketch of John Newport Langley, an English physiologist, who had published, among other things, a treatise "On the Liver," and another "On the Salivary Glands." I recalled that at Harding's house Gunther, after an elaborate discussion of the present state of meteorology, had drifted into a spirited tirade against the evils of ill-cooked and undigested food. It might very well be this paper "On the Salivary Glands" that Gunther had in mind.

I delayed writing as long as I could while the office was being ransacked for the missing article. It was a hopeless search. The manuscript had evidently been swept away into the all-devouring waste basket, another victim to mistaken ideals of efficiency. A few days later came a long and friendly letter from Gunther. Without wishing to flatter me, he said that he was quite as much interested in my opinion of his article as in getting it published. He hoped to hear from me at my very earliest convenience.

I waited nearly a week, and yielding to fate wrote as follows:

"Dear Dr. Gunther: The article is altogether admirable. It seems to me that there are just two subjects which never lose their appeal to the average man. One is the food by which he lives. The other is the universe in which he lives. They represent the opposite poles in his nature, one being no less important than the other. Let the primitive man but satisfy the cravings of his stomach, and his awed gaze will turn to the illimitable glory of the stars. I think of Pasteur's epoch-making researches into the processes of food-fermentation and then I think of Galileo. If you ask me which is the greater man, I will say frankly I do not know. Your article will duly appear in our magazine, though not for some time. In the meanwhile, it may be that additions or changes will suggest themselves to you. Very likely you have a carbon copy of your manuscript at home. Make such alterations as you see fit and send the new manuscript to us as soon as you are satisfied with it."

The foregoing letter was addressed to Dr. Gunther in Boston. Two days later he wrote from his home address in New York. He said: "I cannot speak adequately of the consideration you have given to my poor literary effort. Your letter offering me an opportunity to revise the manuscript reached me just before I left for New York. At home I found the original article awaiting me, in my own envelope. Evidently it had occurred to you that I might not have a copy of the article at hand—which is indeed the case—and so you hastened to send me the original."

Of course the envelope containing the good Doctor's manuscript had not fallen into the hands of the janitor at all. It had caught the quick eye of our conscientious mail-boy, who saw his duty and promptly did it. It only remains for me to persuade the managing editor to print the article when it comes back. After what I have gone through, this should not be difficult. Our readers, therefore, may look forward to a masterly article on a subject of great interest. Whether it is an astronomical article or a pure food article the reader will learn for himself.

[X]

LOW-GRADE CITIZENS

Cooper was in a confidential mood.

"Isn't it true," he said, "that once so often every one of us feels impelled to go out and assassinate a college professor?"

"Why shouldn't one?" said Harding. "No one would miss a professor except, possibly, his wife and the children."

"That's just it, his children," said Cooper. "That's what makes a man hesitate. The particular college professor I have in mind recently published an article on Social Decadence in the North American Review. He deplored the tendency among our well-to-do classes toward small families. At the same time he deplored the mistaken zeal of our low-income classes in trying to more than make up for the negligence of their betters. He said, 'The American population may, therefore, be increasing most rapidly from that group least fitted by heredity or by income to develop social worth in their offspring. Such a process of "reversed selection" must mean, for the nation, a constant decrease in the social worth of each succeeding generation.' He brought forward a good many figures, but I have been so angry that I am quite unable to recall what they are."

"In that case," Harding said, "you should lose no time in seeking out the man and slaying him before his side of the case comes back to you."

"People," said Cooper, with that happy gift of his for dropping a subject to suit his own convenience, "have fallen into the habit of saying that the art of letter-writing is extinct. They say we don't write the way Madame de Sévigné did or Charles Lamb. This is not true.

"For instance, on April 26, 1913, Charles Crawl, a low-income American residing in the soft-coal districts of western Pennsylvania, wrote a letter which I have not been able to get out of my mind. With that unhappy predilection for getting into tight places which is one of the characteristics of our improvident, low-income classes, Charles Crawl happened to be in one of the lower workings of the Cincinnati mine when an explosion of gas—unavoidable, as in all mine disasters—killed nearly a hundred operatives. Charles Crawl escaped injury, but after creeping through the dark for two days he felt his strength going from him, and so, with a piece of chalk, on his smudgy overalls, he wrote the following letter: