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Seeing Things at Night

<h1>SEEING THINGS AT NIGHT</h1> BY HEYWOOD BROUN TO HEYWOOD BROUN, 3RD <h3>Introduction</h3> THE first difficulty was the title. It was felt that Seeing Things at Night might suggest theatrical essays to the exclusion of anything else. That was not the author's intention. He meant to suggest rather newspaper articles of any sort done more or less on the spur of the moment for next day's consumption. There was also some question as to the order in which the various "pieces" should be arranged. The author was tempted to follow the example of Adolf Wolff, a free verse poet who published a volume some years ago called Songs, Sighs and Curses, and explained in a foreword, "When asked in what sequence he would arrange his poems, Wolff threw the manuscripts in the air, saying 'Let Fate decide.' They now appear in the order in which they were picked up from the floor." Broun, however, feared that some of his essays might crash through the floor like the mistakes of a cannonball juggler and that others would prove so lacking in weight when put to the test that it would be necessary to pluck them from the ceiling rather than the floor. The arrangement, therefore, is premeditated though haphazard. In respect to his age the author also wishes to explain that the character, H. 3rd, who appears from time to time is his son and not his grandson. He also wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of The New York Tribune, Vanity Fair, McCall's, Collier's Weekly and The Nation in permitting him to reprint various articles which first appeared in their pages. <h1>SEEING THINGS AT NIGHT</h1> <h3>The Fifty-first Dragon</h3> Of all the pupils at the knight school Gawaine le C&oelig;ur-Hardy was among the least promising. He was tall and sturdy, but his instructors soon discovered that he lacked spirit. He would hide in the woods when the jousting class was called, although his companions and members of the faculty sought to appeal to his better nature by shouting to him to come out and break his neck like a man. Even when they told him that the lances were padded, the horses no more than ponies and the field unusually soft for late autumn, Gawaine refused to grow enthusiastic. The Headmaster and the Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce were discussing the case one spring afternoon and the Assistant Professor could see no remedy but expulsion. "No," said the Headmaster, as he looked out at the purple hills which ringed the school, "I think I'll train him to slay dragons." "He might be killed," objected the Assistant Professor. "So he might," replied the Headmaster brightly, but he added, more soberly, "We must consider the greater good. We are responsible for the formation of this lad's character." "Are the dragons particularly bad this year?" interrupted the Assistant Professor. This was characteristic. He always seemed restive when the head of the school began to talk ethics and the ideals of the institution. "I've never known them worse," replied the Headmaster. "Up in the hills to the south last week they killed a number of peasants, two cows and a prize pig. And if this dry spell holds there's no telling when they may start a forest fire simply by breathing around indiscriminately." "Would any refund on the tuition fee be necessary in case of an accident to young C&oelig;ur-Hardy?" "No," the principal answered, judicially, "that's all covered in the contract. But as a matter of fact he won't be killed. Before I send him up in the hills I'm going to give him a magic word." "That's a good idea," said the Professor. "Sometimes they work wonders." From that day on Gawaine specialized in dragons. His course included both theory and practice. In the morning there were long lectures on the history, anatomy, manners and customs of dragons. Gawaine did not distinguish himself in these studies. He had a marvelously versatile gift for forgetting things. In the afternoon he showed to better advantage, for then he would go down to the South Meadow and practise with a battle-ax. In this exercise he was truly impressive, for he had enormous strength as well as speed and grace. He even developed a deceptive display of ferocity. Old alumni say that it was a thrilling sight to see Gawaine charging across the field toward the dummy paper dragon which had been set up for his practice. As he ran he would brandish his ax and shout "A murrain on thee!" or some other vivid bit of campus slang. It never took him more than one stroke to behead the dummy dragon. Gradually his task was made more difficult. Paper gave way to papier-mâché and finally to wood, but even the toughest of these dummy dragons had no terrors for Gawaine. One sweep of the ax always did the business. There were those who said that when the practice was protracted until dusk and the dragons threw long, fantastic shadows across the meadow Gawaine did not charge so impetuously nor shout so loudly. It is possible there was malice in this charge. At any rate, the Headmaster decided by the end of June that it was time for the test. Only the night before a dragon had come close to the school grounds and had eaten some of the lettuce from the garden. The faculty decided that Gawaine was ready. They gave him a diploma and a new battle-ax and the Headmaster summoned him to a private conference. "Sit down," said the Headmaster. "Have a cigarette." Gawaine hesitated. "Oh, I know it's against the rules," said the Headmaster. "But after all, you have received your preliminary degree. You are no longer a boy. You are a man. To-morrow you will go out into the world, the great world of achievement." Gawaine took a cigarette. The Headmaster offered him a match, but he produced one of his own and began to puff away with a dexterity which quite amazed the principal. "Here you have learned the theories of life," continued the Headmaster, resuming the thread of his discourse, "but after all, life is not a matter of theories. Life is a matter of facts. It calls on the young and the old alike to face these facts, even though they are hard and sometimes unpleasant. Your problem, for example, is to slay dragons." "They say that those dragons down in the south wood are five hundred feet long," ventured Gawaine, timorously. "Stuff and nonsense!" said the Headmaster. "The curate saw one last week from the top of Arthur's Hill. The dragon was sunning himself down in the valley. The curate didn't have an opportunity to look at him very long because he felt it was his duty to hurry back to make a report to me. He said the monster, or shall I say, the big lizard?—wasn't an inch over two hundred feet. But the size has nothing at all to do with it. You'll find the big ones even easier than the little ones. They're far slower on their feet and less aggressive, I'm told. Besides, before you go I'm going to equip you in such fashion that you need have no fear of all the dragons in the world." "I'd like an enchanted cap," said Gawaine. "What's that?" answered the Headmaster, testily. "A cap to make me disappear," explained Gawaine. The Headmaster laughed indulgently. "You mustn't believe all those old wives' stories," he said. "There isn't any such thing. A cap to make you disappear, indeed! What would you do with it? You haven't even appeared yet. Why, my boy, you could walk from here to London, and nobody would so much as look at you. You're nobody. You couldn't be more invisible than that." Gawaine seemed dangerously close to a relapse into his old habit of whimpering. The Headmaster reassured him: "Don't worry; I'll give you something much better than an enchanted cap. I'm going to give you a magic word. All you have to do is to repeat this magic charm once and no dragon can possibly harm a hair of your head. You can cut off his head at your leisure." He took a heavy book from the shelf behind his desk and began to run through it. "Sometimes," he said, "the charm is a whole phrase or even a sentence. I might, for instance, give you 'To make the'—No, that might not do. I think a single word would be best for dragons." "A short word," suggested Gawaine. "It can't be too short or it wouldn't be potent. There isn't so much hurry as all that. Here's a splendid magic word: 'Rumplesnitz.' Do you think you can learn that?" Gawaine tried and in an hour or so he seemed to have the word well in hand. Again and again he interrupted the lesson to inquire, "And if I say 'Rumplesnitz' the dragon can't possibly hurt me?" And always the Headmaster replied, "If you only say 'Rumplesnitz,' you are perfectly safe." Toward morning Gawaine seemed resigned to his career. At daybreak the Headmaster saw him to the edge of the forest and pointed him to the direction in which he should proceed. About a mile away to the southwest a cloud of steam hovered over an open meadow in the woods and the Headmaster assured Gawaine that under the steam he would find a dragon. Gawaine went forward slowly. He wondered whether it would be best to approach the dragon on the run as he did in his practice in the South Meadow or to walk slowly toward him, shouting "Rumplesnitz" all the way. The problem was decided for him. No sooner had he come to the fringe of the meadow than the dragon spied him and began to charge. It was a large dragon and yet it seemed decidedly aggressive in spite of the Headmaster's statement to the contrary. As the dragon charged it released huge clouds of hissing steam through its nostrils. It was almost as if a gigantic teapot had gone mad. The dragon came forward so fast and Gawaine was so frightened that he had time to say "Rumplesnitz" only once. As he said it, he swung his battle-ax and off popped the head of the dragon. Gawaine had to admit that it was even easier to kill a real dragon than a wooden one if only you said "Rumplesnitz." Gawaine brought the ears home and a small section of the tail. His school mates and the faculty made much of him, but the Headmaster wisely kept him from being spoiled by insisting that he go on with his work. Every clear day Gawaine rose at dawn and went out to kill dragons. The Headmaster kept him at home when it rained, because he said the woods were damp and unhealthy at such times and that he didn't want the boy to run needless risks. Few good days passed in which Gawaine failed to get a dragon. On one particularly fortunate day he killed three, a husband and wife and a visiting relative. Gradually he developed a technique. Pupils who sometimes watched him from the hill-tops a long way off said that he often allowed the dragon to come within a few feet before he said "Rumplesnitz." He came to say it with a mocking sneer. Occasionally he did stunts. Once when an excursion party from London was watching him he went into action with his right hand tied behind his back. The dragon's head came off just as easily. As Gawaine's record of killings mounted higher the Headmaster found it impossible to keep him completely in hand. He fell into the habit of stealing out at night and engaging in long drinking bouts at the village tavern. It was after such a debauch that he rose a little before dawn one fine August morning and started out after his fiftieth dragon. His head was heavy and his mind sluggish. He was heavy in other respects as well, for he had adopted the somewhat vulgar practice of wearing his medals, ribbons and all, when he went out dragon hunting. The decorations began on his chest and ran all the way down to his abdomen. They must have weighed at least eight pounds. Gawaine found a dragon in the same meadow where he had killed the first one. It was a fair-sized dragon, but evidently an old one. Its face was wrinkled and Gawaine thought he had never seen so hideous a countenance. Much to the lad's disgust, the monster refused to charge and Gawaine was obliged to walk toward him. He whistled as he went. The dragon regarded him hopelessly, but craftily. Of course it had heard of Gawaine. Even when the lad raised his battle-ax the dragon made no move. It knew that there was no salvation in the quickest thrust of the head, for it had been informed that this hunter was protected by an enchantment. It merely waited, hoping something would turn up. Gawaine raised the battle-ax and suddenly lowered it again. He had grown very pale and he trembled violently. The dragon suspected a trick. "What's the matter?" it asked, with false solicitude. "I've forgotten the magic word," stammered Gawaine. "What a pity," said the dragon. "So that was the secret. It doesn't seem quite sporting to me, all this magic stuff, you know. Not cricket, as we used to say when I was a little dragon; but after all, that's a matter of opinion." Gawaine was so helpless with terror that the dragon's confidence rose immeasurably and it could not resist the temptation to show off a bit. "Could I possibly be of any assistance?" it asked. "What's the first letter of the magic word?" "It begins with an 'r,'" said Gawaine weakly. "Let's see," mused the dragon, "that doesn't tell us much, does it? What sort of a word is this? Is it an epithet, do you think?" Gawaine could do no more than nod. "Why, of course," exclaimed the dragon, "reactionary Republican." Gawaine shook his head. "Well, then," said the dragon, "we'd better get down to business. Will you surrender?" With the suggestion of a compromise Gawaine mustered up enough courage to speak. "What will you do if I surrender?" he asked. "Why, I'll eat you," said the dragon. "And if I don't surrender?" "I'll eat you just the same." "Then it doesn't make any difference, does it?" moaned Gawaine. "It does to me," said the dragon with a smile. "I'd rather you didn't surrender. You'd taste much better if you didn't." The dragon waited for a long time for Gawaine to ask "Why?" but the boy was too frightened to speak. At last the dragon had to give the explanation without his cue line. "You see," he said, "if you don't surrender you'll taste better because you'll die game." This was an old and ancient trick of the dragon's. By means of some such quip he was accustomed to paralyze his victims with laughter and then to destroy them. Gawaine was sufficiently paralyzed as it was, but laughter had no part in his helplessness. With the last word of the joke the dragon drew back his head and struck. In that second there flashed into the mind of Gawaine the magic word "Rumplesnitz," but there was no time to say it. There was time only to strike and, without a word, Gawaine met the onrush of the dragon with a full swing. He put all his back and shoulders into it. The impact was terrific and the head of the dragon flew away almost a hundred yards and landed in a thicket. Gawaine did not remain frightened very long after the death of the dragon. His mood was one of wonder. He was enormously puzzled. He cut off the ears of the monster almost in a trance. Again and again he thought to himself, "I didn't say 'Rumplesnitz'!" He was sure of that and yet there was no question that he had killed the dragon. In fact, he had never killed one so utterly. Never before had he driven a head for anything like the same distance. Twenty-five yards was perhaps his best previous record. All the way back to the knight school he kept rumbling about in his mind seeking an explanation for what had occurred. He went to the Headmaster immediately and after closing the door told him what had happened. "I didn't say 'Rumplesnitz,'" he explained with great earnestness. The Headmaster laughed. "I'm glad you've found out," he said. "It makes you ever so much more of a hero. Don't you see that? Now you know that it was you who killed all these dragons and not that foolish little word 'Rumplesnitz.'" Gawaine frowned. "Then it wasn't a magic word after all?" he asked. "Of course not," said the Headmaster, "you ought to be too old for such foolishness. There isn't any such thing as a magic word." "But you told me it was magic," protested Gawaine. "You said it was magic and now you say it isn't." "It wasn't magic in a literal sense," answered the Headmaster, "but it was much more wonderful than that. The word gave you confidence. It took away your fears. If I hadn't told you that you might have been killed the very first time. It was your battle-ax did the trick." Gawaine surprised the Headmaster by his attitude. He was obviously distressed by the explanation. He interrupted a long philosophic and ethical discourse by the Headmaster with, "If I hadn't of hit 'em all mighty hard and fast any one of 'em might have crushed me like a, like a—" He fumbled for a word. "Egg shell," suggested the Headmaster. "Like a egg shell," assented Gawaine, and he said it many times. All through the evening meal people who sat near him heard him muttering, "Like a egg shell, like a egg shell." The next day was clear, but Gawaine did not get up at dawn. Indeed, it was almost noon when the Headmaster found him cowering in bed, with the clothes pulled over his head. The principal called the Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce, and together they dragged the boy toward the forest. "He'll be all right as soon as he gets a couple more dragons under his belt," explained the Headmaster. The Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce agreed. "It would be a shame to stop such a fine run," he said. "Why, counting that one yesterday, he's killed fifty dragons." They pushed the boy into a thicket above which hung a meager cloud of steam. It was obviously quite a small dragon. But Gawaine did not come back that night or the next. In fact, he never came back. Some weeks afterward brave spirits from the school explored the thicket, but they could find nothing to remind them of Gawaine except the metal parts of his medals. Even the ribbons had been devoured. The Headmaster and the Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce agreed that it would be just as well not to tell the school how Gawaine had achieved his record and still less how he came to die. They held that it might have a bad effect on school spirit. Accordingly, Gawaine has lived in the memory of the school as its greatest hero. No visitor succeeds in leaving the building to-day without seeing a great shield which hangs on the wall of the dining hall. Fifty pairs of dragons' ears are mounted upon the shield and underneath in gilt letters is "Gawaine le C&oelig;ur-Hardy," followed by the simple inscription, "He killed fifty dragons." The record has never been equaled. <h3>How To Be a Lion Tamer</h3> The Ways of the Circus is a decidedly readable book, rich in anecdotes of the life of circus folk and circus animals. The narrator is an old lion tamer and Harvey W. Root, who has done the actual writing, has managed to keep a decidedly naïve quality in the talk as he sets it down. There is a delightful chapter, for instance, in which Conklin tells how he first became a lion tamer. By gradual process of promotion he had gone as far as an elephant, but his salary was still much lower than that of Charlie Forepaugh, the lion man. There were three lions with the circus, but Charlie never worked with more than one in the cage at the time. Conklin got the notion that an act with all the lions in action at once would be a sensational success. He was not sure that it could be done, as he had had no experience with lions. The only way to find out was to try. Accordingly Conklin sneaked into the menagerie alone, late at night, to ascertain whether or not lions lay along his natural bent. "The animals seemed somewhat surprised at being disturbed in the middle of the night," he says, "and began to pace rapidly up and down their cages. I paid no attention to this, but opened the door of each cage in succession and drove them out. Then I began as sternly as I could to order them round and give them their cues. "Except, perhaps, for an unusual amount of snarling, they did as well for me as for Charlie. I put them through their regular work, which took fifteen or twenty minutes, drove them back, and fastened them into their own cages and climbed down on to the floor from the performing cage, much elated with my success. I had proved to myself that I could handle lions." Conklin then goes on to tell how he gave a secret exhibition for the proprietor of the circus and convinced him of his skill. In fact, the proprietor promised that he should become the lion tamer of the show as soon as Charlie Forepaugh's contract ran out. Conklin goes on to say that he himself was very particular for the sake of safety not to let Charlie know of this arrangement. And in explaining his timidity, he writes, "He was a big fellow with a quick temper." This almost emboldens us to believe the old story of the lion tamer and his shrewish wife. Coming home late from a party, he feared to enter the house and so he went to the backyard and crept into the cage with the lions. There it was that his wife discovered him the next morning, sleeping with the lions, and she shook her fist and shouted through the bars, "you coward!" To be sure as Mr. Conklin tells it there seems to be no great trick in being a lion tamer. Take, for instance, the familiar stunt in which a trainer puts his head into a lion's mouth and you will find upon close survey that it is nothing to worry about. "This never failed to make the crowd hold its breath, but it was not as risky as it seemed," says Conklin, "for with my hold on the lion's nose and jowl I could detect the slightest movement of his muscles and govern my actions accordingly." Mr. Conklin does not develop the point, but we suppose that if he detected any intention on the lion's part of closing his mouth he would take his head out in order to make it easier for the animal. Mr. Conklin also corrects a number of misapprehensions about lions which may be of use to some readers. Contrary to popular belief, you have nothing to worry about if any of your lions insist on walking up and down. "A lion that will walk round when you get in the cage with him is all right, as a general thing," explains Conklin, "but look out for the one that goes and lies down in a corner." To be sure, there is something just a little disturbing in the afterthought indicated in "as a general thing." Our luck is so bad that we wouldn't feel safe in a cage with a lion even if he ran up and down. In fact, we would be almost willing to wager that ours would be one of the unfortunate exceptions which didn't know the rule and so would do his bit toward providing it. In another respect the lion tamer is a little more specific about lions and therefore more helpful. "It is true, though," he adds, "that you should never let one get behind you if you can help it, though in many of the acts it is not possible to keep all of them in front of you all the time." We can understand this advice, though it is not altogether clear to us just what we would do if a lion tried to get behind us. Of course, we would tell him not to, but after that we should be somewhat at a loss. We have never believed in being rough with lions. Probably we would let him have his way just to avoid argument. As a matter of fact we would have no great objection to having all our lions behind us if only we could keep far enough in front. "A lion that growls frightfully and acts very ferocious when you are outside the cage may be one of the easiest to handle and get work out of when once you are actually in the cage; and on the other hand, a lion that is mean and dangerous to do anything with in the cage may be exceptionally docile from the outside and allow you to pet him freely." This should go a long way toward solving the problems of lion tamers. All you have to do before a performance is to make a test from outside the cage. Try to pat your lion and pull his ears. If he growls and bites your hand you will know at once that you may come in and go about your business with perfect safety. On the other hand, if he meets your caresses by rolling over on his back and purring it is up to you to call off the show or send for your understudy. The unfortunate fate of such a substitute is described by Conklin with much detail and, we fear, a little relish. The man in question took Conklin's job when he struck for a raise in salary. Things went well enough during the first performance until the very end, and then it was the fault not of the lion but of the substitute, for the trainer was ignorant of one of the cues which had become a part of the act. "I had taught George to jump for me as I went out the door," writes Conklin. "It had been done by blowing on his nose and then jumping back as you would play with a dog. It always made a great hit with the crowd, who supposed it had seen a lion try to eat a man and that I had had a very narrow escape. I worked it this way: After I had finished the rest of my act I would get George all stirred up and growling. Then I would fire my pistol two or three times and jump out of the cage as quickly as I could. At the same time George would give a big lunge and come up against the door which I had just shut behind me. George had learned the trick so well that I frequently had to turn on him once or twice and work him farther back from the door before I dared attempt getting out." Unfortunately the substitute had missed all this part of the act. He started out of the cage and George jumped at him and the man was not prepared to dodge. The moral seems to be that nobody should covet another man's job, not even that of lion taming. Some readers we suppose will find Mr. Conklin's lion stories unwelcome because they may tend to take away their illusions. It is not to be denied that he has to some extent rubbed the gilt off the gingerbread by writing that the record for all the lions he has known consists of one substitute trainer and a cow. His whole attitude toward lions is contemptuous in its calm and so is the attitude of practically everybody else in the book with the exception of the cow and the substitute trainer. Even they suffered a little, at first, from overconfidence. On the night down in Philadelphia when Wallace, the big lion, escaped from his cage in winter quarters nobody grew excited. O'Brien, the owner of the show, did not even get up, but called through the door "Go git Conklin!" The preparations of the trainer were simple. First he got an iron bar and then he found the lion and hit him on the end of the nose. "After a few minutes," he adds, "I had him safely locked in again." Lions, for all their air of authority, seem to be easily dominated. They're not so much wicked as weak. Anybody with a little firmness can twist them around a finger, possibly not the little finger, but any of the others. It is a great pity that lions should be like that. To be sure, the information ought not to come as a surprise to anybody who is familiar with the Bible. The condition we have mentioned has existed for a long time. As far as we know, Daniel had not so much as an iron bar when he went into the den. He overawed the lions with nothing more than faith. Perhaps it is not quite fair to go on as if lions were the only living creatures in all the world who are swayed and cowed by firmness and authority. The same weakness may be found now and then among men. All too many of us if hit on the nose with iron bars, either real ones or symbols, do little more than lions in similar circumstances. We may growl and roar a little, but we do not show resentment in any efficient way. And like the lions, we are singularly stupid in not making working alliances with our fellows against the man with the iron bar. By and by we begin to go through the hoops as if the procedure were inevitable. Having made a protest we feel that our duty is done. It is a great pity. Lions ought to know better. The man who stares you in the eye and squeezes hard in a handshake may come to the bad end which you wish him, but it is unlikely that he will ever be eaten by lions. Something else must be devised for him. Even outside the circus he is likely to go far. Anybody who can shake a little personality can be ringmaster in this world. And we, all of us who have none, do nothing about it except to obey him. Camels we can swallow easily enough, but we strain at the natty dresser. Still we did manage to find a few bits of information in The Ways of the Circus which were brand new to us. If, for instance, a rhinoceros escaped from his cage just what would you do to get him back again? That is, if he were the sort of rhinoceros you wanted back. At first glance it seems rather a problem, but any reader of Mr. Conklin's book could arrange it for you without difficulty. Nothing is needed but carrots and a stout heart. The carrots you scatter profusely about the floor of the cage, and when the rhinoceros returns to get them you slam down the door, and there he is. <h3>H. G. Wells of England</h3> H. G. Wells in his Outline of History seldom seems just an Englishman. He fights his battles and makes most of his judgments alone and generally in defiance of the traditions of his countrymen, but he is not bold enough to face Napoleon Bonaparte all by himself. The sight of the terrible little Corsican peeping over the edge of the thirty-eighth chapter sends Wells scurrying from his solitude into the center of a British square. It must be that when Wells was little and bad his nurse told him that if he did not eat his mush or go to bed, or perform some other necessary function in the daily life of a child, Old Bony would get him. And Wells is still scared. He takes it out, of course, by pretending that Napoleon has been vastly overrated and remarks that it was pretty lucky for him that he lost Trafalgar and never got to England, where troops would have made short work of him. Nelson, Wells holds, was just as great a figure in his own specialty as Napoleon in his, but if so it seems a pity that he did not rise to Wellsian heights of strategy and lose Trafalgar so that Napoleon might land and be defeated by British pluck and skill. Then, indeed, might Waterloo have been won upon the cricket fields of Eton. Not only does Wells insist on regarding Napoleon through national lenses but through moral ones also. Speaking of his accession as First Consul, Wells writes: "Now surely here was opportunity such as never came to man before. Here was a position in which a man might well bow himself in fear of himself, and search his heart and serve God and man to the utmost." That, of course, was not Napoleon's intent. His performance must be judged by his purpose, and it seems to us that Wells doesn't half appreciate how brilliant was the stunt which Napoleon achieved. "He tried to do the impossible and did it." Man was no better for him and neither was God, but he remains still the great bogy man of Europe, a bogy great enough to have frightened Mr. Wells and marked him. Here was a man who took life and made it theatrical. It was an achievement in popular æsthetics, if nothing else, but Wells doesn't care about æsthetics. Perhaps even a moral might be extracted from the life of Napoleon. He proved the magic quality of personality and the inspiration of gesture. Some day the same methods may be used to better advantage. The institution of the Legion of Honor Wells calls "A scheme for decorating Frenchmen with bits of ribbon which was admirably calculated to divert ambitious men from subversive proceedings." But these same bits of ribbon and the red and green ones of the Croix de Guerre and the yellow and green of the Médaille Militaire were later to save France from the onrush of the Germans. Without decorations, without phrases and without the brilliant and effective theatrical oratory of French officers, from marshals to sub-lieutenants, France would have lost the great war. Everybody who saw the French army in action realized that its morale was maintained during the worst days by colored ribbons and florid speeches. Even the stern and taciturn Pershing learned the lesson, and before he had been in France three months he was about making speeches to wounded men in which he told them that he wished that he, too, were lying in hospital with all their glory. Personally, it never seemed to me that Pershing actually convinced any wounded doughboy of his enthusiasm for such a change, but he did not use the gesture with much skill. He lacked the Napoleonic tradition. Another American officer, a younger one, said, "If I ever have anything to do with West Point I'm going to copy these Frenchmen. They do it naturally, but we've got to learn. I'm going to introduce a course in practical theatricalism. Now, if I were a general, as soon as I heard of some little trench raid in which Private Smith distinguished himself I'd send a staff officer down on the sly to find out what Smith looked like. Then I'd inspect that particular organization and when I got to Smith my aide would nudge me and I'd turn, as if instinctively, and say, 'Isn't that Private Smith who distinguished himself on the evening of January 18 at 8 o'clock? I want to shake your hand, Smith.' Why, man, the French army has been living and breathing on stuff like that for the last two years." It is an easy matter to satirize the heroic and theatrical gesture. The French themselves did it. Once in the Chamber of Deputies, late in the war, a Radical member, who didn't care much for the war, anyway, and still less for the Cabinet, arose and said: "This morning as I was walking in the streets of Paris a little before dawn I saw three camions headed for the front, and I stopped the first driver and said, 'Ah, I am overjoyed to see that at last the ministry is awake to the needs of our brave poilus and is sending supplies to the front. What is it that you carry—ammunition, clothing, food?' But the driver shook his head and said, 'No; Croix de Guerre.'" But the satire does not cut too deeply, for Croix de Guerre played just as important a part in winning the war as food or ammunition or clothing. I heard a French colonel once cry to a crowd of prisoners returned from Germany, broken and ill: "Now, let us hear you shout that which it has been so long forbidden to you to say, 'Vive la France!'" And as he spoke his arm shot up into the air and his voice rang like a trumpet call, and everybody within sound of the man straightened up and thrilled as if he had just heard of a great victory. It was fine art for all the fact that it was probably also sincere. No, when Napoleon had himself crowned in Nôtre Dame it was not, as Wells says, "Just a ridiculous scene." Napoleon realized that a play can be staged in a cathedral or upon a battlefield just as well as in a theater, and that man, who may come in time to be the superman of whom Wells dreams is still a little boy sitting in the gallery, ready to applaud and to shout for any dressed-up person who knows how to walk to the center of the stage and hold it. <h3>Promises and Contracts and Clocks</h3> "I am one of those people," says the flapper in Beauty and Mary Blair, "to whom life is a very great puzzle. So many people seem to get used to living, but I don't. I can't seem to get up any really satisfactory philosophy or find anybody or anything to help me about it. I want everything, little or big, fixed up in mind before I can proceed. "Even as a very small child I always wanted my plans made in advance. Once, when mother had a bad sick headache, I sat on the edge of her bed and begged her to tell me if she thought she was going to die, so if she was I could plan to go and live with my Aunt Margaret. I was an odious infant, but all the same, I really wanted to know, and that's the way I am to this day! I want to know what the probabilities are, in order to act accordingly." And without doubt she was odious, but only in the same way that practically everybody else is odious, for we live in a world which is governed by promises and contracts and clocks. If there actually is any such thing as free will, aren't we the idiots to fetter it! The chances of doing things on impulse are being continually diminished. There are points in the city now where it is not possible to cross the street without the permission of the policeman. "Stop," "Go," "Keep Off the Grass," "No Trespassing," "Beware of the Dog," "Watch Your Hat and Overcoat," "Positively No Checks Cashed," "Do Not Feed or Annoy the Animals"—how can a free and adventurous soul survive in such a world? Don Marquis has celebrated the exploit of one brave rebel, we think it was Fothergil Finch, who strode into the monkey house and crying "Down with the tyranny of the capitalist system," or words to that effect, threw a peanut into the baboon's cage. We know an even bolder soul who makes a point of never watching his hat and overcoat in direct defiance of the edict, but he says that the world has become so cowed by rules that nothing ever happens. Even the usual avenues of escape have been beset with barbed wire. There was liquor, for instance. There still is, but the prohibitionists have been devilishly wise. By arranging that it shall be ladled out by prescriptions, no matter how lavish, they have reduced drinking to the prosaic level of premeditation along with all the other activities of the world. Things have come to such a pass that drinking has now been restricted to men with real executive ability. It is no longer the solace of the irresponsible, but the reward of foresight. Once the easy escape from dull and set routine lay in stepping on board a steamer and sailing for distant and purple shores. They are not so purple any more. No traveler can feel much like a free and footloose adventurer after he has spent two weeks in conference with the State Department, presented a certificate confirming the fact of his birth, gathered together the receipts of his income tax payments and obtained a letter from his pastor. Even though he go to the ends of the earth the adventurer travels only by the express and engraved permission of the United States government. Oceans and mountain ranges cannot alter the fact that he is on a leash. Of course, to free souls the whole system is monstrous. The fact that a man suddenly feels a desire to go to Greece on some rainy Tuesday afternoon is no sign at all that he will still want to go two weeks come Wednesday. The only proper procedure for the rebel is to obtain passports for a number of places for which he has not the slightest inclination on the hope that some day or other through a sudden change of wind he may be struck with yearning. Train journeys are almost as bad as sea voyages. Go into any railroad station in town and ask the man at the window for a ticket and he will invariably inquire "Where do you want to go?" No provision is made for the casual traveler without a destination. The query "What trains have you got?" meets with scant courtesy. Our own system is to shop for trains. It is possible to walk up and down in front of the gates and look over the samples before making a selection, but our practice is to take the first one. To be sure this has let us into going to a good many places to which we didn't want to go, but it has also saved us from visiting any number of others to which we ought to go. Moreover, confidentially, we have one trick by which we slash through the red tape of railroad precision. Only last Thursday we told the man with a great show of determination that we wanted to go to Poughkeepsie and bought a ticket for that place. Then, when the conductor wasn't looking we slipped off at Tarrytown. Going to the theater, getting married or divorced are all carried on under the same objectionable conditions. "Seats eight weeks in advance" say the advertisements of some of the popular shows and others. How can anybody possibly want to do something eight weeks in advance? It makes taking in a matinée a matter as dignified to all intents and purposes as writing a will or doing some other service for posterity. There are in this country statesmen who worry from time to time that people do not marry as young as they used to, if at all. How can it be expected that they will? The life force is powerful and may prevail, but nature never had within its intent a license, witnesses, bridesmaids, a plain gold ring, a contract with the caterer, a bargain with the printer and an engagement with the minister. <h3>Alcoholic Liquors</h3> "The moment, now, had arrived for a Daiquiri," writes Joseph Hergesheimer in his San Cristobal de la Habana. "Seated near the cool drip of the fountain, where a slight stir of air seemed to ruffle the fringed mantone of a bronze dancing Andalusian girl, I lingered over the frigid mixture of Don Bacardi, sugar and a fresh, vivid green lime. "It was a delicate compound, not so good as I was to discover later at the Telegrafo, but still a revelation, and I was devoutly thankful to be sitting at that hour in the Inglaterra with such a drink. It elevated my contentment to an even higher pitch, and, with a detached amusement, I recalled the fact that farther north prohibition was now in effect. Unquestionably the cocktail on my table was a dangerous agent, for it held in its shallow glass bowl slightly incrusted with undissolved sugar the power of a contemptuous indifference to fate; it set the mind free of responsibility; obliterating both memory and to-morrow, it gave the heart an adventitious feeling of superiority and momentarily vanquished all the celebrated, the eternal fears." We wonder what they put into Mr. Hergesheimer's Daiquiri. It seems to us a rather optimistic and romantic account of the effect of a single cocktail. One of the reasons why we were reconciled to prohibition was the fact that we invariably felt cheated whenever we read any loving essay about rum. In the theater, too, again and again we saw some character raise a glass to his lips and immediately begin to sing about young love in May if he happened to be the hero, or fall down a flight of steps if he were cast as the low comedian. We tried earnestly enough, but these experiences were never duplicated for us. No songs came to our lips, nor comic tumbles to our feet. Nor did we ever participate in Mr. Hergesheimer's "contemptuous indifference to fate." It was not for us in one cocktail; no, not in many. Occasionally, it was possible to reach a stage where we became acutely conscious of the fact that Armenians were being massacred and that Ireland was not yet free. And later we have known a very persuasive drowsiness. But as for contempt and a feeling of superiority and a freedom from the eternal fears, we never found the right bottle. There was none which opened for us any door of adventure. Once, we remember, while on our way from the office to Seventy-second Street, we rode in the subway to Van Cortlandt Park and, upon being told about it, traveled back to Atlantic Avenue. It was a long ride for a nickel, but it hardly satisfied us as authentic adventure. Even the romantic stories of our friends generally seem to us inadequate. Only to-day A. W. said, "You should have come to the party. We played a new game called 'adverbs.' You send somebody out of the room and choose an adverb, and when she comes back you've got to answer all the questions in the spirit of that adverb. You know rudely, quickly, cryptically, or anything like that. And then Art did a burlesque of the second act of Samson and Delilah and Elaine passed out completely, and every time anybody woke her up she'd say, 'Call me a black and white ambulance.' You had ought to have come." We couldn't have added anything to that party. When it came our turn to answer the questions in the adverb game it would be just our luck to have the chosen word "gracefully" or "seductively" or something like that, and probably the burlesque was no good anyhow unless one could get into the spirit of the thing. That is our traditional failure. Right at the beginning of a party we realize that it is our duty to get gay and put ice down people's backs and all that, and it terrifies us. Whenever a host says "Here, drink some more Scotch and liven up" we have the same sinking feeling that we used to get when one of our former city editors wrote in the assignment book opposite our name: "Go up to the zoo and write me a funny story." The whole trouble with life so far is that too much of it falls into assignments. We're not even content to let our holidays just happen. Instead we mark them down on a calendar, and there they stay as fixed and set as an execution day. There are times, for instance, when we feel like turning over a new leaf and leading a better life and giving up cigarettes, but when we look at the calendar it isn't New Year's at all, but Fourth of July, and so nothing can be done about it. Columbus Day or Washington's Birthday generally comes just about the time we've worked up an enthusiasm for Lincoln, which has to go to waste, and the only strong impulse we ever had to go out and cut loose was spoiled because we noticed that everybody we met was wearing a white flower in his buttonhole and we remembered that it was Mother's Day. There are even times when we don't want to play cards or travel on railroad trains or read the newspapers or go to the movies, but these times never synchronize with Sunday. When we first took up drinking we hoped that this would be one of the avenues of escape from schedule and assignment, but it didn't work out. Even here there were preliminaries and premeditation. First of all, it was necessary to cultivate a taste for the stuff, but that was only a beginning. There were still ceremonies to be complied with. Drunkenness never just descended on anybody like thunderstorm, rain or inspiration. It was not possible to go to sleep sober and wake up and find that somehow or other you had become intoxicated during the night. Always an act of will was required. A fixed determination, "I'm going to get drunk," must first be set, and then the rum has to be ordered and poured out and consumed pretty regularly. In fact, we never could look at a bottle without feeling that the label probably bore the express direction, "Take ten times every hour until relief is obtained." Even before the Volstead act liquor was spiritually a prescription rather than a beverage. We never had the strength of character to get any good out of it. It's a fallacy, of course, to think of a chronic drunkard or a chronic anything as a person of weak will. Indeed, as a matter of fact, his will is so strong that he has been able to marshal all his energies into one channel and to make himself thereby a specialist. In all our life we have never met but two determined men. One took a cold bath every morning and the other got drunk every night. <h3>Some of My Best Friends Are Yale Men</h3> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry"> <tr><td align="left">"Oh, Harvard was old Harvard when Yale was but a pup,</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">"And Harvard will be Harvard still when Yale has all gone up,</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">"And if any Eli———"</td></tr> </table> THIS is about as far as the old song should be carried. Perhaps it is too far. Our plea to-day is for something of abatement in the intensity of the rivalry between Harvard and Yale. To be sure we realize that the plea has been made before unsuccessfully by mightier men. Indeed it was Charles W. Eliot himself, president of Harvard, who rebuked the students when first they began to sing, "Three cheers for Harvard and down with Yale." This, he said, seemed to him hardly a proper spirit. He suggested an amendment so that the song might go, "Three cheers for Harvard and one for Yale." Such seventy-five percent loyalty was rejected. Yale must continue to do its own cheering. Naturally, it is not to be expected that Yale and Harvard men should meet on terms of perfect amity immediately and that the old bitterness should disappear within the time of our own generation. Such a miracle is beyond the scope of our intention. Too much has happened. Just what it was that Yale originally did to Harvard we don't profess to know. It was enough we suppose to justify the trial of the issue by combat four times a year in the major sports. Curiously enough, for a good many years Yale seemed to grow more and more right if judged in the light of these tests. But the truth is mighty and shall prevail and the righteousness of Harvard's cause began to be apparent with the coming of Percy Haughton. God, as some cynic has said, is always on the side which has the best football coach. Our suggestion is that whatever deep wrong Yale once committed against Harvard, a process of diminution of feeling should be allowed to set in. After all, can't the men of Cambridge be broadminded about these things and remember that nothing within the power of Yale could possibly hurt Harvard very much? Even in the days when the blue elevens were winning with great regularity there should have been consolation enough in the thought that Harvard's Greek department still held the edge. Seemingly nobody ever thought of that. In the 1906 game a Harvard half-back named Nichols was sent in late in the game while the score was still a tie. On practically the first play he dropped a punt which led directly to a Yale touchdown and victory. Throughout the rest of his university career he was known in college as "the man who dropped the punt." When his brother entered Harvard two years later he was promptly christened, and known for his next four years, as "the brother of the man who dropped the punt." Isn't this a little excessive? It seems so to us, but the emphasis has not yet shifted. Only a month or so ago we were talking in New Haven before an organization of Yale graduates upon a subject so unpartisan as the American drama—though to be sure Harvard has turned out ten playwrights of note to every one from Yale—and somehow or other the talk drifted around to football. In pleading for less intensity of football feeling we mentioned the man who dropped the punt and his brother and told how Yale had recovered the fatal fumble on Harvard's nineteen-yard line. Then, with the intention of being jocose, we remarked, "The Yale eleven with characteristic bulldog grit and courage carried the ball over the line." To our horror and amazement the audience immediately broke into applause and long cheers. Some of my best friends are Yale men and there is no basis for the common Harvard assumption that graduates of New Haven's leading university are of necessity inferior to the breed of Cambridge. Still, there is, perhaps, just a shade of difference in the keenness of perception for wit. Practically all the Harvard anecdotes about Yale which we know are pointed and sprightly, while Yale is content with such inferior and tasteless jibes as the falsetto imitation which begins "Fiercely fellows, sift through." Even the audience of graduates to which we referred was singularly cold to the anecdote about the difference in traditions which prevails at New Haven and at Cambridge. "When a Yale man is sick, the authorities immediately assume that he is drunk. When a Harvard man is drunk, the authorities assume that he is sick." Nor were we successful in retelling the stirring appeal of a well-known organizer who was seeking to consolidate various alumni bodies into a vast unified employment agency for college men. "There should be," he cried, "one great clearing house. Then when somebody came for a man to tutor his children we could send him a Harvard man and if he needed somebody to help with the furnace, we'd have a Yale graduate for him." Joking with undergraduates we found still more disastrous. After the last Harvard-Yale football game—score Harvard 9, Yale 0, which doesn't begin to indicate the margin of superiority of the winning team—we wrote an article of humorous intent for a New York newspaper. Naturally our job as a reporter prevented us from being partisan in our account of the game. Accordingly, in a temperate and fairminded spirit, we set down the fact that, through the connivance of the New York press, Yale has become a professional underdog and that any Harvard victory in which the score is less than forty-two to nothing is promptly hailed as a moral victory for Yale. Developing this news angle for a few paragraphs, we eventually came to the unfortunate fist fight between Kempton of Yale and Gaston of Harvard which led to both men being put out of the game. It was our bad luck to see nothing but the last half second of the encounter. As a truthful reporter we made this admission but naturally went on to add, "Of course, we assume that Kempton started it." For weeks we continued to receive letters from Yale undergraduates beginning, "My attention has been called to your article" and continuing to ask with great violence how a reporter could possibly tell who started a fight without seeing the beginning of it. Some letters of like import were from Princeton men. Princeton is always quick to rally to the defense of Yale against Harvard. This suggests a possibly common meeting ground for Harvard and Yale. Of course, they can hardly meet on the basis of a common language for the speech of Yale is quite alien. For instance, they call their "yard" a "campus." Also, there are obvious reasons why they cannot meet as equal members in the fellowship of educated men. Since this is a nonpartisan article designed to promote good feeling it will probably be just as well not to go into this. Though football is the chief interest at New Haven, Yale men often display a surprising sensitiveness to attacks on the scholarship of their local archaeologists. Nor will religion do as a unifier. Yale is evangelical and prays between the halves, while Harvard is mostly agnostic, if it isn't Unitarian. No, just one great cause can be discovered in which Harvard men and Yale men can stand shoulder to shoulder and lift their voices in a common cause. Each year some public spirited citizen ought to hire Madison Square Garden and turn it over to all graduates and undergraduates of Harvard and of Yale for a great get-together meeting in which past differences should be forgotten in one deep and full throated shout of "To Hell with Princeton!" <h3>Bacillus and Circumstance</h3> IT is evening in the home of Peter J. Cottontail. The scene is a conventional parlor of a rabbit family of the upper middle class. About the room there is the sort of furniture a well-to-do rabbit would have, and on the shelves the books you would naturally expect. Leaves of Grass is there, of course; possibly Cabbages and Kings, and perhaps a volume or two of The Winning of the West, with a congratulatory inscription from the author. The walls have one or two good prints of hunting scenes and an excellent lithographic likeness of Thomas Malthus, but most of the space is given over to photographs of the family. In the center of the room is a small square table, the surface of which is covered with figures ranged in curious patterns such as 2 × 5 = 10, and even so radical an arrangement as 7 × 8 = 56. At the rise of the curtain Peter J. Cottontail is discovered seated in an easy chair reading the current edition of The New York Evening Post. He is middle-aged and wears somewhat ill fitting brown fur, tinged with gray, and horn-rimmed spectacles. He looks a little like Lloyd George. As a matter of fact, his grandfather was Welsh. The actor should convey to the audience by means of pantomime that he has made more than a thousand dollars that afternoon by selling Amalgamated Cabbage short, and that there will be a tidy surplus for himself even after he has fulfilled his promise to make up the deficit incurred by the charity hop of the Bone Dry Prohibition Union. Now and again he smiles and pats his stomach complacently. It is essential that the actor should indicate beyond the peradventure of a doubt that Peter J. Cottontail has never touched spirituous or malt liquors or anything containing more than two per cent of alcohol per fluid ounce. As P. J. Cottontail peruses his paper the ceiling of the room is suddenly plucked aside and two hands are thrust into the parlor. One of the hands seizes Mr. Cottontail, and the other hand, which holds a hypodermic needle, stabs the helpless householder and injects into his veins the contents of the needle. It is a fluid gray and forbidding. There is no sound unless the actor who plays Cottontail chooses to squeak just once. Here the curtain descends. It rises again almost immediately, but five days are supposed to have elapsed. Mr. Cottontail is again seated in the center of the room, and he is again reading The Evening Post. The property man should take pains to see that the paper shall be dated five days later than the one used in the prologue. It might also be well to change the headline from "Submarine Crisis Acute" to "Submarine Crisis Still Acute." It is also to be noted that on this occasion Mr. Cottontail has removed his right shoe in favor of a large, roomy slipper. On the opposite side of the table sits Mrs. Cottontail. She is middle-aged but comely. A strong-minded female, one would say, with a will of her own, but rather in awe of the ability and more particularly the virtue of Mr. Cottontail. Yet Mr. Cottontail is evidently in ill humor this evening. He takes no pleasure in his paper, but fidgets uneasily. At last he speaks with great irritation. MR. COTTONTAIL—Is that doctor ever coming? MRS. COTTONTAIL—I left word at Doctor Cony's house that you were in a good deal of pain, and that he should come around the minute he got home. (The door bell rings.) Here he is now. I'll send him up. (She goes out the door, and a few moments later there enters Dr. Charles Cony. He is a distinguished and forceful physician, but a meager little body for all that. He carries a black bag.) DR. CONY (removing his gloves and opening the bag)—Sorry I couldn't get here any sooner, but I've been on the go all day. An obstetrician gets mighty little rest hereabouts, I can tell you. Well, now, Mr. Cottontail, what can I do for you? What seems to be the trouble? COTTONTAIL (pointing to the open door, and lifting one finger to his mouth)—Shush! DR. CONY—Really! (The physician crosses the room in one hop and closes the door.) COTTONTAIL—The pain's in my foot. My big toe, I think, but that's not what worries me— DR. CONY (breaking in)—Pains worse at night than it does during the daytime, doesn't it? Throbs a bit right now, hey? COTTONTAIL—Yes, it does, but that isn't the trouble. DR. CONY—That's trouble enough. I'll try to have you loping around again in a month or so. COTTONTAIL—But there's more than the pain. It's the worry. I haven't told a soul. I thought at first it might be a nightmare. DR. CONY—Dreams, eh? Very significant, sometimes, but we'll get to them later. COTTONTAIL—But I'm afraid it wasn't a dream. DOCTOR—What wasn't a dream? COTTONTAIL—Last Tuesday evening I was sitting in this room, quietly reading The Evening Post, when suddenly something tore the ceiling away, and down from above there came ten horrible pink tentacles and seized me in an iron grasp. Then something stabbed me with some sharp instrument. I was too frightened to move for several minutes, but when I looked up the ceiling was back in place as if nothing had touched it. I felt around for the wound, but the only thing I could find, was a tiny scratch that seemed so small I might have had it some time without noticing it. I couldn't be sure it was a wound. In fact, I tried to make myself believe that the whole thing was all a dream, until I was taken sick to-night. Now I'm afraid that the sword, or whatever it was that stabbed me, must have been poisoned. DR. CONY (sharply)—Let me look at your tongue. (Cottontail complies.) Seems all right. Hold out your hands. Spread your fingers. (He studies the patient for a moment.) Nothing much the matter there. (Producing pen and paper.) If it was only March now I'd know what to say. Let's see what we can find out about hereditary influence. Father and mother living? COTTONTAIL—I had no father or mother. I came out of a trick hat in a vaudeville act. DR. CONY—That makes it a little more difficult, doesn't it? Do you happen to remember what sort of a hat? COTTONTAIL (a little proudly)—It was quite a high hat. DR. CONY—Yes, it would be. What color? COTTONTAIL—Black and shiny. DR. CONY—That seems normal enough. I'm afraid there's nothing significant there. (Anxiously.) No fixed delusions? You don't think you're Napoleon or the White Rabbit or anything like that, do you? Do you feel like growling or biting anybody? COTTONTAIL—Of course not. There's nothing the matter with my brain. DR. CONY—Perhaps you went to sleep and dreamed it all. COTTONTAIL—No, I distinctly saw the ceiling open and I felt the stab very sharply. I couldn't possibly have been asleep. I was reading a most interesting dramatic review in The Evening Post. DR. CONY—But you weren't stabbed in the big toe, now, were you? COTTONTAIL—Well, no. DR. CONY—And you will admit that the ceiling's just the same as it ever was? COTTONTAIL—It looks the same from here. I haven't called any workmen in yet to examine it. DR. CONY—Take my advice and don't. Just let's keep the matter between ourselves and forget it. I'm afraid you've been working too hard. Drop your business. Do a little light reading, and after a bit maybe I'd like to have you go to a show. Something with songs and bunny-hugging and jokes and chorus girls. None of this birth control stuff. I don't see how any self-respecting rabbit could go to a play like the one I saw last night. (He goes to his instrument case and produces a stethoscope.) DR. CONY—Have you had your heart examined lately? COTTONTAIL (visibly nervous)—No. DR. CONY—Any shortness of breath or palpitation? COTTONTAIL—I don't think so. DR. CONY—If that's a vest you have on, take it off. There, now. (He stands in front of Cottontail with his stethoscope poised in the air. Cottontail is trembling. Dr. Cony allows the hand holding the stethoscope to drop to his side and remarks provocatively), I'll bet you Maranville doesn't hit .250 this season. COTTONTAIL (amazed)—Really, sir, I never bet. No, never. I don't know what you are talking about, anyway. DR. CONY—That's all right, that's all right. Don't agitate yourself. Just a little professional trick. I wanted to calm you down. Now (he makes a hurried examination), Mr. Cottontail, I don't want you to run. I don't want you to climb stairs. Avoid excitement and don't butter your parsnips. Fine words are just as good, no matter what anybody may tell you, and they don't create fatty tissue. Of course, you've got to have some exercise. You might play a little golf. Say, about three holes a day. COTTONTAIL (sadly)—Three holes? DR. CONY—Yes, that will be enough. COTTONTAIL (musing)—It's a little tough, doctor. I can still remember the day I won my "H" at dear old Hassenpfeffer in the 'cross-country run. I had the lungs and the legs then. Even now I can feel the wind on my face as I came across the meadow and up that last, long hill. They were cheering for me to come on. I can tell you I just leaped along. It was nothing at all for me. If I'd sprinted just a bit sooner I could have been first in a hop. Anyhow, I was second. There was nobody ahead of me but the Tortoise. (Cheerlessly) Three holes of golf a day! DR. CONY—Come, come, sir, be a rabbit. There's no cheating nature, you know. You had your fun, and now you must pay. COTTONTAIL—What's the matter with me? DR. CONY—Plain, old-fashioned gout. COTTONTAIL—What does that come from? DR. CONY (with evident relish)—From too much ale or porter or claret or burgundy or champagne or sherry or Rhine Wine or Clover Clubs or Piper Heidsieck or brandy or Bronxes or absinthe or stingers, but the worst of all and the best of all is port wine. COTTONTAIL (horrified)—You mean it comes from drinking? Dr. Cony—In all my twenty-five years of professional practice I have never known a case of gout without antecedent alcoholism. COTTONTAIL (much relieved)—Well, then, it can't be gout. I've never taken a drink in my life. Dr. Cony—In all my twenty-five years of professional experience I've never made an incorrect diagnosis. It is gout. COTTONTAIL—But I'm president of the Bone Dry Prohibition Union. Dr. Cony—The more shame to you, sir. COTTONTAIL—What shall I do? DR. CONY—Obey my instructions implicitly. A good many doctors will tell you that they can't cure gout. Undoubtedly they are right. They can't. But I can. Only you simply must stop drinking. Cutting down and tapering off to ten or twelve drinks a day won't do. You must stop absolutely. No liquor at all. Do you understand? Not a drop, sir. COTTONTAIL (his nose violently palpitating with emotion)—I never took a drink in my life. I'm president of the Bone Dry Prohibition Union. I was just sitting quietly reading The Evening Post— DR. CONY—Save that story for your bone-dry friends. I have nothing to do with your past life. I'm not judging you. It's nature that says the alcoholic must pay and pay and pay. I'm only concerned now with the present and the future, and the present is that you're suffering from alcoholism manifested in gout, and the future is that you'll die if you don't stop drinking. COTTONTAIL—I tell you I promised my Sunday school teacher when I was a boy that I would always be a Little Light Bearer, and that I would never take a drink if I lived to be a hundred. DR. CONY—Don't worry, you won't live that long, and don't take on so. You're not the first one that's had his fun and then been dragged up by the heels for it. Cheer up. Remember the good times that are gone. Life can't be all carrots, you know. COTTONTAIL—But I never had any good times. DR. CONY—Oh, yes, you did, I'll warrant you. There must have been many merry nights as the bottle passed around the table. (With evident gusto) Maybe there was a rousing song—"When Leeks Are Young in Springtime"—or something like that, and I wouldn't be surprised if now and again there was some fluffy little miss to sing soprano to your bass. Youth! Youth! To be young, a rabbit and stewed. (Quoting reminiscently) "A leaf of lettuce underneath the bough." After all, salad days are the best days. I never meet an old rabbit with gout but I take off my hat and say, "Sir, you have lived." COTTONTAIL (wildly)—It's not true. I never lived like that. I never took a drink in my life. You can ask anybody. Nobody ever saw me take a drink. DR. CONY—That's bad. You solitary drunkards are always the hardest to handle. But you've simply got to stop. You must quit drinking or die, that's all there is to it. COTTONTAIL—This is terrible. It must have been that poisoned sword. I tell you, I was just sitting here quietly, reading The Evening Post— DR. CONY—My dear sir, please rid yourself right away of the alcoholic's habit of confusing cause and effect. He thinks he's sick because green elephants are walking on him, while, as a matter of fact, green elephants are walking on him because he's sick. It's terribly simple, when you stop to figure it out. COTTONTAIL—You don't think I saw any pink monster come through the ceiling? DR. CONY—On the contrary, I'm sure you did. But the point is, you mustn't see him again, and the only way to avoid seeing him is to quit drinking. Your fun's done. Now, be a good patient and tell me you'll stop drinking— COTTONTAIL—I tell you I never had any fun. I never had any fun— DR. CONY—Well, strictly speaking, it isn't the fun that hurts you, it's the rum. You must stop, even if you hate the stuff. Do you understand? COTTONTAIL (hysterical)—I can't stop, I can't stop; I never started, I can't stop— DR. CONY—Very well, sir, I must insist on taking the only measure that will save your life. (He steps to the door and calls) Mrs. Cottontail, will you come here immediately? (Enter Mrs. Cottontail.) COTTONTAIL—My dear— DR. CONY—If you please, madame. Let me explain first. You can have it out with your husband later. I'm sorry to tell you, Mrs. Cottontail, that your husband has gout. He has contracted it from excessive drinking. You knew, of course, that he was a heavy drinker? MRS. COTTONTAIL (surprised, but not in the least incredulous)—I couldn't go so far as to say I knew it. DR. CONY—He must stop or he'll die. COTTONTAIL (rapidly and wildly)—I can explain everything, my dear. The doctor's all wrong. The whole trouble is somebody pulled the roof off the other day and stabbed me with a poisoned sword. I was right here in this room. I was just quietly reading The Evening Post. I knew no good would come of our moving into this new apartment house, with its fancy wire and green paint and free food, and all the rest of it. DR. CONY (to Mrs. Cottontail, who aids him in ignoring the patient)—You can see for yourself, madame, just how rational he is. I leave him in your care, Mrs. Cottontail. Don't let him out of your sight. Try and find out where he gets his liquor. If he pleads with you for a drink, be firm with him. Follow him everywhere. Make him obey. It won't be hard in his enfeebled condition. I'll be around to-morrow. (To Cottontail) Remember, one drink may be fatal. (Exit Dr. Cony.) COTTONTAIL—My dear, it was a pink monster, with an enormous dagger. It lifted off the ceiling— MRS. COTTONTAIL—Peter, can't you even be temperate in your lies? COTTONTAIL (sinking helplessly in his chair)—My dear, I was just sitting quietly, reading The Evening Post— MRS. COTTONTAIL—You brute! I always had a feeling you were too good to be true. COTTONTAIL (feebly and hopelessly)—I was just sitting, reading The Evening Post (his voice trails off into nothingness. He sits motionless, huddled up in the chair. Suddenly he speaks again, but it is a new voice, strangely altered.) Mopsy, give me The Sun. MRS. COTTONTAIL (looking at him in amazement)—What do you say? COTTONTAIL (His muscles relax. His eyes stare stupidly. He speaks without sense or expression)—The Sun! The Sun! The Evening Sun! (He is quite mad.) (Curtain.) <h3>Death Says It Isn't So</h3> THE scene is a sickroom. It is probably in a hospital, for the walls are plain and all the corners are eliminated in that peculiar circular construction which is supposed to annoy germs. The shades are down and the room is almost dark. A doctor who has been examining the sick man turns to go. The nurse at his side looks at him questioningly. THE DOCTOR (briskly)—I don't believe he'll last out the day. If he wakes or seems unusually restless, let me know. There's nothing to do. He goes out quietly, but quickly, for there is another man down at the end of the corridor who is almost as sick. The nurse potters about the room for a moment or two, arranging whatever things it is that nurses arrange. She exits l. c., or, in other words, goes out the door. There is just a short pause in the dark, quiet room shut out from all outside noises and most outside light. When the steam pipes are not clanking only the slow breathing of the man on the bed can be heard. Suddenly a strange thing happens. The door does not open or the windows, but there is unquestionably another man in the room. It couldn't have been the chimney, because there isn't any. Possibly it is an optical illusion, but the newcomer seems just a bit indistinct for a moment or so in the darkened room. Quickly he raises both the window shades, and in the rush of bright sunlight he is definite enough in appearance. Upon better acquaintance it becomes evident that it couldn't have been the chimney, even if there had been one. The visitor is undeniably bulky, although extraordinarily brisk in his movements. He has a trick which will develop later in the scene of blushing on the slightest provocation. At that his color is habitually high. But this round, red, little man, peculiarly enough, has thin white hands and long tapering fingers, like an artist or a newspaper cartoonist. Very possibly his touch would be lighter than that of the nurse herself. At any rate, it is evident that he walks much more quietly. This is strange, for he does not rise on his toes, but puts his feet squarely on the ground. They are large feet, shod in heavy hobnail boots. No one but a golfer or a day laborer would wear such shoes. The hands of the little, round, red man preclude the idea that he is a laborer. The impression that he is a golfer is heightened by the fact that he is dressed loudly in very bad taste. In fact, he wears a plaid vest of the sort which was brought over from Scotland in the days when clubs were called sticks. The man in the gaudy vest surveys the sunshine with great satisfaction. It reaches every corner of the room, or rather it would but for the fact that the corners have been turned into curves. A stray beam falls across the eyes of the sick man on the bed. He wakes, and, rubbing his eyes an instant, slowly sits up in bed and looks severely at the fat little man. THE SICK MAN (feebly, but vehemently)—No, you don't. I won't stand for any male nurse. I want Miss Bluchblauer. THE FAT MAN—I'm not a nurse, exactly. THE SICK MAN—Who are you? THE FAT MAN (cheerfully and in a matter of fact tone)—I'm Death. THE SICK MAN (sinking back on the bed)—That rotten fever's up again. I'm seeing things. THE FAT MAN (almost plaintively)—Don't you believe I'm Death? Honest, I am. I wouldn't fool you. (He fumbles in his pockets and produces in rapid succession a golf ball, a baseball pass, a G string, a large lump of gold, a receipted bill, two theater tickets and a white mass of sticky confection which looks as though it might be a combination of honey and something—milk, perhaps)—I've gone and left that card case again, but I'm Death, all right. THE SICK MAN—What nonsense! If you really were I'd be frightened. I'd have cold shivers up and down my spine. My hair would stand on end like the fretful porcupine. I'm not afraid of you. Why, when Sadie Bluchblauer starts to argue about the war she scares me more than you do. THE FAT MAN (very much relieved and visibly brighter)—That's fine. I'm glad you're not scared. Now we can sit down and talk things over like friends. THE SICK MAN—I don't mind talking, but remember I know you're not Death. You're just some trick my hot head's playing on me. Don't get the idea you're putting anything over. THE FAT MAN—But what makes you so sure I'm not Death? THE SICK MAN—Go on! Where's your black cloak? Where's your sickle? Where's your skeleton? Why don't you rattle when you walk? THE FAT MAN (horrified and distressed)—Why should I rattle? What do I want with a black overcoat or a skeleton? I'm not fooling you. I'm Death, all right. THE SICK MAN—Don't tell me that. I've seen Death a thousand times in the war cartoons. And I've seen him on the stage—Maeterlinck, you know, with green lights and moaning, and that Russian fellow, Andreyeff, with no light at all, and hollering. And I've seen other plays with Death—lots of them. I'm one of the scene shifters with the Washington Square Players. This isn't regular, at all. There's more light in here right now than any day since I've been sick. THE FAT MAN—I always come in the light. Be a good fellow and believe me. You'll see I'm right later on. I wouldn't fool anybody. It's mean. THE SICK MAN (laughing out loud)—Mean! What's meaner than Death? You're not Death. You're as soft and smooth-talking as a press agent. Why, you could go on a picnic in that make-up. THE FAT MAN (almost soberly)—I've been on picnics. THE SICK MAN—You're open and above board. Death's a sneak. You've got a nice face. Yes; you've got a mighty nice face. You'd stop to help a bum in the street or a kid that was crying. THE FAT MAN—I have stopped for beggars and children. THE SICK MAN—There, you see; I told you. You're kind and considerate. Death's the cruellest thing in the world. THE FAT MAN (very much agitated)—Oh, please don't say that! It isn't true. I'm kind; that's my business. When things get too rotten I'm the only one that can help. They've got to have me. You should hear them sometimes before I come. I'm the one that takes them off battlefields and out of slums and all terribly tired people. I whisper a joke in their ears, and we go away, laughing. We always go away laughing. Everybody sees my joke, it's so good. THE SICK MAN—What's the joke? THE FAT MAN—I'll tell it to you later. Enter the Nurse. She almost runs into the Fat Man, but goes right past without paying any attention. It almost seems as if she cannot see him. She goes to the bedside of the patient. THE NURSE—So, you're awake. You feel any more comfortable? The Sick Man continues to stare at the Fat Man, but that worthy animated pantomime indicates that he shall say nothing of his being there. While this is on, the Nurse takes the patient's temperature. She looks at it, seems surprised, and then shakes the thermometer. THE SICK MAN (eagerly)—I suppose my temperature's way up again, hey? I've been seeing things this afternoon and talking to myself. THE NURSE—No; your temperature is almost normal. THE SICK MAN (incredulously)—Almost normal? THE NURSE—Yes; under a hundred. She goes out quickly and quietly. The Sick Man turns to his fat friend. THE SICK MAN—What do you make of that? Less than a hundred. That oughtn't to make me see things; do you think so? THE FAT MAN—Well, I'd just as soon not be called a thing. Up there I'm called good old Death. Some of the fellows call me Bill. Maybe that's because I'm always due. THE SICK MAN—Rats! Is that the joke you promised me? THE FAT MAN (pained beyond measure)—Oh, that was just a little unofficial joke. The joke's not like that. I didn't make up the real one. It wasn't made up at all. It's been growing for years and years. A whole lot of people have had a hand in fixing it up—Aristophanes and Chaucer and Shakespeare, and Mark Twain and Rabelais— THE SICK MAN—Did that fellow Rabelais get in—up there? THE FAT MAN—Well, not exactly, but he lives in one of the most accessible parts of the suburb, and we have him up quite often. He's popular on account of his after-dinner stories. What I might call his physical humor is delightfully reminiscent and archaic. THE SICK MAN—There won't be any bodies, then? THE FAT MAN—Oh, yes, brand new ones. No tonsils or appendixes, of course. That is, not as a rule. We have to bring in a few tonsils every year to amuse our doctors. THE SICK MAN—Any shows? THE FAT MAN—I should say so. Lots of 'em, and all hits. In fact, we've never had a failure (provocatively). Now, what do you think is the best show you ever saw? THE SICK MAN (reminiscently)—Well, just about the best show I ever saw was a piece called "Fair and Warmer," but, of course, you wouldn't have that. THE FAT MAN—Of course, we have. The fellow before last wanted that. THE SICK MAN (truculently)—I'll bet you haven't got the original company. THE FAT MAN (apologetically)—No, but we expect to get most of them by and by. Nell Gwyn does pretty well in the lead just now. THE SICK MAN (shocked)—Did she get in? THE FAT MAN—No, but Rabelais sees her home after the show. We don't think so much of "Fair and Warmer." That might be a good show for New York, but it doesn't class with us. It isn't funny enough. THE SICK MAN (with rising interest)—Do you mean to say you've got funnier shows than "Fair and Warmer"? THE FAT MAN—We certainly have. Why, it can't begin to touch that thing of Shaw's called "Ah, There, Annie!" THE SICK MAN—What Shaw's that? THE FAT MAN—Regular Shaw. THE SICK MAN—A lot of things must have been happening since I got sick. I hadn't heard he was dead. At that I always thought that vegetable truck was unhealthy. THE FAT MAN—He isn't dead. THE SICK MAN—Well, how about this "Ah, There, Annie!"? He never wrote that show down here. THE FAT MAN—But he will. THE SICK MAN (enormously impressed)—Do you get shows there before we have them in New York? THE FAT MAN—I tell you we get them before they're written. THE SICK MAN (indignantly)—How can you do that? THE FAT MAN—I wish you wouldn't ask me. The answer's awfully complicated. You've got to know a lot of higher math. Wait and ask Euclid about it. We don't have any past and future, you know. None of that nuisance about keeping shall and will straight. THE SICK MAN—Well, I must say that's quite a stunt. You get shows before they're written. THE FAT MAN—More than that. We get some that never do get written. Take that one of Ibsen's now, "Merry Christmas"— THE SICK MAN (fretfully)—Ibsen? THE FAT MAN—Yes, it's a beautiful, sentimental little fairy story with a ghost for the hero. Ibsen just thought about it and never had the nerve to go through with it. He was scared people would kid him, but thinking things makes them so with us. THE SICK MAN—Then I'd think a sixty-six round Van Cortlandt for myself. THE FAT MAN—You could do that. But why Van Cortlandt? We've got much better greens on our course. It's a beauty. Seven thousand yards long and I've made it in fifty-four. THE SICK MAN (suspiciously)—Did you hole out on every green or just estimate? THE FAT MAN (stiffly)—The score is duly attested. I might add that it was possible because I drove more than four hundred yards on nine of the eighteen holes. THE SICK MAN—More than four hundred yards? How did you do that? THE FAT MAN—It must have been the climate, or (thoughtfully) it may be because I wanted so much to drive over four hundred yards on those holes. THE SICK MAN (with just a shade of scorn)—So that's the trick. I guess nobody'd ever beat me on that course; I'd just want the ball in the hole in one every time. THE FAT MAN (in gentle reproof)—No, you wouldn't. Where you and I are going pretty soon we're all true sportsmen and nobody there would take an unfair advantage of an opponent. THE SICK MAN—Before I go I want to know something. There's a fellow in 125th Street's been awful decent to me. Is there any coming back to see people here? (A pause.) THE FAT MAN—I can't explain to you yet, but it's difficult to arrange that. Still, I wouldn't say that there never were any slumming parties from beyond the grave. THE SICK MAN (shivering)—The grave! I'd forgotten about that. THE FAT MAN—Oh, you won't go there, and, what's more, you won't be at the funeral, either. I wish I could keep away from them. I hate funerals. They make me mad. You know, they say "Oh, Death, where is thy sting?" just as if they had a pretty good hunch I had one around me some place after all. And you know that other—"My friends, this is not a sad occasion," but they don't mean it. They keep it sad. They simply won't learn any better. I suppose they'd be a little surprised to know that you were sitting watching Radbourne pitch to Ed. Delehanty with the bases full and three balls and two strikes called. Two runs to win and one to tie. THE SICK MAN—Will Radbourne pitch? THE FAT MAN—Sure thing. THE SICK MAN—And, say, will Delehanty bust that ball? THE FAT MAN—Make it even money and bet me either way. THE SICK MAN—I don't want to wait any longer. Tell me that joke of yours and let's go. The light softens a little. The room is almost rose color now. It might be from the sunset. The Fat Man gently pushes the head of the Sick Man back on the pillow. Leaning over, he whispers in his ear briefly and the Sick Man roars with laughter. As his laughter slackens a little The Fat Man says, "I'll meet you in the press box," and then before you know it he's gone. The Sick Man is still laughing, but less loudly. People who did not know might think it was gasping. The Nurse opens the door and is frightened. She loudly calls "Doctor! Doctor!" and runs down the corridor. The Sick Man gives one more chuckle and is silent. The curtains at one of the windows sway slightly. Of course, it's the breeze. (Curtain.) <h3>The Library of a Lover</h3> THE responsibilities of a book reviewer, always heavy, sometimes assume a gravity which makes it quite impossible for them to be borne on any single pair of shoulders. We have received a letter to-day upon which so much depends that we hesitate to answer without requesting advice from readers. It is from a young man in Pittsburgh who identifies himself merely by the initials X. Q., which we presume to be fictitious. He writes as follows: "As a reader of the book columns of The Tribune I am humbly requesting your assistance in the matter of a little experiment that I desire to perform. I find myself highly enamored of a superlatively attractive young lady who has, however, one apparent drawback to me. That lies in the fact that she has never cultivated a taste for really worth while reading. Such reading to me is one of the greatest of life's pleasures. Now, my idea is this: that this reading taste may be developed by the reading of a number of the best books in various lines. I have decided upon an experiment wherein a list of fifty books shall be furnished by you and a serious attempt made by the young lady to read them. When she has completed this reading I shall ask her to make a thoroughly frank statement as to whether a reading habit has been cultivated which will enable her to enjoy good literature. I would appreciate very much your furnishing me a list of fifty of the very best books which you consider suitable for the experiment which I have in mind. The lady in question has read but little, but has completed the regulation high school course and in addition has taken two years at one of the recognized girls' schools of the country." Obviously, the making of such a list involves a responsibility which we do not care to assume. We do not like to risk the possibility that our own particular literary prejudices might rear a barrier between two fond hearts. After all, as somebody has said, fond hearts are more than Conrads. However, we do venture the suggestion that if the young man's intentions are honorable, fifty books is far too great a number for the experiment which he has in mind. We have known many a young couple to begin life with no possession to their name but a common fondness for the poems of W. E. Henley. We have known others to marry on Kipling and repent on Shaw. Of course, it would be a great deal easier for us to advise the young man if we knew just what sort of a wife he wanted. If she likes Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit it seems to us fair to assume that she will be able to do a little plain mending and some of the cooking. On the other hand, if her favorite author is May Sinclair, we rather think it would be well to be prepared to provide hired help from the beginning. Should she prefer Eleanor H. Porter, we think there would be no danger in telling the paperhangers to do the bedroom in pink. After all, if she is a thoroughgoing follower of Pollyanna and the glad game, you don't really need any wall paper at all. It would still be her duty to be glad about it. But we are afraid that some of this is frivolous and beside the point, and we assume that the young man truly wants serious advice to help him in the solution of his problem. Since marriage is at best a gamble, we advise him earnestly not to compromise his ardor with any dreary round of fifty books. Let him chance all on a single volume. And what shall it be? Personally, we have always been strongly attracted by persons who liked Joan and Peter, but we know that there are excellent wives and mothers who find this particular novel of Wells's dreary stuff. There are certain dislikes which might well serve as green signals of caution. A young man, we think, should certainly go slow if she does not like An Inland Voyage, or Virginibus Puerisque, or The Ebb Tide or Sentimental Tommy. He should take thought and ask himself repeatedly, "Is this really love?" if she confesses a distaste for Tono Bungay, or Far from the Madding Crowd, or Cæsar and Cleopatra. And if she can find no interest in Conrad in Quest of His Youth, or Mary Olivier or Huckleberry Finn, let him by all means stipulate a long engagement. But if she dislikes Alice in Wonderland let the young man temporize no more. It is then his plain duty to tell her that he has made a mistake and that what he took for love was no more than the passing infatuation of physical passion. <h3>A Bolt from the Blue</h3> JOHN ROACH STRATON died and went to his appointed kingdom where he immediately sought an audience with the ruler of the realm. "Let New York be destroyed," shouted Dr. Straton as he pushed his way into the inner room. The king was engaged at the moment in watching a sparrow fall to earth and motioned the visitor to compose himself in silence, but there was an urgency in the voice and manner of the man from earth which would not be denied. "Smite them hip and thigh," said Dr. Straton and the king looked down at him and asked, "Is the necessity immediate?" "Delay not thy wrath," said Dr. Straton, "for to-day on thy Sabbath sixty thousand men, women, and children of New York have gathered together to watch a baseball game." The ruler of the realm looked and saw that 11,967 persons were watching the Yankees and the White Sox at the Polo Grounds. "A good husky tidal wave would confound them," urged Straton, but the king shook his head. "Remember the judgment you heaped upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah," suggested Straton. The ruler of the realm nodded without enthusiasm. "I remember," he said, "but as I recollect it didn't do much good." Dr. Straton's bright hopefulness faded and the king hastened to reassure him. "We can think up something better than that," he said, and had the visitor been an observant man he might have noticed that the streets of the kingdom were paved with tact. "Now there was the Tower of Babel," said the ruler of the realm reflectively, "that was a creative idea. That was a doom which persisted because it had ingenuity as well as power. That's what we need now." Suddenly there dawned in the face of the king an idea, and it seemed to Dr. Straton as if he were standing face to face with a sunrise. The doctor lowered his eyes and he saw that the men and the women Sabbath breakers of New York were all upon their feet and shouting, though to his newly immortal senses the din came feebly. "Now," he said, with an exultation which caused him to slip into his old pulpit manner, "let 'em have it." But the king with keener vision than Dr. Straton, saw that it was the ninth inning, the score tied, runners on first and second, and Babe Ruth coming to bat. "The time has not come," said the king, and he pushed the doctor gently and made him give ground a little. And they waited until two strikes had been pitched and three balls. The next one would have cut the heart of the plate, but Babe Ruth swung and the ball rose straight in the air. Up and up it came until it disappeared from the view of all the players and spectators and even of the umpires. Soon a mighty wrangle began. Miller Huggins claimed a home run and Kid Gleason argued that the ball was foul. The umpires waited for an hour and then, as the ball had not yet come down, Dineen was forced to make a decision and shouted "Foul!" while the crowd booed. One of the pop bottles injured him rather badly and there was a riot for which it was necessary to call out the reserves. Everybody went home disgruntled and a month later the Lusk bill abolishing Sunday baseball was passed. And all the time the ball continued to rise until suddenly the king, thrusting out his left hand, caught it neatly and slipped it into his pocket. It was not a conventional pocket, for there were planets in it and ever-lasting mercy and other things. For a long time Dr. Straton had been awed into silence by the mighty miracle, but now he spoke, reverently but firmly. "I beg your pardon," he said, "but you will observe that there is a sign in the baseball park which says 'All balls batted out of the diamond remain the property of the New York Baseball Club and should be thrown back!'" The ruler of the realm smiled. "You forget," he answered, "that if I threw the ball back from this great height it might strike a man and kill him, it might crash through a huge office building, it might even destroy the Calvary Baptist Church." Then for the first time a touch of sharpness came into the voice of Dr. Straton. "All that is immaterial," he said. "I think I know my theology well enough to understand that law is law and right is right, come what may." "Oh, but it's not nearly as simple as all that," remonstrated the king. "There are right things which are so harsh and unpleasant that they become wrong; and wrong things which are, after all, so jolly that it's hard not to call them right. Why, sometimes I have to stop a fraction of a century myself to reach a decision. It's terribly complicated. The problem is infinite. No mere man, quick or dead, has any right to be dogmatic about it." "Come, come," said Dr. Straton, and now there was nothing but anger in his voice, "I've heard all those devilish arguments before. When I came here I thought you were God and that this was Heaven. I know now that there's been a mistake. God is no mollycoddle." He turned on his heel and started to walk away before he remembered that he was a Southern gentleman as well as a clergyman and bowed stiffly, once. Then he went to the edge of the kingdom and jumped. Where he landed it would be hard to say. Only a carefully trained theologian could tell. <h3>Inasmuch</h3> ONCE there lived near Bethlehem a man named Simon and his wife Deborah. And Deborah dreamed a curious dream, a dream so vivid that it might better be called a vision. It was not yet daybreak, but she roused her husband and told him that an angel had come to her in the vision and had said, as she remembered it, "To-morrow night in Bethlehem the King of the World will be born." The rest was not so vivid in Deborah's mind, but she told Simon that wise men and kings were already on their way to Bethlehem, bringing gifts for the wonder child. "When he is born," she said, "the wise men and the kings who bring these gifts will see the stars dance in the heavens and hear the voices of angels. You and I must send presents, too, for this child will be the greatest man in all the world." Simon objected that there was nothing of enough value in the house to take to such a child, but Deborah replied, "The King of the World will understand." Then, although it was not yet light, she got up and began to bake a cake, and Simon went beyond the town to the hills and got holly and made a wreath. Later in the day husband and wife looked over all their belongings, but the only suitable gift they could find was one old toy, a somewhat battered wooden duck that had belonged to their eldest son, who had grown up and married and gone away to live in Galilee. Simon painted the toy duck as well as he could, and Deborah told him to take it and the cake and the wreath of holly and go to Bethlehem. "It's not much," she said, "but the King will understand." It was almost sunset when Simon started down the winding road that led to Bethlehem. Deborah watched him round the first turn and would have watched longer except that he was walking straight toward the sun and the light hurt her eyes. She went back into the house and an hour had hardly passed when she heard Simon whistling in the garden. He was walking very slowly. At the door he hesitated for almost a minute. She looked up when he came in. He was empty handed. "You haven't been to Bethlehem," said Deborah. "No," said Simon. "Then, where is the cake, and the holly wreath, and the toy duck?" "I'm sorry," said Simon, "I couldn't help it somehow. It just happened." "What happened?" asked Deborah sharply. "Well," said Simon, "just after I went around the first turn in the road I found a child sitting on that big white rock, crying. He was about two or three years old, and I stopped and asked him why he was crying. He didn't answer. Then I told him not to cry like that, and I patted his head, but that didn't do any good. I hung around, trying to think up something, and I decided to put the cake down and take him up in my arms for a minute. But the cake slipped out of my hands and hit the rock, and a piece of the icing chipped off. Well, I thought, that baby in Bethlehem won't miss a little piece of icing, and I gave it to the child and he stopped crying. But when he finished he began to cry again. I just sort of squeezed another little piece of icing off, and that was all right, for a little while; but then I had to give him another piece, and things went on that way, and all of a sudden I found that there wasn't any cake left. After that he looked as if he might cry again, and I didn't have any more cake and so I showed him the duck and he said 'Ta-ta.' I just meant to lend him the duck for a minute, but he wouldn't give it up. I coaxed him a good while, but he wouldn't let go. And then a woman came out of that little house and she began to scold him for staying out so late, and so I told her it was my fault and I gave her the holly wreath just so she wouldn't be mad at the child. And after that, you see, I didn't have anything to take to Bethlehem, and so I came back here." Deborah had begun to cry long before Simon finished his story, but when he had done she lifted up her head and said, "How could you do it, Simon? Those presents were meant for the King of the World, and you gave them to the first crying child you met on the road." Then she began to cry again, and Simon didn't know what to say or do, and it grew darker and darker in the room and the fire on the hearth faded to a few embers. And that little red glow was all there was in the room. Now, Simon could not even see Deborah across the room, but he could still hear her sobbing. But suddenly the room was flooded with light and Deborah's sobbing broke into a great gulp and she rushed to the window and looked out. The stars danced in the sky and from high above the house came the voice of angels saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men." Deborah dropped to her knees in a panic of joy and fear. Simon knelt beside her, but first he said, "I thought maybe that the baby in Bethlehem wouldn't mind so very much." <h3>H. 3rd—The Review of a Continuous Performance</h3> MARCH 1, 1919.—"Do you know how to keep the child from crying?" began the prospectus. "Do you know how always to obtain cheerful obedience?" it continued. "To suppress the fighting instinct? To teach punctuality? Perseverance? Carefulness? Honesty? Truthfulness? Correct pronunciation?" We pondered. Obviously, our rejoinder must be: "In reply to questions NOS. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 the answer is in the negative." The prospectus said that all this would be easy if you bought the book. "Instead of a hardship," the advertisement said, "child training becomes a genuine pleasure, as the parent shares every confidence, every joy and every sorrow of the child, and at the same time has its unqualified respect. This is a situation rarely possible under the old training methods. And what a source of pride now as well as in after years! To have children whose every action shows culture and refinement—perfect little gentlemen and gentlewomen." This gave us pause. After all, we were not certain that we wanted a little gentleman who washed behind the ears, wore blue velvet and took his baths with a broad "a." We felt that he might expect too much from us. It might cramp our style to live with a person entirely truthful, punctual, persevering, honest and careful. Also, we were a little abashed about sharing confidences. The privilege of becoming a confidant would involve a return in kind, and it would not be a fair swap. It seemed to us that the confessions of the truthful, honest, careful and persevering child could never be half so interesting as our own. We were also a little bit discouraged over the promise to suppress the fighting instinct. We did not feel qualified for the job of making it up to him by chastising the parents of the various boys along the block who drubbed him. And yet we were not entirely dissuaded until we read something of the manner in which the new method should be applied. It was hard to thrust aside the knowledge of how to keep the child from crying. But, then, the book said: "No matter whether your child is still in the cradle or is eighteen years old, this course will show how to apply the right methods at once. You merely take up the particular trait, turn to the proper page and apply the lessons to the child. You are told exactly what to do." It wasn't that we were afraid that somebody else around the house might get hold of the book and turn it on us. That risk we might have faced. But a quotation from Abraham Lincoln in the prospectus itself brought complete disillusion. "All that I am and all that I ever hope to be I owe to my mother." That's what Abraham Lincoln said, according to the prospectus. It seemed, perhaps, like halving the proper acknowledgments, and yet it lay in the right direction. But what of the punctual, persevering and truthful child brought up under the new method? We could see only one acknowledgment open to him. We pictured his first inaugural address, and seemed to hear him say: "All that I am to-day I owe to Professor Tunkhouser's book on The Training of Children. If I am honest you have only to look on page 29 to know the reason. It is true that I have persevered to gain this high office, and why should I not, seeing that I was cradled in page 136?" Of course, if he had not overlooked the chapter on proper gratitude he might upon maturity return the purchase price of Professor Tunkhouser's volume. That seemed almost the most to be expected. And so we let him cry, and are going on in the old, careless way, hoping to be able, unscientifically enough, to lick a working amount of truth and general virtue into him at such time as that becomes necessary. However, we did write to the publisher to ask him if by any chance he had a book along the same lines about Airedale puppies. <hr /> JUNE 5, 1919.—"Izzie gonna teachie itty cutums English or not?" asks Prudence Brandish in effect in her book Mother Love in Action, and proceeds to protest vigorously against the practice of bringing up children on baby talk. It is true that parents deserve part of the blame, but babies ought to be made to realize that some of the responsibility is theirs. Often they talk the jargon themselves without any encouragement whatever. Indeed, they have been known to cling to muddled words and phrases in spite of the soundest reasoning which all their parents could bring to bear on the matter. H. 3rd, for instance, has been told repeatedly that the word is "button," and yet he goes on calling it "bur" or "but" or something like that. We feel very strongly that he should get it straight, because it is the only word he knows. He tried "moma" and "dayday" for a while, but abandoned them when he seemed to sense opposition against his attempt to use them broadly enough to include casual friends and total strangers. R., who comes from Virginia, could not be made to abandon a narrow-minded point of view about H.'s conception of his relation to the ashman. "But" seems much more elastic and does not involve the child in questions of race prejudice and other problems which he does not fully comprehend as yet. The round disks on a coat are "buts," and H. seems satisfied that so are doorknobs and ears and noses. He is, to be sure, not quite content that all should be sewn on so firmly. There seems to be no limit to his conception of the range of his one word "but." If he could get his hands on the Washington Monument or the peak of the Matterhorn, we feel sure that he would also classify these as buttons. Much may be done with one word if it be used cosmically in this way. For the sake of H. we have been trying to develop a theory that all the problems of the world may be stated in terms of buttons. We intend to point out to him that if he finds a gentleman with two buttons on either hip to which suspenders are attached, he may safely set him down as a conservative. If, in addition, the gentleman wears another gold button tightly wedged into a starched collar just below his chin he may be classified as an exponent of a high protective tariff and a Republican majority in the Senate. From gentlemen with no buttons, either at the hips or the neck, he may expect to hear about the soviet experiment in Russia and the status of free speech in America. We intend to tell H. that he is not far wrong in his attempt to limit language to the one word "but" or "bur," since all the world struggles in religion, in politics and in economics are between those who believe in buttoning up life a little tighter and those who would cut away all fastenings and let gravity do its worst or best. However, we have told him fairly and squarely that we will not let him in on this simplifying and comforting short cut to knowledge until he can make the word come out clearly and distinctly—"button." <hr /> SEPTEMBER 3, 1919.—H. 3rd lay back in his carriage with his arms folded across his stomach and said nothing. I tried to make conversation. I pointed out objects of interest, but met no response. He smiled complacently and was silent. Even carefully rehearsed bits of dialogue such as "Who's a good boy?" to which the answer is "Me," and "Is your face dirty," to which the answer is "No," failed to move him to speech. I tried him in new lands with strange sights and pointed out the camels, and buffaloes and rhinoceri of the zoo, hoping that he would identify some one of them in his all-embracing "dog," which serves for every member of the four-footed family. But still he smiled complacently and was silent. I began to feel as if I were an Atlantic City negro wheeling a tired business man down the Boardwalk. Suddenly the possible value of suggestion came to me, and I turned to the right and finally brought up at the foot of Shakespeare's statue in the mall. And here again I sought to interest him in the English language. "Man," said I, rather optimistically, pointing to the bronze. H. 3rd looked intently, and taking his hands from his stomach answered "Boy." "Man," I repeated. "Boy," said H. 3rd. And so the argument continued for some time without progress being made by either side. At last I stopped. Is it possible, I thought, that in this curious statue the sculptor has succeeded in giving some suggestion of "sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child," which is communicated to H. 3rd and fails to reach me? I looked again and gave up this theory for one more simple and rational. Without question it was the doublet and hose which confused him. Never, I suppose, had the child seen me, or the janitor, or the iceman or any of his adult male friends clad in close fitting tights such as Shakespeare wore. And then I looked at the doublet. No, there was no denying that in this particular statue it appeared uncommonly like a diaper. <hr /> SEPTEMBER 5, 1919.—W. H. Hudson points the way to an interesting field of speculation in one of the early chapters of Far Away and Long Ago, in which he speaks of his mother. "When I think of her," he writes, "I remember with gratitude that our parents seldom punished us, and never, unless we went too far in our domestic dissensions or tricks, even chided us. This, I am convinced, is the right attitude for parents to observe, modestly to admit that nature is wiser than they are, and to let their little ones follow, as far as possible, the bent of their own minds, or whatever it is that they have in place of minds. It is the attitude of the sensible hen toward her ducklings, when she has had frequent experience of their incongruous ways, and is satisfied that they know best what is good for them; though, of course, their ways seem peculiar to her, and she can never entirely sympathize with their fancy for going into the water. I need not be told that the hen is, after all, only stepmother to her ducklings, since I am contending that the civilized woman—the artificial product of our self-imposed conditions—cannot have the same relation to her offspring as the uncivilized woman really has to hers. The comparison, therefore, holds good, the mother with us being practically stepmother to children of another race; and if she is sensible, and amenable to nature's teaching, she will attribute their seemingly unsuitable ways and appetites to the right cause, and not to a hypothetical perversity or inherent depravity of heart, about which many authors will have spoken to her in many books: <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry"> <tr><td align="left">"But though they wrote it all by rote</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">  They did not write it right."</td></tr> </table> The very dim race memory of old tribal and even primitive life which is in all of us is much stronger in children than in grown-ups. They are closer to the past than their elders, and although we hear a great deal about maternal instinct, it is probable that it is a much slighter and more limited thing than the instinct of a young child. I have noticed, for instance, that without any help from me H. 3rd has learned to fall with amazing skill. He can trip over the edge of the carpet, do a somersault ending on the point of his nose and come up smiling, unless some grown-up makes him aware of his danger by crying out in horror. He did not copy it from me. I have never even undertaken to teach him by precept or illustration. The difficult trick of relaxing in midair is his own contribution. He cannot be said to have learned it. He seems always to have had it. At the age of eight months he pitched headlong out of his carriage and landed on top of his head without so much as ruffling his feelings. It may be fantastic, but I rather think that his skill in preparing for the bump by a complete relaxation of every muscle is a legacy from some ancestor back in the days when knowing how to fall was of vital importance, since even the best of us might, upon special occasions, miscalculate the distance from branch to branch. So strong is my faith in the child's superior memory of primitive life that if the hallboy were to call me up on the telephone to-morrow to say that there was an ichthyosaurus downstairs who wanted to see me, I would not think of deciding what to do about it without first consulting H. 3rd. Curiously enough, Hudson relates one incident which might well be cited in support of the theory that the child is equipped at birth with certain protective instincts, but he passes it over with a different explanation. He says that on a certain afternoon his baby sister, who could scarcely walk, was left alone in a room, and suddenly came toddling to the door shrieking "ku-ku," an Argentine word for danger, which was almost her single articulate possession. Her parents rushed into the room and found a huge snake coiled up in the middle of the rug. The child had never seen a snake before, and there was much speculation as to how she knew it was dangerous. "It was conjectured," writes Hudson, "that she had made some gesture to push it away when it came onto the rug, and that it had reared its head and struck viciously at her." It seems to us that a much more plausible explanation lies in the theory that this child who had never seen a snake profited from some old racial memory of the danger of serpents. Unfortunately, under modern conditions some restrictions must be put on the liberty of small children. I have been told that a child knows instinctively that he must not put his hand into a fire, but he has no age-grounded instinct not to touch a radiator. Still, it might be fair to say that in most New York apartment houses none of them would be hot enough to hurt him much. I can testify that children of less than two years of age are not equipped with any inherited protective knowledge about matches, pins, cigarette stubs, $5 bills, or even those of larger denominations; bits of glass, current newspapers or magazines, safety razor blades (for which, of course, there is an excuse, since the adjective may well mislead a child), watches or carving knives. But all these articles are too recent to come within the scope of inherited primitive knowledge. <hr /> DECEMBER 17, 1919.—We read Floyd Dell's Were You Ever a Child? to-day and found him remarking: "People talk about children being hard to teach and in the next breath deplore the facility with which they acquire the 'vices.' That seems strange. It takes as much patience, energy and faithful application to become proficient in a vice as it does to learn mathematics. Yet consider how much more popular poker is than equations! But did a schoolboy ever drop in on a group of teachers who had sat up all night parsing, say, a sentence in Henry James, or seeing who could draw the best map of the North Atlantic states? And when you come to think of it, it seems extremely improbable that any little boy ever learned to drink beer by seeing somebody take a tablespoonful once a day." Most of this is true. The only trouble with all the new theories about bringing up children is that it leaves the job just as hard as ever. We believe in the new theories for all that. They work, we think, but, like most worth while things, they are not always easy. For instance, H. 3rd came into the parlor the other day carrying the carving knife. Twenty years ago I could have taken it away and spanked him, but then along came the psychologists with their talk of breaking the child's will, and sensible people stopped spanking. Ten years ago I could have said, "Put down that carving knife or you'll make God feel very badly. In fact, you'll make dada feel very badly. You'll make dada cry if you don't obey him." But then the psychoanalysts appeared and pointed out that there was danger in that. In trying to punish the child by making him feel that his evil acts directly caused suffering to the parent there was an unavoidable tendency to make the child identify himself with the parent subconsciously. That might lead to all sorts of ructions later on. The child might identify himself so completely with his father that in later life he would use his shirts and neckties as if they were his own. Of course, I might have gone over to H. 3rd and, after a short struggle, taken the carving knife away from him by main force, but that would have made him mad. He would at length have suppressed his anger and right away a complex would begin in his little square head. Picture him now at thirty—he has neuralgia. Somebody mentions the theory of blind abscesses and he has all his teeth pulled out. No good comes of it. He goes to a psychoanalyst and the doctor begins to ask questions. He asks a great many over a long period of time. Eventually he gets a clue. He finds that when H. 3rd was eight years old he dreamed three nights in succession of stepping on a June bug. "Was it a large, rather fat June bug?" asks the doctor carelessly, as if the answer was not important. "Yes," says H. 3rd, "it was." "That June bug," says the doctor, "was a symbol of your father. When you were twenty months old he took a Carving knife away from you and you have had a suppressed anger at him ever since. Now that you know about it your neuralgia will disappear." And the neuralgia would go at that. But by that time I'd be gone and nothing could be done about this suppressed feud of so many years' standing. My mind went through all these possibilities and I decided it would be simpler and safer to let H. 3rd keep the carving knife as long as he attempted nothing aggressive. A wound is not so dangerous as a complex. "And, anyhow," I thought, "if he can make that carving knife cut anything he's the best swordsman in the flat." <hr /> DECEMBER 20, 1919.—Our attitude toward H. 3rd and the carving knife turns out to have been all wrong. We received a letter from Floyd Dell to-day in which he points out that no Freudian could possibly approve our policy of non-interference. Mr. Dell says we should have used force to the utmost. "Psychoanalytically speaking," he writes, "I think you were wrong about H. 3rd and the carving knife. There is really no Freudian reason why, when he came carrying it into the parlor, you should not have gone over to him and, 'after a short struggle,' taken it away from him by main force. Of course, that would have made him mad. But what harm would that have done?... Unless, of course, you had previously represented yourself to him as a Divine and Perfect Being. In that case his new conception of you as a big bully would have had to struggle with his other carefully implanted and nourished emotions—and his sense of the injustice of your behavior might have been 'repressed.' "But you know quite well that you are not a Divine and Perfect Being, and, if you consider it for a moment from the child's point of view, you will concede that his emotional opinion of you under such circumstances, highly colored as it is, has its justification. When you yourself want something very much (whether you are entitled to it or not) and when some one (however righteously) keeps you from getting it, how do you feel? But you know that you live in a world in which such things happen. H. 3rd has still to learn it, and if he learns it at his father's knee he is just that much ahead. The boys at school will teach it to him, anyway. The fact is, parents are unwilling that their children should hate them, however briefly, healthily and harmlessly. "The Victorian parent spanked his offspring and commanded them to love him any way. The modern parent refrains from spanking (for good reasons) and hopes the child will love him. The Freudian parent does not mind if his children do hate him once or twice a day, so long as they are not ashamed of doing so. If H. 3rd swats his father in an enraged struggle to keep possession of the precious carving knife he is expressing and not repressing his emotions. And so long as he has done his best to win he is fairly well content to lose. What a child doesn't like is to have to struggle with a big bully that he mustn't (for mysterious reasons) even try to lick! The privilege of fighting with one's father, even if it does incidentally involve getting licked, is all that a healthy child asks for. Never fear, the time will come when he can lick you; and awaiting that happy time will give him an incentive for growing up. Quite possibly you don't want him to grow up; but that is only another of the well-known weaknesses of parents!" <hr /> DECEMBER 22, 1919.—Concerning H. 3rd and the carving knife I am gratified to find support for my position from Dr. Edward Hiram Reede, the well-known Washington neurologist, who finds that from the point of view of H. 3rd there was soundness in my policy of non-interference. "Speaking for him," he writes, "I commend your action. Urged as he is by the two chief traits of childhood, at the present time—curiosity and imitation—I see no reason for direct coercion. So long as the modern child is environed by a museum, as the modern home appears, his curiosity must always be on edge, and if each new goal of curiosity is wrested from him by the usual 'Don't!' or the more ancient struggle for possession instead of by a transference of interest, then the contest will be interminable. "H. 3rd by right of experience looks upon the armamentarium of the kitchen as his indisputable possessions and can hardly be expected to except a carver. The deification of the parent occurs in accord with the ancestor worship of primitive forebears, and the father will remain the god to the child so long as observation daily reveals the parent as a worker of miracles. Parental self-canonization is not at all necessary to produce this." <hr /> DECEMBER 23, 1919.—Recently, a reader wrote to inform us that in her opinion we were a "semi-Bolshevist," and added, "your style is cramped by this demi-semi attitude, and your stuff seems a little grotesque both to conservatives and radicals." This seemed fair comment to us and we confessed frankly that we were not a conservative and on clear and pleasant days not quite a radical. This business of sticking to the middle of the road, with perhaps a slight slant to the left, seems ever so difficult. One is ambushed and potted at from either side. Seemingly, even in our confession we have again offended, for Miss Mora M. Deane writes: "As it happens I have just read your comment on my letter; and since you have turned out to be merely an egotist who twists an adverse criticism to his own advantage, I must now add to my letter that part which I lopped off considerately. This precisely because I did not know you were an egotist. The deleted part which originally closed the letter follows: "At any rate I have lately heard intelligent persons from both camps saying, 'Heywood Broun is responsible for my going to see some pretty rotten plays and for reading some stupid books.' "I myself should like to warn you against letting Heywood 3rd ever read Floyd Dell's book. The very idea of his advising about children leaves a bad taste in the mouth. You'll be sorry some day if you ever take him seriously." Of course, Miss Deane does wisely to let us have the deletion. First impulses are usually sound. And in one respect Miss Deane has scored more heavily than she could well have realized. Her warning that I should protect H. 3rd from radical literature touches an impending tragedy in my life. Almost by intuition Miss Deane seems to realize that the child and I are not in agreement in our political opinions. Of the fifteen or twenty words in which H. 3rd is proficient one is "mine" and another is "gimme." When he goes to the park he wears a naval uniform with the insignia of an ensign on his left arm. There is gold braid on his cap. Moreover, H. 3rd has in his own right two Liberty bonds, a card of thrift stamps, a rocking-horse, a railroad, a submarine, three picture books, an automobile and a Noah's ark. Any effort to socialize a single one of these holdings is met by a protest so violent that I cannot help but realize that the child's sense of property rights is strongly developed. That is, his own property rights, for he is often inclined to dispute my title to cigarette stumps, safety razor blades and carving knives. Moreover, H. 3rd is unblushingly parasitic. We fail to remember that he has ever offered to make any return for the regular income of milk and oatmeal, and sometimes carrots, which is issued to him regularly by his parents. To be sure, he once gave me a chicken bone and on another occasion a spool of cotton, but both times he promptly took them away again. I am even inclined to question whether, in any strictly legal sense, the chicken bone or the spool were his. Granting that they had been carelessly discarded by other members of his family, and that, by his own efforts, H. 3rd rescued the spool from the scrapbasket and the chicken bone from behind the trash box, the fact remains that it was I who bought the chicken and Miss X who purchased the spool. We were entitled at least to a royalty during the life of the two utilities, but H. 3rd merely absorbed them without explanation or promise. I doubt whether Dell or Eastman or even Karl Marx himself could avail to check the rampant individualism of the child. He has always displayed an impatience and an irritation at abstract arguments. The best that can be done is to avoid introducing contentious subjects. For the present Miss X and I are able to carry on destructive and seditious conversations even in his presence by spelling out "p-r-o-l-e-t-a-r-i-a-t" and "b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s-i-e" and other words which might make him mad. We have even been able to keep Trotzky's picture above the mantelpiece in the red room, but in this case Miss X adopted a subterfuge which seems to me rather questionable. She told H. 3rd that it was a portrait of Nicholas Murray Butler. When H. 3rd is twenty-one he will come into undisputed possession of the two Liberty bonds and the card of thrift stamps for which Miss X and I starved and scraped. I rather hope he will thank us, but beyond that I expect nothing except good advice. I can see him now squaring his shoulders, as becomes a man of property and independent income, and then laying a kindly hand on my shoulder as he says, "Dad, can't you understand how wrong you are? Don't you see that if you disturb or even threaten the institution of private property you undermine the home, imperil the state and destroy initiative?" <hr /> JANUARY 21, 1920.—When the rest went out and left me alone in the house, they said that H. 3rd would surely sleep through the evening. Nobody remembered that he had ever waked up to cry. But he did this night. I didn't quite know what to do about it. I sang "Rockabye Baby" to him, but that didn't do any good, and then I said "I wouldn't cry if I were you." This, too, had no effect, and, in fact, no sooner had I uttered it than I recognized it as a piece of gratuitous impertinence. How could I possibly tell whether or not I would cry if the safety pins were in wrong or anything else of that sort was not quite right? Nor was it even fair to assume that H. 3rd was crying for any such personal reasons. After all, he lives in a state which has recently suspended five duly elected assemblymen, and in which as fine a book as Jurgen has aroused the meddlesome attention of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and his country has gone quite hysterical on the subject of "Reds" and "Red" propaganda and I haven't paid him back yet for that $50 Liberty Bond of his which I sold. And after I had thought of these things it seemed to me that he was entirely justified in crying, and that I ought to be ashamed of myself because I didn't cry, too, since there were so many wrong things in the world to be righted. Humbly I left him to continue his dignified protest without any further unwarranted meddling on my part. <hr /> JANUARY 24, 1920.—"My attention has been called," writes John S. Sumner, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, "to a paragraph of your article in the Tribune of January 21, wherein you refrain from blaming H. 3rd for crying, because among other things, he 'lives in a state which has recently suspended five duly elected assemblymen, and in which as fine a book as Jurgen has aroused the meddlesome attention of the Society for the Suppression of Vice.' "I assume that H. 3rd is too young to appreciate the contents of any publication, but some day he will be old enough, and no doubt his character will be molded and his conduct controlled, in a measure, by what he reads and the thoughts suggested by such reading. That is the usual thing. "If, when H. 3rd or any other young person, reached the age of understanding a stranger came into the home and attempted to entertain the young mind with stories and suggestions such as are contained in the book in question, whoever had in charge the moral welfare of the young person would no doubt be very indignant and the stranger would be expelled forthwith. We cannot properly have a rule for the protection of our own and fail to extend that protection to others." Mr. Sumner is incorrect in his assumption that any stranger who told H. 3rd such merry and gorgeous stories as those of Jurgen would be expelled forthwith by "whoever had in charge the welfare of the young person." To be sure, this description hardly fits us. We mean to have as little to do with the morals of H. 3rd as possible. It seems to us a sorry business for parents to hand down their own morals, with a tuck here and a patch there, and expect a growing child to wear them with any comfort. Let the child go out and find his own morals. But if H. 3rd went out and found Jurgen and read it at the age of adolescence, or thereabouts, it might be excellent literature for him. After all, a boy has to learn the facts of sex some time or other, and Cabell has been felicitious enough in Jurgen to present them not only as beautiful, but merry as well. Those elements ought to be present in everybody's sex education. The new knowledge comes to almost all youngsters as a distinct shock, because, while the things their boy companions tell them may be merry enough, they are also sufficiently gross to be distinctly harmful in a number of cases; and, if their parents tell them it is either in some form so highly poetic that it means nothing, or as something decidedly grim and solemn as Sunday School. In either case this knowledge is apt to be regarded as something of which to be ashamed, and it seems to us that the world is just beginning to realize that shame is almost the most destructive of all the evil forces in the world. And so, unless our opinions change, we shall continue to pray each night, "Oh God, please keep all shame out of the heart and mind of H. 3rd." <hr /> MARCH 10, 1920.—Some little time ago we were asked what method we were going to use to instil moral ideas into the head of H. 3rd. We said then that we rather hoped that he would be able to get along, for a while at any rate, without any. We felt that it was the last thing in the world concerning which we wanted to be dogmatic. Unfortunately, the moral sense seems to arise early. Already H. 3rd is constantly inquiring "Good boy, dada?" Usually this comes after he has chipped the furniture or broken some of the china. Of course, we ought not to answer him. We have no idea whether he is a good boy or not. The marks of his destruction are plain enough, but without knowing his motives we can't pass on his conduct. We were slightly annoyed when he broke the lamp, but perhaps it was no more than pardonable curiosity on his part. Perhaps it was wanton. How can we tell? And yet, it is impossible to preserve neutrality. After the fifteenth or sixteenth reiteration of the query we always say, "Yes, you are a good boy," and then he goes away satisfied. But we are not. He is beginning to make us feel like the Supreme Court or Moses. It's too much responsibility. <hr /> MARCH 12, 1920.—"Your troubles are just beginning," writes M. B. "H. 3rd knew he was a bad boy when he broke that lamp. He has simply been testing your moral sense, which for some months he has suspected of being inadequate. I foresee that you will be a great disappointment to him as time goes on. In twelve years or so he will find your political views unsound and your literary tastes decadent. I doubt whether he will approve of the way you spend Sunday. "You may think you can retain his affection, if not his respect, by keeping clear of the arbitrary methods of a bygone generation. Alas! I don't think there is even that hope for the radical parent of a conservative child. By the time H. 3rd has grown to adolescence he will feel that dogmatism is a sine qua non of parenthood, and he will wish that he had had a real father. He may even resolve to have military discipline in his home. "I am sorry. I wish I could see brighter things for you in the days to come. Please forgive the impertinence of this prophecy. It has been wrung from the experience of one who has been condemned out of the mouth of fourteen as a socialist, a pacifist and (if he had known the word) a pagan." We have feared as much. Already we have found that we do not know the child. A week ago we were delighted when he picked up a pocketbook and, with a scornful exclamation of "Money!" threw it far across the room. "He will be an artist," we said, but last Saturday morning he came charging down upon the crap game loudly shouting, "I want a dollar!" He had to be forcibly restrained from gathering up the entire stake—it was two dollars and not one—which lay upon the floor. We were so disconcerted by the revelation of his spirit that we threw twelve twice and failed on an eight. Of course, that is not the thing which disturbs us. We fear that H. 3rd will grow up to be a business man. As such, of course, he may become the support of our old age, but we shall consider support more than earned if it entails our receiving with our allowance a monthly homily on the reason and cure for unrest. <hr /> APRIL 6, 1920.—Some time ago I wrote a bitter attack on H. 3rd, the reactionary, in which I stated that his political emotions made it necessary for his parents to avoid the use of "proletariat" and such words except when disguised by the expedient of spelling out "p-r-o-l-e-t-a-r-i-a-t." And it is only fair to say that the device takes a good deal of the zest out of sedition. I also stated at the time that we had been able to keep the picture of Trotzky over the mantelpiece in the red room by mendaciously telling H. 3rd that it was a portrait of Nicholas Murray Butler. It now becomes necessary for me to make a public apology to H. 3rd. It is perhaps a tasteless proceeding for me to drag his private political views into print, but the retraction ought to have as much publicity as the original slander. H. 3rd is not a reactionary. He is a liberal. It would have been perfectly safe for us to have said "proletariat" right out and to have confessed the identity of Trotzky. H. 3rd might not have been altogether in support, but he would have been interested. I discovered that he was a liberal early on Sunday morning while we were walking in Central Park. We happened to go near the merry-go-round and H. 3rd, drawn by the strains of "Dardanella," dragged me eagerly toward the pavilion. I supposed, of course, that he wanted to ride and had just time to strap him on top of a camel before the platform began to move. No sooner were we in motion round and round, slow at first and then faster and faster as the revolutions increased in violence, than H. 3rd began to cry. As soon as possible I lifted him back to the firm and stable ground and briskly started to walk away from the scene of his harrowing experience. I thought he wanted to get as far away from it as possible, but after a few steps I noticed that he was not following me. Instead he was hurrying back to the merry-go-round as fast as his legs would carry him. "Perhaps," I thought, "he intends to discipline his will and is going to ride that merry-go-round again just because he is so much afraid of it." I knew that people sometimes did things like that because I had read it in The Research Magnificent. H. 3rd is not among them. He howled louder than before when I tried to put him on the camel again. I even tested the fantastic possibility that it was the camel and not the carrousel to which he objected, but he yelled just as vigorously when offered a horse and later a unicorn. Then, I ceased to interfere and resolved to watch. When the merry-go-round began to whirl H. 3rd edged up closer and closer with a look of the most intense interest which I have ever seen on his face. He was fascinated by the sight of men, women and children engaged in a wild and, perhaps, a debauching experiment. Hitherto he had observed that people went forward and back in reasonably straight lines, but this progress was flagrantly rotary. I could not get him away. He stood his ground firmly. He would not retreat a step, nor would he go any nearer. In fact, he was already so close to the carrousel that he could have leaped on board with no more than a hop. By leaning just a little he could have touched it. But he did neither. He preferred a combination of the closest possible proximity and stability. And after a while I realized just what it was of which he reminded me. He was an editor of The New Republic watching the Russian Revolution. The mad whirling thing lay right at his feet, but his interest in it and even its imminence never disturbed his tranquillity. The lines of communication with the safe and sane rear remained unbroken. He could retreat the minute the carrousel attempted to become overly familiar. And so we knew that H. 3rd was and is a liberal. <hr /> APRIL 18, 1920.—The nurse said that H. 3rd had a fight in the park with one of his little playmates and won it. She was proud and partisan. "Woodie," she said, using the fearful nickname which has fastened itself upon the child, "wanted to play with Archie's fire engine, and Archie wouldn't let him. Woodie hit him in the mouth and made it bleed, and Archie cried." I said "Tut, tut." "I think it's right," said the nurse. "I think children ought to stand up for their rights." "But, after all," I reminded her, "it was Archie's fire engine." "Archie's older than Woodie," she said; "he's two and a half and he's bigger." "That sort of justification," I objected, "if carried far enough, would lead straight to criminal anarchy. After all, the bituminous miners might say that Mr. Palmer was bigger than they are." "We didn't think they'd fight," she said, cleverly dodging the larger implications of the discussion. "We were watching them, and all of a sudden Woodie swung his left hand and hit Archie in the mouth." "Which hand?" I exclaimed. "His left hand," she said. "Are you sure?" I insisted. "Why, yes, sir. Didn't you ever notice Woodie always picks up things with his left hand?" Before, I had been the cool, impartial judge, but it was impossible to maintain that attitude. In a moment I had become again the parent, human and fallible to emotion. I motioned to the nurse to leave me. I wanted to be alone with my problem. I must face the fact with as much courage as I could muster. There seemed to be no shadow of doubt from which hope could spring. I was the father of a southpaw. <hr /> APRIL 20, 1920.—We decided not to let H. 3rd play with lead soldiers, for fear they might inculcate a spirit of militarism. Instead, he received an illuminated set of Freedom Blocks. We remember that among the titles were "Bill of Rights," "Free Speech," "Magna Charta" and "Habeas Corpus." The blocks have not been altogether a success. The set is badly depleted, for the child licked all the paint off "Free Speech" and threw "Habeas Corpus" out of the window. <hr /> APRIL 21, 1920.—Although we don't know the exact legal form, we think we have seen announcements of somewhat the same sort. At any rate, we want to advertise the fact that on and after this date we will not be responsible for persons who may be injured by falling objects while passing the apartment house on the west side of Seventh Avenue between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth streets. Our first hint of the danger came when the hairbrush disappeared and could not be found. That was only circumstantial evidence, but on Monday we caught him in the act of tossing out a hand mirror. It was our idea to dissuade him by trying to make him understand that breaking mirrors is bad luck, but R. says that it is best not to plant any superstitions in the undeveloped mind of a child. The best we could do was to take the mirror away and shadow him closely. But yesterday a bronze vase disappeared and two books. So far no casualties have been reported. Although we live on the fifth floor, I don't believe the books could have hurt anybody very much. They were light fiction, but the vase is different. We told M. not to leave the stove unguarded for a moment, and we are seeking to perfect a device to padlock the piano to the wall. As yet we have reached no plan to guard the books. Probably the best we can do is to allow any passerby who is hit and hurt to keep the book. Of course, the point naturally arises as to whether a passerby who has been hit with the second volume of Gibbon's Rome has a right to demand the whole set. We rather think there would be justice in that. At any rate, we are not disposed to be petty about the matter, because we realize that from the fifth floor even a single volume of Gibbon might be deadly. A. W., who is frivolous, suggests that we lock up all but a certain number of suitable books which we shall allow H. 3rd to throw out the window without interference. His list includes The Rise and Fall of the Dutch Republic, The Descent of Man, La Débâcle, The Fall and Rise of Susan Lennox, and then he would add, rather optimistically, we fear, It Never Can Happen Again. What is getting into children these days, anyway? Frankly, we view their conduct with alarm. That spirit of destruction and unrest seems to have gripped them all. Where do they get it? Why has the Lusk committee failed to act in the matter? To us it seems a clear case of Bolshevist propaganda. <hr /> APRIL 23, 1920.—H. 3rd handed me a pencil, and then stood around as if he expected me to do something with it. I didn't suppose he wanted me to commit myself in writing about any recent plays or books, and I guessed that he desired something more pictorial. I drew a face and showed it to him. It wasn't any face in particular and I didn't know whether to call it the Spirit of the Ages or a young Jugo-Slav artillery officer. H. 3rd looked at it with interest and promptly said "baybay." I let it go at that and was pleased that he had caught the general intent of the work. Unfortunately, I tried to show my versatility, and the next head was stuck underneath a pompadour and on top of a rather elaborate gown. But again he called it "baybay." I added trousers, a walking stick, a high hat, a fierce scowl and put a long pipe in the mouth, but he could see no difference. It was still a "baybay." I was put in the quandary of setting H. 3rd down as a little unintelligent or stigmatizing my art as ineffective, until I suddenly came upon the correct explanation. These pictures of mine were direct, naïve, unspoiled by any theory of life or composition. They were the natural expression of a creative impulse. In them was the spirit of spring, and freshets, and early birds, and saplings, and What Every Young Man Ought to Know and all that sort of thing. "Baybay," said H. 3rd, and he was quite right. I couldn't fool him by putting Peter Pan in long trousers. <hr /> MAY 5, 1920.—This is the story of the low-cut lady and the lisping tot. It is contained in The Menace of Immorality, by the Rev. John Roach Straton, in a chapter entitled "Slaves of Fashion": "I once heard one of the most famous reform workers of this city explain why she gave up low-cut gowns," writes Dr. Straton. "She explained how she was ready to start for the theater one night in such a dress, when her little boy of five said to her, 'But, mother, you are not going that way? You are not dressed.' And then, with trembling voice, she told us how all the evening through, as she sat in the playhouse she kept hearing that sweet childish voice saying 'Not dressed! Not dressed! Not dressed!' until at last, with the blush of shame mantling to her cheeks, and with the realization that a Christian mother should dress differently from the idle and godless women of the world, she drew her cloak about her and went home, dressed—or rather undressed—for the last time in such a costume!" Nothing we have read in a month has been quite so disturbing to us as this simple little tale. Before it our theories tremble and fall. Upon many an occasion we have set down the conviction that little children should never be spanked under any provocation whatsoever. And yet if we had been that low-cut lady we would certainly have given that interfering and priggish little youngster a walloping. Even in the case of H. 3rd we are minded to make an exception in our program. He may rampage and roar and destroy without laying himself open to corporal punishment, but he will do very well to refrain from any comment of any sort about our clothes or personal appearance. We do not purpose to come home in our cloak from any show with our evening entirely spoiled by the fact that a sweet childish voice has been saying in our ear, "Not shaved! Not shaved! Not shaved!" <hr /> JUNE 3, 1920.—Of late I am beginning to notice with perturbation a distinctly sentimental streak in H. 3rd. Nothing else will account for his tenderness toward Goliath. When we first began to talk about him he was treated by common consent rather scornfully. He was known to us as "Ole Goliath he talks too much." Even in those early days it cannot be said that Goliath was treated with special spite, for as the story grew in the telling he fared not much worse than David. Somehow or other I eventually came into the incident myself. Just now I can't remember whether it was at the special invitation of H. 3rd or my own egotistic urge. At any rate, it seems that David, after knocking Goliath down, grew overbearing in his attitude to all the world. Goliath, it must be explained, was not killed, since death would involve explanations beyond the comprehension of H. 3rd. Goliath was merely hit in the chest and fell. The chest was stressed, since it is necessary every now and then to halt H. 3rd in his most playful moments with the admonition that hitting casual visitors in the face is not a friendly act. We pride ourselves on our old-fashioned Brooklyn hospitality. However, as we had said, David followed up his victory with the boast, "I can beat any man in the world," at which point H. 3rd is supposed to chime in, "And lick 'em." In response to this challenge Heywood 2d appeared, and when David picked up another rock and threw it H. 2d cleverly put up his hands and caught the missile. He threw it back at David and knocked him down. Rollo offered the further amendment that he himself then appeared and knocked Heywood 2d down. "And," he told the child, "I didn't need a rock. I used a snappy retort." He even went so far as to draw a picture of the occurrence, but it met with no favor from H. 3rd, who exclaimed, "Heywood second did not fell. He did not fell." I was much touched by this display of loyalty until I found that his feelings were just as much engaged in the fate of Goliath. This love of his for the Philistine he indicated suddenly one evening when he asked me to tell him the story of "Sweet Goliath," and I found that nothing would satisfy him but the complete revision of the whole tale to the end that it should be Goliath who picked up the rock and vanquished David. I have tried to lure him away from this unauthorized version in vain. Only to-day I suggested hopefully "That ole Goliath he talks too much." H. 3rd looked at me severely, but then his face brightened, and with all the unction of a missionary to China he said, "Goliath loves you." <hr /> JUNE 11, 1920.—"Perhaps you can answer the challenge to American educational institutions contained in this letter from H. G. Wells," writes Floyd Dell. "I can't (neither am I able to think of anything to reply to the question which he counters to my 'Were You Ever a Child?'—'Were You Ever a Parent?' But that won't embarrass you)." I'm afraid that by dint of writing now and again about H. 3rd I have managed to pass myself off as a chronic parent. For all the assurance with which I have put forth certain theories on the care and education of the young, many of them mere reflections of Dell's book, I admit at the outset no qualification to answer the challenge of Wells even if I were sure that an answer were possible. For all I know H. 3rd will grow up to rob a bank and curse me that he was not spanked with due moralizing and ceremony three times a week. However, the letter from Wells is as follows: "Dear Floyd Dell: Yours is a good, wise book—so far. But there is a devil—several devils—of indolence in a child. Have you ever been a parent? That too is useful. "Do you know anything of modern English public schools? How many Americans do? You know of Beedale's and Abbotsholm, crank schools, but you know nothing of Audle. Have you ever heard of Audle? Audle has 500 boys (two of mine). No class teaching practically, boys working in research groups, big botanical gardens, library, concert hall, picture gallery, big engineering laboratories and a good biological one. Boys encouraged to read stuff like The Liberator and me. Sex via biology (see Joan and Peter). This isn't 1947. This is now. Wake up America!" "I ought perhaps to add," writes Dell in a postscript, "that the handwriting of my fellow member of the advisory council of the Association for the Advancement of Progressive Education is a peculiar hieroglyphic which it is sometimes almost impossible to decipher. Thus, I am not quite sure whether he says my book 'is a good, wise book,' or something quite different. Some of my friends who have seen the letter think that he says it is 'a God-awful book.' The hieroglyphics transliterate equally well either way. But I do not think that particular descriptive phrase is used in England. Anyway, you can take your choice." If Floyd Dell can't think up anything to say in defense of American educational methods I'm sure I can't. It seems to me that almost without exception our schools are devoted to that process called "large scale production." "I can tell any graduate of your school at a glance," said a man in my hearing. "They all bear your stamp unmistakably." And the schoolmaster grinned with delight. Practically all our institutions of learning are finishing schools. We are told, for instance, that the modern public school aims to turn out 100 per cent Americans. It seems to me that 98 or even 97 per cent would be better. That would leave the child some margin for growth and development based on actual experience rather than precept. I'm afraid that the 100 per cent may represent nothing more than something poured in by the teacher, and I doubt if many of our educators are sure enough of eye and hand to stop exactly at the minute notch marked 100. There is always the danger that a little too much will be poured in and something will be spilled over, for when a man becomes 101 or 102 per cent American he must soon dispose of the surplus. He may take it to Mexico in the train of a holy war or bayonet a path for it into Japan, and recently we have heard not a few around New York who seem to think highly of the possibility of a war to Americanize England. And, of course, the various agencies to deport, expel and imprison often represent the activities of those who have more Americanism than they can carry like gentlemen. Not only is patriotism poured in at the top in our schools, but literature and art and everything else is administered in like fashion. The pupil is allowed to discover nothing for himself. "Here," says the teacher, "is a great book. Read it." And yet we wonder that when the boys and girls grow old enough to vote they usually follow the same order of boss or demagogue, who says, "Hylan is the people's friend; vote for him." In fact, we train a public which masses around cheer leaders. It follows the man with the megaphone, who shouts, "Now, boys, all together and nine long rahs on the end!" The rahs are the most important part of it. That is the point where the volume of sound swells greater and greater. It doesn't seem to me that there is much difference in the psychological processes of the followers of Ole Hansen and of Big Bill Haywood. They are merely on opposite sides of the field. The trouble with bringing up anybody on cheer leaders is that it is so easy for him to switch. The same man who tells you one day that this country must have law and order if it has to lynch every Socialist in the country to get it is just as likely to say the next month that this will never be a true democracy until it has a dictatorship of the proletariat. Not for a minute, mind you, would we suppress the cheering squads or their leaders. Personally, we have no desire to see a social revolution. Our holdings, which include two Liberty bonds, twenty shares of American Drug Syndicate and one share of preferred stock in The Liberator, incline us to conservatism. It seems to us that we property-holders who want the world to go on without convulsions should urge a policy which would permit those who want to holler to go on hollering and at the same time rope off some section under the grandstand for those who just want to talk. Audle, the home of the Wells children, must be a good school. Very probably it is better than anything in America. And yet we are not willing to accept it as the last word. It terrifies us a little by its efficiency. If H. 3rd goes to Audle's we know he'll come home to ask us questions which we can't possibly answer and he'll build toy factories and bridges in the front hall for us to trip over. Out of Audle's will come men to make these toys real—men who will tunnel mountains and frighten rivers out of their courses. Others will harry germs and compose symphonies and perhaps some will write huge stacks of novels as high as those of Wells himself. Nevertheless, we are a little distressed when Wells speaks so impatiently of the devil of indolence in a child. We wonder whether he may not mean the child's invariable desire to do something other than that suggested by parent or teacher. There have been times when H. 3rd has refused my most earnest pleas that he ride his kiddie car up and down the hall. Still, it would hardly be fair to call him indolent simply because he preferred to beat against the front window with a tablespoon. It takes ever so much energy to do that, particularly if you keep it up as long as H. 3rd does. We are not quite ready to believe that it is essential to exorcise the devil, even if he is one of sheer indolence. Naturally it is repugnant to a man like Wells, who realizes so keenly the necessity for us all to get together and do something for the world. There is no denying that it was a rush job. But, after all, God created man in His image. Some of us have the spirit which animated Him during those terrific six days, but we wonder whether the world has no place, and never will have any place, for those others who emulate the God who rested and talked a little, perhaps, and sat around and remembered and dreamed and never lifted a finger to add as much to the world as one more fly or another blade of grass. <hr /> JUNE 15, 1920.—"Heywood Broun 3rd," writes a correspondent who signs no name, "is, fortunately for him, a very young son; Heywood Broun is a very young father—both will grow up. May the boy grow in grace free from Jurgen's influence and may the father find his materialism Dead Sea fruit in time to set such an example that H. B. 3rd will act upon the Fifth Commandment. It can't be done on smutty fiction or carnal knowledge." It may be, as the writer suggests, that we shall grow in grace. However, that is beside the point, for, in the words of the beautiful christening service, a child takes his father "for better or worse." Even now we are of the opinion that all the Commandments should be observed in decent moderation. We think we are correct in assuming that the Fifth is, "Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." We intend to serve notice on H. 3rd not to make this his favorite Commandment. If he must break one of them, by all means let it be the Fifth. Even though we become much better than we are now, it is going to make us distinctly uncomfortable if he goes about the house honoring us. It will seem too ridiculous, and we doubt very much if he can do it with a straight face. Whenever he feels that he simply must honor his parents we hope that he will do it in an underhand way behind our backs. Although we hope never to spank him, he will be running a great risk if he makes his honoring frank and flagrant. And, anyway, why should he want to? Hasn't he got Jack the Giant Killer, and Dick Whittington, and Aladdin and Captain Kidd? Let him honor them. They are all too dead and too deserving to be annoyed by it. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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