I knew he was fairly on his way to giving up golf forever.

Of course, when a man hasn't played all winter, but has been engaged

in the mild and harmless exercise of writing a novel, his hands become

soft. Then, when he suddenly begins to play thirty-six holes a day,

and takes a lock-grip on his clubs as tightly as if he supposed

somebody was trying to snatch them away from him, he is apt to develop

certain blisters. To a war correspondent and traveler over the Dawson

Trail, such blisters are nothing. To a golf player they are of

profound importance. The next day, in our foursome, they affected the

war correspondent's game. He became softly querulous.

"I wish you wouldn't talk when I am about to drive," he complained to

a caddie.

"This mashie is too heavy for me," he muttered to himself.

"Every time I make a stroke, that crack on the third finger of my left

hand, above the top joint, opens and pains me," he declared to anybody

who would listen.

His drive from the eighteenth tee went kerplunk into the mud, and

buried itself like a startled woodchuck. He said nothing, but took a

left-handed club from his bag--for he began the game left-handed, and

had switched over the year before, upon hearing our professional say

that no left-handed player could ever become a great golfer. With this

fresh implement, he began to dig. He finished the hole left-handed,

with three perfect shots! We tried to cheer him up, but he was not to

be cheered.

"What's the use!" he wailed. "Here I've spent a year and a fortune

unlearning how to play left-handed. I'm never going to play the

confounded game again!"

And, by way of token, he began to talk about Theodore Roosevelt.

That was his first renunciation for 1914. The next few days the game

went well, and so did work on a new novel he had commenced, fired by

his success in getting off seventeen perfect tee-shots. But he reached

his fourth chapter and an off afternoon on the same fair Saturday.

What a lovely day it was!--you know, one of those early June days that

invariably causes some woman to quote Lowell. But the famous war

correspondent saw no charm in the leafy luxury around him, in the blue

sky, the lush grass. He heard no pipe of birds nor whisper of the

breeze. His driver wasn't working right. Then his over-worked mashie

went back on him. By the fourth green he was taking three putts, and

by the eighth he was picking up. His face was a thundercloud; his

vocabulary disclosed a richness gleaned from camp and field which was

a revelation even to our caddies; and that is no insignificant

accomplishment.

Our tenth hole in those days was close to the club-house, and the tee

was but 195 yards away--a good iron to the green. By the time we

reached this tee, the war correspondent had very nearly exhausted even

the stock of expletives he had acquired on the Dawson Trail, and had

declared seven times that he was _through_, yes, _forever_!

"Oh, come on and play just this hole--keep going to the club-house

anyway," we pleaded.

"Well," he said, "I'll take one more shot--it's my last--positively.

I'm going back to New York to-morrow."

He tossed a scarred, cut, battered ball on the turf, scorning to make

a tee. Yanking a cleek from his bag, he stepped up with the speed of

Duncan and swung. To our amazement, the ball flew like a bullet to the

mark and disappeared over the lip of the green, headed straight for

the pin. But he never saw it. He wasn't watching.

"Good shot!" we cried, with real enthusiasm.

"I wasn't looking, where'd it go?" he asked, with an attempt at scorn,

which, however, was manifestly weakening.

"Got a putt fer a two," said his caddie.

The noted man cast a withering look at this object of his previous

invective. He still suspected something. We backed the caddie up, and

he strode down the fairway with a certain reviving spring in his step.

There on the green, not six inches from the cup, reposed his battered

ball!

"Been anybody else it would have gone in!" he muttered, as he sank it

for a two.

That was his proud surrender. He said no more. He strode ahead to the

next tee, and tore out a long, straight drive. Then he lit a cigarette

and remarked that he had never seen the willows more beautiful, more

silvery in the afternoon light.

Ah, well, poor chap, he did give up golf on the first of August, if

not forever at least for the longest period of abstinence in his

career on the links. On our last afternoon over the velvet together,

before he left for the steamer that was to take him into the

maelstrom, he paid little attention to his game, and a surprised and,

I fancied, even a slightly disappointed caddie followed him. (He was

always most generous to his caddie when he had most abused him, like

the hero of Goldoni's comedy.)

"I sha'n't see nice, sweet, unscarred green sod again for a long

time," he said, digging up a huge divot with unconscious irony. "I'm

going to my last war, though."

"Gracious," said I, "are you going to give up War forever, too?"

"The world is going to give it up forever, after this one," he

replied.

I have seen him twice since, once when he was still a correspondent,

once more recently when he came back in the uniform of Uncle Sam. And

each time his greeting has been the same:--

"Have you got rid of that hook yet?"

Then he smiled--a wistful, tragic smile, and asked where all the new

traps and bunkers are, how we contrived to lengthen the course,

whether the new sixth green is in play yet, all the pathetically

unimportant little gossip of our eighty acres of green meadow.

"Ah," he said the last time we parted, "some day I'm coming back and

make that 79 at last! Anybody can go over the top, but to break 80 at

Stockbridge--!"

Then he left for the trenches of France.

I have another good friend who, unlike the Major, has never given up

golf forever. This, as he himself admits (or I should not dare offer

the explanation), is because he has never yet really played it. He,

too, is rather well known at his avocation of play-writing; but golf

is his real business in life when the season once gets under way. He

has enabled several professionals to buy motor-cars, he has sent

numerous fore-caddies through the high school, he has practised by the

hour with individual clubs, but still, after almost a quarter of a

century, he has never broken 90 on a first-class course. From my

superior position (I have on three never-to-be-forgotten occasions

broken 80, one of them at Manchester!), I sometimes wonder what keeps

him at the game. Then I play with him, and realize. He has the divine,

inexplicable faculty, once or twice in a round, of tearing off an

astounding drive of 300 yards, by some subtle miracle of timing, which

after hours of rolling finally comes to rest far out beyond any other

ball in the foursome, or even the professional's drive. What does it

matter if he scruffs his approach? What does it matter if he takes

three putts? He has the memory of that drive, the unexpected,

thrilling feel of it in arms and body, the tingling vision of the day

when he will find out how he did it, and be able to repeat at will!

That keeps him going--that, and a trophy he once achieved by winning

the beaten eight division of the sixth sixteen. It was a little pocket

match-safe, but it is more precious in his eyes than pearls, aye, than

much fine gold or his reputation as perhaps the deftest writer of

dialogue on the American stage. It represents definite achievement in

the game of Golf.

You may suppose, dear Reader, if by some miracle you are not a golfer,

that I have been pressing the essayist's privilege and indulging in an

attempt at whimsicality. Nothing, I assure you, could be farther from

the fact. I am, in this chapter, a realist. All I have here set down

is a record of actuality. Nay, I have erred on the other side. I have

said nothing whatever about my own reasons for giving up golf forever.

Nor have I told the story of the elderly gentlemen at a course near

Boston, whom I once observed in an exhibition of renunciation that

perhaps deserved recording.

This course was of nine holes (it is now the site of several apartment

houses), and the last hole called for a carry over a little pond, to a

green immediately in front of the club-house. The somewhat elderly and

irascible gentleman in question, playing in a foursome, had reached

this ninth tee on the shore of the pond, and even from the club

veranda it was evident that his temper was not of the best. Things had

not been going right for him. His three companions carried the pond.

Then he teed up, and drove--splash!--into the water. A remark was

wafted through the still air. He teed again--another splash. Then

followed an exhibition which I fear my wife would describe as

childish. First this elderly gentleman spoke, in a loud, vexed voice.

Then he hurled his driver into the pond. Then he snatched his bag of

clubs from the caddie's shoulder, seized a stone from the pond side,

stuffed it into the bag, grasped the strap as a hammer-thrower the

handle of his weight, swung the bag three times around his head, and

let it fly far out over the water. It hit with a great splash, and

sank from sight. His three companions, respecting his mood, discreetly

continued their game, while he came up to the club-house, sought a far

corner of the veranda, and with a face closely resembling a Greek mask

of Tragedy, sank down huddled into a chair.

On the veranda, too, his grief was respected. No one spoke to him. In

fact, I think no one dared. We were careful that even our mirth did

not reach his ears. He was alone with his thoughts. The afternoon

waned. His three companions again reached the ninth tee, drove the

pond, and came into the club-house to dress. The caddies were about to

depart. Then a strange thing happened; at its first intimation we

tiptoed to a window to observe. He roused himself, leaned over the

rail, and called a caddie.

"Boy," we heard him say, in a deep, tragic voice, "can you swim?"

"Yes, sir," the caddie replied.

"All right. About thirty feet out in front of the ninth tee there's a

bag at the bottom of the pond. Go get it for me, and I'll give you

five dollars."

The caddie ran, peeling his garments as he went. Modestly retaining

his tattered underclothes, he splashed in from the tee, while the

somewhat elderly golf player gesticulated directions on the bank.

Presently the boy's toes detected something, and he did a pretty

surface dive, emerging with the bag strap in his right hand. He also

rescued the floating driver, and we saw the promised bill passed to

him, and watched him drag on his clothes over his wet undergarments.

Slowly, even tenderly, the somewhat elderly gentleman emptied the

water and the stone from his bag, and wiped the clubs on his

handkerchief. With the wet, dripping burden over his shoulder he came

across the foot-bridge and into the locker room, while we hastened to

remove our faces from the door and windows, and attempted to appear

casual.

He entered in silence, and strode to his locker. The silence grew

painful. Somebody simply had to speak, or laugh. Finally somebody did

speak, which was probably the safer alternative.

"Decided to try again, eh?"

The somewhat elderly gentleman wheeled upon the assemblage, his

dripping bag still hanging from his shoulder.

"Yes, damn it!" he thundered.

Well, I have never thrown my clubs into a pond, and I am sure you have

never done anything so childish, either. But how many times have you

and I both given up golf forever, and then returned to links the

following day--"damn it"! We do not play for the exercise, we do not

play because it "keeps us out in the open air." Neither motive would

hold a man for a week to the tantalizing, costly, soul-racking, nerve-

and temper-destroying game. We play it because there is some

diabolical--or celestial--fascination about the thing; some

will-o'-the-wisp of hope lures us over swamp and swale, through pit

and pasture, toward the smooth haven of the putting green; some

subtle, mysterious power every now and then coordinates our muscles

and lets us achieve perfection for a single stroke, whereafter we

tingle with remembrance and thrill with anticipation. Golf is the

quest of the unattainable, it is a manifestation of the Divine Unrest,

it spreads before us the soft green pathway down which we follow the

Gleam. That is why you and I shall be giving it up forever on our

eightieth birthday.

[Illustration]

_"Grape-Vine" Erudition_

You may recall that Mr. Ezra Barkley acquired a great reputation for

learning by imparting to the spinsters of Old Chester such astonishing

facts as the approximate number of roe contained in a shad. His

sister-in-law, in her ignorance, supposed there were only two hundred!

Ezra also knew who first kept bees, and many other important things,

usually of a statistical nature. I cannot recall that Mrs. Deland has

told us where Ezra acquired his erudition, and I used at one time to

wonder. But now I know. He read the "grape-vine" in the first editions

of our daily papers.

Perhaps you don't know what "grape-vine" is? I rejoice in my ability

to tell you. It is the name given by newspaper men to the jokes and

squibs and bits of information clipped by the busy exchange reader,

and put into type, making short paragraphs of varying lengths, which

are dropped in at the bottom of a column to fill up the vacant space

when the need arises. This need most often arises in preparing the

first edition, the one which catches the early trains for the

country. By the time the city edition goes to press sufficient news

of battles, carnage, and sudden death, of politics and stock

exchanges, has been prepared to fill every inch of available space.

The city reader, therefore, sees little of this "grape-vine." Thus we

have a new argument for country life.

I am now a resident of the country, one hundred and fifty miles

removed from New York and as far from Boston; and I am by way of

becoming nearly as erudite as Ezra Barkley. I am, indeed, almost

bewildered with the mass of information I am acquiring. This morning I

read a column about the European war, all of which I have now

forgotten. But how can I ever forget the two lines of "grape-vine" at

the very bottom which filled out an otherwise vacant quarter inch? I

am permanently a wiser man.

"Many Filipino women catch and sell fish for a living."

Amid a world at war, too, how peaceful and soothing is this tabloid

idyl of piscatorial toil!

After the acquisition of this morsel of learning I set diligently to

work on the day's papers, both the morning editions and those

"evening" editions which come to us here by a train leaving the city

early in the afternoon, to see how much erudition I could accumulate

in one sun's span. I think you of the cities will be astonished. I was

myself. In a few weeks I shall read the encyclopaedia advertisements

with scorn instead of longing. For instance, I have learned that "A

new tooth-brush is cylindrical and is revolved against the teeth by a

plunger working through its spirally grooved handle." Obviously, just

the implement for boys interested in motor-cars (as all boys are).

They will play they are grinding valves and run joyously to brush

their teeth.

I have learned that "In the last five years our national and state

lawmaking bodies have passed 62,550 laws." The surprising thing about

this information is that the number is so small!

I have learned that "Russia has ten thousand lepers, taken care of by

twenty-one institutions."

I have acquired these valuable bits of ornithological lore: "The

frigate-bird is capable of getting up a speed of ninety-six miles an

hour with hardly a movement of its wings. The greater part of its life

is spent in the air." "The swallow has a larger mouth in proportion to

its size than any other bird."

I have, from the bottom of a single column, gleaned these three items

of incalculable value: "By harnessing a fly to a tiny wagon an English

scientist found it could draw one hundred and seventy times its own

weight over smooth surfaces."

"Missouri last year produced 195,634 tons of lead, a fairly heavy

output."

"The United States has five hundred and seventeen button-factories."

The New York _Times_ staggers me with this statistical line: "One

Paris motion-picture plant produces an average of three million feet

of films weekly." (This strikes me as a kind of "French

frightfulness.")

The New York _Evening Post_ contributes to my welfare and domestic

comfort this item: "Both an electric range and a refrigerator are

included in a new kitchen cabinet, but are hidden from view by doors

when not in use."

I am certainly a wiser man for knowing that "The Mexican seacoast on

the Pacific and the Gulf of California is 4,575 miles." And I am at

least interested in the fact that "An Englishman has invented a cover

for hatchways on vessels that operates on the principle of a roll-top

desk." If this hatchway operates on the principle of the only roll-top

desk I ever possessed, God help the poor sailors when the storm

breaks!

Such items as these disclose to me the extent of my previous

ignorance:--

"Bolivia is producing about one-third of the world's output of tin."

"Records disclose that for several centuries an infusion of nutgalls

treated with sulphate of iron composed the only known ink."

"The first job held by William G. McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasury,

was that of a newsboy selling the Macon _Morning Telegraph_. His next

job was that of a farm laborer."

"There are 2,500,000 freight-cars in the country, and their average

life is somewhere about twenty years."

"Since gold was discovered in the Auckland province, in 1852, there

has been exported from that district gold to the value of

$116,796,000."

I should, to be sure, be more completely educated if I could find

somewhere, under the sporting news, or at the base of the obituaries,

a statement of where Auckland is. But perhaps that information will

come to-morrow.

Well, I have presented here only a tithe of the knowledge I have

to-day gleaned from the daily press, that hitherto (by me, at least)

underestimated institution. I haven't stated that I now know who first

used anthracite coal as a fuel, and when. You don't know that, I am

sure. Neither do you know how many acres of corn were planted in

England and Wales in 1915 and 1916, nor how many government employees

there were in France before the war, nor that "A bundle of fine glass

threads forms a new ink-eraser."

However, I must share with you my choicest acquisition. It seems

little less than a crime to keep such knowledge from the world at

large, to bury it at the bottom of a column on the ninth page of the

first edition of the Springfield _Republican_. So I rewrite it here.

For oral delivery, I shall save it till some caller comes whom I

particularly desire to impress. Then, with all the Old-World courtesy

of Mr. Ezra Barkley, I shall offer this guest a chair, and as I do so

I shall remark, with the careless casualness of the truly erudite:

"Guatemala has only one furniture factory. It employs a hundred and

fifty men."

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

_Business Before Grammar_

We have just been perusing a copy of a certain magazine which

proclaims on its cover that it has doubled its circulation in twenty

months. Within, the editor sets forth what he believes to be the

reasons for this gratifying growth. "The magazine accepts man as he

is--and helps him," says the editor. "The magazine is edited to answer

the questions that keep rising and rising in the average man's head.

It is not edited with the idea of trying to force into the average

man's head a lot of information which he does not hanker for and

cannot make use of."

Having always considered ourself an average man, we turned the pages

hopefully, only to find a considerable amount of information we had

never "hankered" for, and could not make use of, as, for instance, how

to become the biggest "buyer" in the universe, or how a certain

theatrical manager wants you to think he thinks he got on in the world

(there is, to be sure, a quite unintentional psychological interest

here), or how to remember the names of a hundred thousand

people--dreadful thought! So we decided we were not, after all, an

average man, and shifted to the fiction.

There were four short stories and a serial in this issue, and not one

of them concerned itself with people who could speak correct English.

Some of the stories confined their assaults upon our mother tongue to

the dialogue, one was told by a dog (which, of course, excuses much,

in prose as well as verse), and one was entirely written in what we

presume to be a sort of literary Bowery dialect, which we have since

been informed by friends more extensively read than ourself is now the

necessary dialect of American magazine humor, as essential, almost, as

the bathing-girl on the August cover.

"'I think we got about everything. I'll see that the things

is packed in them wardrobe trunks an' sent to your hotel

to-morrow morning. An' believe me, it's been _some_

afternoon, Mr. Bentley!'"

--This, at random, from one of the two stories which dealt with the

"business woman," whose motto seems to be, "Business Before Grammar,"

even as it is the motto of the editor. The other "business woman" was

not quite so lax. She tried as hard to speak correctly as the author

could let her, and won a certain amount of sympathy for her efforts.

But the gem, of course, was the story told all in the literary

Boweryese. A lack of acquaintance with past performances by our author

prevented us from feeling quite sure who the supposed narrator might

be, without reading the entire story, but we gathered from early

paragraphs and from the illustrations that the guy was a pug. (You

see, it's contagious.) At any rate, this is how the story began:--

"The average guy's opinion of himself reaches its highest

level about five minutes after the most wonderful girl in

the world gasps 'Yes!' He always thought he was a little

better than the other voters, but now he knows it! Of

course, he figures, the girl couldn't very well help fallin'

for a handsome brute like him, who'd have more money than

Rockefeller if he only knew somethin' about oil. He kids

himself along like that, thinkin' that it was his curly hair

or his clever chatter that turned the trick. Them guys gimme

a laugh!

"When Mamie Mahoney or Gladys Van de Vere decides to love,

honor and annoy one of these birds, she's got some little

thing in view besides light house-keepin'. Some dames marry

for spite, some because they prefer limousines to the

subway, and others want to make Joe stop playin' the races

or the rye. But there's always _somethin'_ there--just like

they have to put alloy in gold to hold it together. Yes,

gentle reader, there's a reason!

"But if you're engaged, son, don't let this disturb you.

I've seen some dames that, believe me, I wouldn't care

_what_ they married me for, as long as they did!"

Having proceeded thus far, we turned back to the table of contents for

affirmation of what we vaguely remembered to have read there. Yes, we

_had_ read it! The tale was labeled by the editor, "A funny story."

So this is fiction for "the average man," and on this spiritual fare

his cravings for literature are fed! So this is the sort of thing

which doubles the circulation of a popular magazine in twenty months!

Such melancholy reflections crossed our mind, coupled with the thought

that with no speech at all in the movies, and such speech as this in

his magazines, the "average man" will either have to read his Bible

every day or soon forget that there was once such a thing as the

beautiful English language. And alas, the circulation of the Bible

hasn't doubled in the past twenty months! "This magazine accepts man

as he is--and helps him"--so reads the editor's self-puffery. What an

indictment of man--and what an idea of help! We would hate to go to

bed with his conscience,--if editors have such old-fashioned

impediments.

But suddenly we caught a ray of light amid the encircling gloom. The

editor hadn't stated what his circulation was twenty months ago! We

recalled how Irvin Cobb once told us that the attendance at his

musical comedy had doubled the previous evening--the usher had brought

his sister. Doubtless the new circulation isn't more than a

million,--and what is a mere million nowadays?

[Illustration]

_Wood Ashes and Progress_

"Once man defended his home and hearth; now he defends his home and

radiator." The words stared out of the bulk of print on the page with

startling vividness, a gem of philosophy, a "criticism of life," in

the waste of jokes which the comic-paper editor had read and doubtless

paid for, and which the public was doubtless expected to enjoy. The

Man Above the Square laid aside the paper, leaned toward his fire,

took up the poker (an old ebony cane adorned with a heavy silver knob

which bore the name of an actor once loved and admired) and rolled the

top log over slowly and meditatively. The end of the cane was scarred

and burned from many a contest with stubborn logs, and the Man Above

the Square looked at the marks of service with a smile before he stood

the heavy stick again in its place by the fireside.

"It isn't every walking-stick which comes to such a good end," he said

aloud.

Then either because he was cold or in penitence for the pun, he walked

over to the windows to pull down the shades. But before he did so he

looked out into the night, his breath making a frosty vapor on the

pane. Below him the Square gleamed in white patches under the

arc-lamps, and across these white patches here and there a belated

pedestrian, coat collar turned up, hurried, a black shadow. The cross

on the Memorial Church gleamed like a cluster of stars, and deep in

the cold sky the moon rode silently. A chill wind was complaining in

the bare treetops beneath him and found its way to his face and body

through the window chinks. He drew down the shades quickly and pulled

the heavy draperies together with a rattle of rings on the rods. Then

he turned and faced his room.

A scarf of Oriental silk veiled the light of the single lamp, set low

on his desk, and the fire had its own way with the illumination. It

sent dancing shadows over the olive walls, it made points of light of

the picture-frames and a glowing coal of the polished coffee-urn in

the corner; it pointed pleasantly out the numberless books, but told

nothing of their contents; it made dark the spaces where the alcoves

were, but suffused the little radius of the hearth that was bounded by

an easy chair and a pipe-stand with a glow and warmth and comfort

which were irresistible. The Man Above the Square came quickly into

this charmed radius and sank again into the chair. "And some people

insist on steam heat!" he said.

Then he looked into the rosy pit of wallowing, good-natured flames,

and fancied he was meditating. But in reality he was going to sleep.

When he woke up the fire was out and he was cramped and cold. He

stumbled to a corner, turned on the steam in a radiator, that the room

might be warm in the morning, and returned to his chamber.

"After all, you have to build a fire; but the steam just comes," he

growled, as he crawled sleepily into bed.

Toward morning the steam did come, but some hours before he was ready

to rise. It came at intervals, forcing the water up ahead and thumping

it against the top of the radiator with the force of a trip-hammer and

the noise of a cannon. The Man Above the Square woke up and cursed.

The intervals between thumps he employed in wondering how soon the

next report would come, which effectively prevented his going to sleep

again. Presently the thumping ceased, and he dozed off, to awake later

in ugly temper. He went out into the sitting room and found it cold as

an ice-box.

"Where in blazes is all that steam which woke me up at daylight?" he

shouted down the speaking-tube to the janitor. The answer, as usual,

admitted of no reply, even as it offered no satisfactory explanation.

He dug into the wood-box and on the heap of feathery white ashes

which topped the pile in the fireplace like snow--"the fall of last

night" he called it--he laid a fire of pine and maple. In three

minutes he was toasting his toes in front of the blaze, and good

nature was spreading up his person like the tide up a bay.

"Modern conveniences would be all right," he chuckled, looking from

the merry fire to the ugly radiator, "if they were ever convenient!"

Then he swung Indian clubs for a quarter of an hour, jumped into a

cold plunge, and went rosy to his breakfast and the day's work, with

the cheeriness of the fire in his heart.

But while he was gone there entered the chambermaid, and sad

desecration was wrought. Chambermaids are another modern

inconvenience. The Pilgrim Fathers got along without chambermaids; and

even at a much later period chambermaids worked at least under the

supervision of a mistress of the household. But nowadays they have

their own way, even in abodes where there is one who could be a

mistress if she would, or time from social duties and the improvement

of her mind permitted. Of course, in the abode of a bachelor the

chambermaid is supreme, for bachelors, at least in New York, have of

necessity to live in apartments, not private boarding houses presided

over by a careful mistress. Probably most of them prefer to; but that

does not prove progress, none the less. But the Man Above the Square

was not of this class. He had a sharp elbow bone, in the first place,

which is to signify that he was a "good house-keeper," as they say in

New England. And in the second place, he knew the value to the

aesthetic and moral sense of personality in living rooms, of an

orderly, tasteful arrangement of inanimate objects, carpets, pictures,

furniture, which, through weeks of comparative changelessness, takes

on the human aspect of a friend and silently welcomes you when you

return at night, saying comfortably, "I am here, as you left me; I am

home."

So when he entered his room again that evening and turned up the gas,

his immediate utterance was not strictly the subject for reproduction.

To begin with, the chambermaid had, in disobedience to his strict

orders, taken up the centre rug and sent it up on the roof for the

porter to beat. Being an expensive rug, the Man Above the Square did

not particularly relish having it frequently beaten. But still less

did he relish the way it had been replaced. It was not in the centre

of the room, so that two legs of the library desk in the middle stood

on the border and two on the diamond centre. One end was too near the

piano, the other consequently too far from the hearth. And in trying

to tug it into position the maid had managed to pull every edge out of

plumb with the lines of the floor. Of course, the photographs on the

piano had smooches on the margins, where the maid's thumb had pressed

as she held them up to dust beneath. Pudd'n-Head Wilson would alone

have prized them in their present state. On the mantel each object was

just far enough out of its proper place to throw the whole decorative

scheme into a line of Puritanic primness. And the chairs, silent

friends that are so companionable when an understanding hand places

them in position, were now facing at stiff angles of armed neutrality,

as if mutually suspicious. Not one of them said, "Sit in me."

But the worst was yet to come. Walking over to the fireplace, the Man

Above the Square looked in and groaned.

"She's done it again!" he cried. "I'd move out of this flat to-night

if I wasn't sure that any other would be as bad, this side of the

middle of last century."

It was, indeed, a sorry piece of work. The splendid pile of gray and

white wood ashes which that morning had been heaped high over the arms

of the firedogs, and which drifted high into each corner and out upon

the hearth, was no more. A little pile remained, carefully swept into

the rear of the fireplace, but the bulk of the ashes had been removed

and the arms of the firedogs stood inches above what was left.

"I told her not to do it; confound it! I told her not to do it!" he

muttered aloud, storming about the room. "Here I've been since

Christmas collecting that pile of ashes, and it had just reached the

point where I could kindle a fire with three sticks of kindling and

burn only one log if I wished. And then that confounded chambermaid

disobeys me--distinctly disobeys me--and shovels it all out!"

He rang angrily for the chambermaid, whose name was Eliza, and who was

tall and angular.

"Didn't I tell you under no consideration to take away any of my

ashes?" he demanded.

"But I swept the room into them, and they got all dirty," she

protested.

"Then don't sweep the room again!" he interposed. "I want the ashes

left hereafter."

"But the fire will burn better without so many ashes; they chokes it,"

said Eliza. "Most people like 'em cleaned out every week."

"Most people are fools," said the Man Above the Square. "You may go

now."

The loss of his ashes had so irritated him that it was a long time

before he could yield himself to the influence of the blaze, which

leapt merrily enough, in spite of the too clear hearth. He filled his

pipe and smoked it out and filled it again; he tried the latest

autobiography and Heine's prose and the current magazines; and still

his mind would not settle to restfulness and content. Then suddenly

he remembered the date, the 20th of January. He took down his Keats.

The owl, for all his feathers, might well have been a-cold on that

night, too, for a shrill wind was up without. He glanced at his fire.

Already the kindlings were settling into glowing heaps beneath the

logs, a good start on a fresh pile of ashes. He snuggled more

comfortably into his chair and began once more the deathless poem.

The clock ticked steadily; the wind sent crashing down the limb of an

elm tree outside and shrieked exultingly; a log settled into the fire

with a hiss and crackle of sparks. But he heard nothing. Presently he

laid the book aside, for the poem was finished, and looked into the

fire. It was sometimes a favorite question of his to inquire who ate

Madeline's feast, a point which Keats leaves in doubt; but he did not

ask it to-night.

"Yes, it was ages long ago," he said at length. "Ages long ago!"

Then he leaned forward, poking the fire meditatively, and added:

"Steam heat in Madeline's chamber? Impossible! But there might have

been just such another fire as this!"

And was it a sudden thought, "like a full-blown rose," making "purple

riot" in his breast, too, or was it simply the leap of the firelight,

which caused his face to flush?

"I wonder where they are now?" he whispered. "'They are together in

the arms of death,' a later poet says. But surely the world has not so

far 'progressed' that they do not live somewhere still."

Then he recalled a visit he once made to a young doctor in a fine old

New-England village. The doctor was not long out of college, and he

had brought his bride to this little town, to an old house rich in

tiny window panes, uneven floors and memories. Great fireplaces

supplied the heat for the doctor and his wife, as it had done for the

occupants who looked forth from the windows to see the soldiery go by

on their way to join Washington at the siege of Boston. And when the

Man Above the Square came on his visit he found in the fireplace which

warmed the low-studded living room, that was library and drawing room

as well, a heap of ashes more than a foot high, on which the great

cordwood sticks roared merrily.

The doctor and his wife, sitting down before the blaze, pointed

proudly to this heap of ashes, and the doctor said, "I brought Alice

to this house a year ago, on the day of our wedding, and we kindled a

fire here, on the bare hearth. Since then not a speck of ashes has

been removed, except little bits from the front when the carpet was

invaded. That pile of ashes is the witness to our year-long

honeymoon."

Then Alice smiled fondly into the rosy glow, herself more rosy, and

they kissed each other quite unaffectedly.

The Man Above the Square, when his memory reached this point, let the

ebony poker slide from his grasp. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "her name was

really Madeline!"

Again he looked into the fire. "Could the ashes have been preserved if

Madeline had not given the matter her personal attention, but had

trusted to a housemaid?" he thought. What further reflections this

question inspired must be left to conjecture. He did not speak again.

But presently he got up, went to his desk, and wrote a letter. He was

a long time about it, consulting frequently with the fire and smiling

now and then. When it was done he took it at once to the elevator to

be mailed. Perhaps he thought it unsafe to wait the turning of the

mood.

[Illustration]

_The Vacant Room in Drama_

I am content to let Mr. John Corbin sing the praises of the stage

without scenery; I prefer to sing the praises of the stage without

actors. Ever since I was a little boy, nothing in the world has been

for me so full of charm and suggestiveness as an empty room. I

remember as vividly as though it were week before last being brought

home from a visit somewhere, when I was four years old, and arriving

after dark. My mother had difficulty in finding the latch-key in her

bag (I have since noted that this is a common trait of women), and

while the search was going on I ran around the corner of the house and

peered in one of the low windows of the library. The moonlight lay in

two oblong patches on the floor; and as I pressed my nose against the

pane and gazed, the familiar objects within gradually emerged from the

gloom, as if a faint, invisible light were being turned slowly up by

an invisible hand. Nothing seemed, however, as it did by day, but

everything took on a new and mysterious significance that bewildered

me. I think it must also have terrified me, for I recall my father's

carrying me suddenly into the glare of the hall, and saying, "What's

the matter with the boy?" And to-day I cannot enter a theatre, even at

the prosaic hour of ten in the morning, when the chairs are covered

with cloths and maids are dusting, when the house looks very small and

the unlit and unadorned stage very like a barn, without a thrill of

imaginative pleasure. I have even mounted the stage of an empty

theatre and addressed with impassioned, soundless words the deeply

stirred, invisible, great audience, rising row on row to the roof. At

such moments I have experienced the creative joy of a mighty orator or

a sublime actor; I have actually felt my pulses leap. And then the

entrance of a stage-hand or a scrub-woman would shatter the illusion!

But it is when I am one of a real audience, and the stage is disclosed

set with scenery but barren of players, that I derive, perhaps, the

keenest pleasure. A few playwrights have recognized the power of the

vacant room in drama, but on the whole the opportunities for such

enjoyment are far too rare. This is odd, too, with such convincing

examples at hand. There is, for instance, the close of the second act

of _Die Meistersinger_, when the watchman passes through the sleepy

town after the street brawl is over, and then the empty, moon-bathed

street lies quiet for a time, before the curtain closes. Of course,

here there is music to aid in creating the poetic charm and soothing

repose of that moment. But at the end of _Shore Acres_ there was no

such aid. Who that saw it, however, can forget that final picture?

After Nat Berry--played by Mr. Herne, the author--had scratched a bit

of frost off the window-pane to peer out into the night, locked the

door, and banked the fire, he climbed with slow, aged footsteps up the

stairs to bed. At the landing he turned to survey the old kitchen

below, that lay so cozy and warm under the benediction of his eye.

Then he disappeared with his candle, and the stage grew quite dim,

save for the red glow from the fire. Yet the curtain did not fall; and

through a mist of tears, tears it cleansed one's soul to shed, the

audience looked for a long, hushed moment on the scene, on the now

familiar room where so much of joy and grief had happened,--deserted,

tranquil, but suddenly, in this new light of emptiness, realized to be

how vital a part of the lives of those people who had made the play!

It used to seem, indeed, as if the drama had not achieved full reality

until the old kitchen had thus had its say, thus spoken the epilogue.

It is strange to me that more playwrights have not profited by such

examples. The cry of the average playgoer is for "action," to be sure;

but even "action" may be heightened by contrast, by peace and

serenity. Certainly the vitality, the illusion, of a scenic background

on the stage can be enhanced by drawing a certain amount of attention

to it alone; and something as Mr. Hardy, in _The Return of the

Native_, paints Egdon Heath--"Haggard Egdon"--in its shifting moods

before he introduces a single human being upon the scene of their

coming tragedy, it is quite possible for the modern playwright, with

an artist to aid him, to show the audience the scene of his drama, to

let its suggestive beauty, its emotional possibilities, charm or fire

their fancies before the speech and action begin. So also, as Wagner

and Mr. Herne have demonstrated, there can be a climax of the vacant

stage. I look to the new stage-craft to develop such possibilities.

[Illustration]

_On Giving an Author a Plot_

There are two people who annoy an author more than any others--the

person who calmly supposes that everything he writes is biographical,

or even autobiographical, and the person who declares, "I've got a

dandy plot for you"--and proceeds to tell it.

The first person, of course, is annoying, because an author's stories

always _are_ either biographical or autobiographical, and he never

cares to admit, even to himself, how true this is. To be sure, his

characters are composites, and his self-revelations are rather

possibilities (or even, alas, Freudian wishes!) than records of

actuality. But fancy trying to explain that to a gushing female who

has developed a sudden passion for calling on your wife, and is heard

to remark, "Oh, is that where he writes?" as you flee by a back door,

down the garden!

The second person is annoying not so much because most of the "dandy

plots" that he or she tells are hoary with age, or even because most

writers don't start with a 'plot' at all, and couldn't define a plot

if they had to; but rather because a writer, however humble, has to

feel the idea for a story come glowing up over the horizon of his

brain out of the east of his own subconsciousness, or it is never his,

it never acquires the necessary warmth to interest him, the color and

light to make it real. This is a curious fact, and one which your

modest writer shrinks from trying to explain to his well-meaning

friend, lest he seem egotistical. Only the blessed publicity of print

could draw him out. Yet the psychology involved perhaps deserves some

attention.

Suppose it is my common method, in writing a story, to start from some

social situation which illumines a strata of life; suppose, let us

assume, that I am present at a dinner party where a radical has got in

by mistake and says something which profoundly shocks some

capitalistic pirate who honestly feels himself a pillar of law and

order, and in this situation I see an irony which gradually demands

fictional expression, as imagined characters and more extensive

clashes begin to shape in my brain. There you have a not at all

impossible evolution of a story. But now suppose that instead of my

being present at this party, a friend had been present, quite as alive

as I to the ironies of the situation, and suppose my friend later

repeated the incident to me--why should it not serve me just as well,

why should it not start the fictional urge, the gestation of character

and incident?

Generalizing is dangerous work. Of course, there may be authors in

whom it would start the process. But I have never known one. Even in

so exceptional a case as this--of course, the usual friendly

suggestion has no real meat of fiction in it at all--something is

lacking to fire the imagination. It is exactly as if your nose were

called upon to sense, or your retina to image, an odor or a scene

described to you and not directly experienced. Your brain accepts the

description, but there is no warmth in the reaction, no tingle of

life. Just so, it would almost seem, the conception for a story, a

poem, no doubt for a picture, too, or a strain of music, is something

less, or more, than merely mental; it is in some subtle way sensory,

as if the brain had fingers which must themselves touch the thing

directly to get the feel of it. Is it not, perhaps, this fact which

has caused so many artists, consciously or unconsciously, to believe

in "inspiration"?

The singing line walks from nowhere into the poet's head, the perfect

situation comes to the writer of fiction when he is least expecting

it. To take a humble example, I was once sitting in an editor's

office, listening while he expounded to me a grand "plot" for a series

of stories. I looked across the street from his window to avoid his

eyes, lest I should show my lack of appreciation, and there beheld a

slight incident which I instantly knew was a starting-point. It

turned out to be worth a year's income to me. Yet, to a merely

impersonal judgment, the editor's idea was more interesting and worth

while than mine. Only it wasn't mine; that's the point. It was foreign

born, and could never become a citizen of my mental commonwealth. I

have not quite reached the pitch of calling my ideas inspirations, but

I long ago recognized that unless they were my ideas from the dim days

before their birth they could never be mine, and it was only a waste

of time to wrestle with them. So when a friend declares he has a dandy

plot for me, I summon what patience I may and pretend to listen, while

planning a better succession of perennials for next year's garden, or

mentally reviewing the prospect of cutting three strokes off my golf

score.

[Illustration]

_The Twilight Veil_

New York! How few of us call it home! We have been sucked into it, as

into a whirlpool, and as we spin round and round on its mighty unrest

our hearts and fancies find repose in memory--the memory of an old New

England village, or a corn field and a split-rail fence and then the

level prairie, or cotton fields and the red handkerchiefs of the

negroes, or the vineyard slopes of Sicily, or the great white surf

beating up the cliffs of Connemara. It may be that the second and

third generations of immigrants, born on the East Side, are true New

Yorkers, just as a vanishing generation of elderly men and women on

Murray Hill and the Avenue are true New Yorkers. But the great

majority of New York's five millions cherish in their hearts either

the memory or the hope of some spot far away to which they give the

allegiance of home love. Ours is a curious city in that respect.

Perhaps, indeed, it is a fortunate one. Without such memory or such

hope, the flat-dwelling imposed on most New Yorkers by economic

necessity would be a deadly thing--or shall we say, a more deadly

thing?

If you desire a curious experience, go into a New York club like the

Yale or Harvard or Players' club, and collect a dozen men at random,

asking each for a little word-sketch of his childhood home. Seldom

enough will the scene of that sketch be in New York City, and you will

probably be surprised to find how infrequently it will be in any city.

A kind of urban consciousness gets complete possession of us after we

have lived long on Manhattan Island, and we are prone to forget what a

geographically tiny spot it is. We forget the country. It comes as a

surprise when we discover how many of our fellows were, like us,

country bred. We are still a nation, at bottom, of little white

dwelling houses, if not any longer of little white school houses. (I

know the phrase is little red school houses, only they never were red,

but white!) This is probably one reason why our aesthetic sense is not

adjusted to find more beauties than we do in the physical aspects of

New York City. Deep in our consciousness, if not rather our

subconsciousness, lies the ache for green vistas and gardens, for low

sky lines and quiet streets. When we speak of the picturesque in New

York, we most often refer (aside from the obviously striking aspect of

the lower city from the harbor) to the old brick houses on Washington

Square or the quaint streets of Greenwich Village. Yet we do both the

city and ourselves an injustice by this more or less unconscious

attitude. Let us consider picturesque to mean what is shaped by chance

and the play of light into a beautiful picture, and, if we but walk

the town with eyes upraised and open, we shall see the picturesque on

every side.

There is the Plaza Hotel, for example. Every New Yorker and every

visitor to New York knows it,--a great, white, naked sky-scraper, with

a green hip-roof, rising close to the Park and St. Gaudens' golden

bronze of General Sherman. But how many know that it is probably the

one sky-scraper in the world which can gaze at its own reflection in

still water, and that to the spectator looking at it over this

water-mirror it becomes a gigantic but ethereal Japanese design, even

to the pine limb flung across the upper corner?

They say there is an hour at twilight when all men appear noble, and

all women beautiful. Certainly there is such a twilight hour when New

York City is veiled, oftimes, in loveliness; and most lovely at this

hour is the Plaza mirrored in the pool. The view is not easy to find,

unless you are one of those who know your Central Park. But a little

searching will uncover it. You will see in the southeast corner of the

Park a lake, and just beyond this lake you will find a path turning

west. That path leads to a stone bridge over a northward-stretching

inlet of the pond. Cross the bridge a few paces and turn your face to

the south. At your feet the bank goes down sharply to the still, dark

water. Across the pond the bank rises steep and rocky, covered with

thick shrubbery and trees. Shooting up apparently out of these trees

is the white wall of the Plaza, three hundred feet into the air, and

down into the water sinks its still reflection, to an equal depth. It

rises alone, open sky to left and right, and there is just room in the

lake for its replica. The picture is impressive by day, but as

twilight begins to steal over the scene, as the sky takes on a pearly

softness, and the shadows creep through the trees in the Park, and the

lights in half the windows up that white cliff wall begin to gleam in

golden squares, the great building becomes curiously ethereal, the

pine limb flung into the foreground of the design catches the eye, the

reflection in the water is as real as the reality. The Plaza,

monstrous tons of steel and stone, floats between two elements. Then

darkness gathers, the reflected lights in the blackening water grow

more golden, and suddenly, perhaps, a duck swims across a tenth story

window and sets it dancing in golden ripples. You may fare far among

the ancient and "picturesque" cities of the earth without finding a

rival for this strange bit of beauty in New York, an ethereal

sky-scraper in white and gold gazing at its own reflection in the

forest pool!

Twilight in the Park, indeed, converts more than one building into a

thing of beauty, and the Plaza into a thing of beauty from more than

one view. For instance, as you pass into the Park, seeking the spot we

have described, turn back before you have advanced far, and see the

great cliff wall going up beyond the slender tracery of young trees,

with the street lights, just turned on, making a level strip of golden

shimmer at its base, curiously suggestive of crowds and gaiety. There

is at all hours a certain charm to be found in the long line of high

hotels and apartment houses which line the Park to the west, when you

view them over treetops, rock ledges, and running brooks, or over

white fields of snow. It is as if the city had crested in a great wave

along the green shore of the country, ready to curl and fall and dash

onward, but had been suddenly arrested by some more potent King

Canute. Loveliness, however, is hardly a word you would apply till

twilight steals across the scene. Down side streets into the west the

golden sunset glows for a time, and the shadows on the snow are

amethyst. Then the glow fades. The arc lamps come on with a splutter,

and they, too, at first are amethyst. But in the gathering dark they

change to blue. The sky changes to the deep blue of approaching night.

The dim bulks of the buildings change to blue. The shadows about you

are but a deeper blue. Even the snow at your feet is blue. In the

great apartments and hotels the golden window squares appear, and the

looming procession of blue shadow bulks might be a fleet of giant

liners going by you in the night.

There is always a mystery and poignant charm about our parks in New

York, if you let them have their way with your imagination, which you

do not find in other parks intrinsically, perhaps, more beautiful. No

doubt this comes from violent contrast between our city and the hush

and peace of trees. Our streets are all treeless, and our great heave

of masonry comes up to the very edge of our green oases. Even the

smaller parks which fill but a block or two, when twilight enfolds

them, blurring the harsher outlines and conjuring out the shadows, can

captivate the senses. If you chance to wander in Brooklyn--which no

self-respecting inhabitant of Manhattan permits himself to do except

under compulsing!--you may come upon Fort Greene Park when the evening

shadows are stealing down the streets to meet you, and the Martyrs'

Monument strangely converted into a pagan altar, silhouetted against

the sky amid its guardian druid grove wherein the lamps glow and

twinkle and dark figures move mysteriously.

But it is not even necessary to enter the parks of New York to find

the picturesque and lovely. Such open areas as Washington and Madison

Squares hold varying aspects of beauty and imaginative suggestion,

from sunrise to moonset. Large enough to admit the play of light and

to blur a bit the building lines at their further side, these squares

reward the seeing eye with many an unguessed delight.

For ten years my rooms were six stories up on the east side of

Washington Square, and for ten years, at all seasons and all hours, I

walked daily up-town through Madison Square to the Rialto, and back

again. I have often regretted that I kept no note-book of the changing

aspects of these two oases, as one keeps a note-book of the seasons in

the country. Spring comes in Washington and Madison Squares with signs

no less unmistable than the hepaticas by the woodland road. The

western wall of the Flatiron Building has its autumnal colorings; and

though the first snow fall may be black mud by noon, at sun-up those

brick-bounded areas laugh in white and the aged trees arch their

fantastic tracery.

Spring in the Square! The central fountain is playing again its

rainbow jet of spray, the tulips are a jaunty ring about it, the

benches have put forth a strange, sad foliage of humanity (you must

not think too much of the benches nor look at them too long!), the

shrill children are everywhere, the green 'busses are gay with

sight-seers atop, and as you stand by the fountain and look northward

through the Washington Arch, you see that an amazing thing has come

to pass. The great arch spans the vista of the Avenue, lined here with

red brick dwellings and the sunny white bulk of the old Brevoort

House. Far off, the sky-scrapers begin to loom, whipping out flags and

steam plumes. It is a treeless vista, yet it is hazed with spring!

Imagination, you scoff--and dust. Yet you look again, and it is not

imagination, and it is not dust. It is the veil of spring, cast with

delicate hand over the city. These laughing sight-seers atop the green

'bus now going under the arch feel it, too. These children screaming

round your feet, as they dash through the wind-borne fountain spray,

are aware of it. There is an answering benignity in the calm, red

brick dwellings up the vista of the Avenue. Wait for a few hours, let

the sun sink behind the heights of Hoboken, and then wander once more

into the Square. Twilight, a warm, balmy twilight, is upon your

spirit. Look through the arch southward now. There is still plenty of

light left in the sky, but the great, springing, Roman masonry is

dusky. It frames the sweeping curve of the asphalt around the

fountain, and beyond that the Judson Memorial tower, graceful,

Italian, bearing its electric cross against the failing day like a

cluster of timid evening stars. It is a tower from the plains of

Lombardy, or from an island in the Tiber, seen through an arch of

ancient Rome. Do you object to that in an American city? I cannot

argue the point. I only know that when I see them so, the one framing

the other, in the spring twilight, or in the early dusk of a winter

day, my heart is very glad, and my spirit feels a touch of that peace

and calm the poet felt among the Roman ruins,

"Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles

Miles on miles...."

How often in New York it is a tower which gathers the picture

together! Ours is a city of towers. We hide Trinity spire in a well,

and Henry Arthur Jones, the playwright, once complained that the

windows of his hotel room on the Avenue looked down upon the pinnacle

of a church steeple. Yet our towers rise just the same, new ones

leaping up as far above the new three-hundred-foot sky-line as Trinity

steeple once lifted above lower Broadway. We aspire still. Nor is the

old Judson tower on Washington Square yet dwarfed. How many red

sunsets have I seen glow through its belfry windows, while the tower

itself was a black silhouette against the sky, and down in the shadowy

Square the night lamps began to come out, or the asphalt, drenched by

a shower, shone as if molten copper had been rained upon it! In how

many deep, starlit nights have I thrown open my window for a fresher

breath and a moment of meditation, to see the deserted Square below

me, its white arch faintly gleaming in the radiation of the arc lamps,

the long stretch of city roofs beyond, the twinkling lamps on the far

heights of Hoboken, and there in the centre of the picture the dark,

silent tower, keeping quiet watch and bearing its steady cross like a

star-cluster in the night! Many a time I have gone to bed with its

beautiful image behind my eyelids.

The Metropolitan tower in Madison Square is less intimate. It has its

moods, but they are the moods of the mountain. It has dwarfed the

graceful, Spanish tower of the Madison Square Garden, without a doubt,

and taken the proud Diana down a peg. But there are compensations in

its mightiness. Have you ever seen it on a foggy day going up out of

sight into the driving vapors? Have you stood in ancient Gramercy

Park--still a bit of the old, domestic New York of the '70's--and seen

it booming up over the red brick dwellings, white and confident into

the sun? Have you ever come down through Madison Square late at night,

when the relic of a moon was rising behind the tower, and the ghostly

shaft stood up tremendous against the pale, racing cloud-rack? Have

you seen it with the last pink glow of sunset upon it, and upon the

western wall of the Flatiron Building, and upon nothing else, all

lower buildings being in shadows of obscuring twilight? That is one

of its delicate mountain moods, when it seems to lift above our

earth-bound vision and look over those western cloud ranges into the

Land Beyond the Sunset.

Have you seen it, too, down Madison Avenue in the mysterious twilight

hour of blue and gold when all New York is beautiful? The street lamps

have come on; the dark figures of home-going pedestrians hurry past

you; there are lamps in the windows of houses. A filmy blue veil of

twilight obscures the distances, so that they are soft, alluring. The

tower is pale, almost ethereal, at the end of the vista. Its great

clock, pricked out with golden lamps, seems scarce a third of the way

up its side. The white walls rise on, and on, with here and there a

spot of gold, and taper into nothing. They are lost in the gloom of

coming night. But still they must go on, for far aloft you see the

lantern glowing like a star, hung between earth and heaven. In this

twilight hour of blue and gold the tower is the mighty guardian spirit

of the scene, sending down sonorous word of the hours as they pass,

and lifting our eyes, like its steady lantern, toward the watch-towers

of Eternity. Must we be forever reminded that those glowing window

squares up its flanks denote lawyers toiling late at their briefs, or

mining stock promoters planning a new cast of the net? Must we be

forever told that this is not a spire in praise of God but a monument

in praise of Mammon? Aspiration is in its lines, beauty in its

sky-borne shaft of blue and gold, wonder in its shrouded summit.

"They builded better than they knew--

The conscious stone to beauty grew."

It is enough. Let us wonder and be glad.

There are many odd views of the tower to be had for a little

searching, spots where its peak appears in unexpected places, or with

unusual suggestion. There is just one point in Union Square, for

example, about halfway round "dead man's curve," where you see the

tapering pyramid and the golden lantern overtopping the high buildings

between. You do not see it again, if you are walking up Broadway, till

you are close to Madison Square. Then, if you lift your eyes, you are

suddenly aware of it looming far aloft over the cornice-line to your

right, shredding the mists on a stormy day, or by night lifting its

lantern up with the stars. There is always an added impressiveness

about a tower when we cannot see the base. The sheer drop of its sides

is left to our imagination, and the human imagination may generally be

trusted to embroider fact. For that reason alone, the view of the

tower from a certain point on East Thirty-first Street, between

Madison and Fourth Avenues, would be worth the searching out. But it

has another and unique charm. If you will walk along Thirtieth Street

toward Fourth Avenue you will see, tucked in between larger and more

modern buildings on the south side, a little two-story-and-a-half

wooden cottage, set back a few feet behind an iron fence. It must have

stood there many years, for the wooden age in New York was long, long

ago. It is a quaint little dwelling, with quaint pseudo-Gothic

ornamentations, and until recently was used as an antique shop. A

large weather-stained Venus stood upon the front porch, ironically

beside a spinning-wheel! Now the house is untenanted, so that you lift

your eyes the sooner to look above and beyond it. It occupies, of

course, a slit between higher buildings. Through that slit, as you

stand on the opposite curb, you look over a few spindly black

chimney-stacks in the foreground directly to the Metropolitan Tower,

booming up suddenly and unexpectedly. You see only that for a moment,

because of its Titanic size and white impressiveness. Then you notice

something outlined against it, a lower tower, much more slender, a

mere tracery of delicate shafts and belfries, and crowning it, her bow

forever poised, the lovely limbed Diana. Whence either of these towers

come, you see not. They merely spring up into the vision over the roof

of the little wooden house, the darker one outlined against the other

for comparison. Between and around them steam plumes from unseen

buildings drift like clouds. Diana turns a little, and points her

shaft into the wind anew. The might of the new tower is mightier for

this close comparison. Yet the other tower, too, does not suffer, its

femininity is the more alluring. But lift your eyes as you walk

through this commonplace cross-street of New York, and you may see as

picturesque a vista, over the quaint wooden cottage, as any city,

anywhere, affords--forty stories looking down on two and a half, and

between them, in intermediate flight, St. Gaudens' bronze Diana.

Snow in the city! We in New York think of bespattered boots, of horses

falling down, of dirty piles, more black than white, lining the

streets like igloos till the tip-carts come and carry them off. "The

frolic architecture" of the snow is a thing of memory, not of present

fact. Like Whittier, we recall the hooded well-sweep or fantastic

pump, and the great drifts by the pasture wall. Yet, once again, it is

the seeing eye we lack, nor do we need even to enter the Park to

discover the snow at its artistic handiwork. Let Sixty-fifth Street

enter the Park for you, from the east, and do you stand upon Fifth

Avenue and note the conversion from ugliness to beauty of a paved

road, dipping into a dugway between dirty stone walls. The soiled

pavement is hidden now, each rough stone on the bounding walls is

softly outlined with white, not far into the Park a graceful stone

foot-bridge spans the sunken street, supporting a second and more

graceful arch of snow, and the street curves alluringly into the trees

which rise beyond, a gray wall of misty shadow, the eye is satisfied

with a clean, well-composed, strongly lined picture, and the

imagination almost deluded into a belief of its rusticity.

I remember once walking down Broadway late at night, after an evening

at some tiresome play and supper at some yet more tiresome and tawdry

restaurant. I had been having what is popularly supposed to be a "good

time," and I was bored. There had been a recent deep fall of snow. The

night was clear and cold. Below Herald Square I met comparatively few

pedestrians, and those few were not of the sort to dispel my

despondent mood.

"Back home," I thought, "the moon should be shining on the white,

clean hills, and underneath my boots the snow-crust would squeak.

Perhaps a screech-owl would whistle his plaintive call in the ghostly

orchard. How beautiful there the night would be! But here--" and I

flung out my arm instinctively toward the walls which hemmed me in.

But as I drew near Madison Square, and lifted my eyes to the soaring

ship's-prow of the Flatiron Building, I noted suddenly that its upper

stories were bathed in a pale, golden glow; and coming full into the

square, I saw the moon, riding small and high beyond the white tower.

The next strip of canyon street shut it out once more, but at Union

Square it was waiting to greet me, and as I entered the slit of

Broadway to the south and drew near Eleventh street, I was aware of

the snow-covered northward pitch of Grace Church roof gleaming in its

light, a great rectangle of pale radiance at the bend of the street.

Above the roof the Gothic spire stood up serenely. There were no

passers at the moment, not even a trolley-car. The greatest traffic

artery in town was hushed as death. The high buildings about were dark

and shadowy. At the angle commanding the vista in either direction the

church slept in the moonlight.

"Deep on the convent roof the snows

Are sparking to the moon."

Tennyson's lines came to me instinctively, for here in the heart of

town was their very picture and their simple magic. A little

shamefaced for my sceptic blindness, I passed on toward home.

Somebody, probably Emerson, said that we bring from Europe only what

we take to it. But need one go to Europe to demonstrate the principle?

We in New York, who are often our city's harshest critics, find pretty

much what we look for. We do not look for beauty, and we do not find

it. Then, too, man is no less conventional about beauty than about

other things. If he believes that the beauty of a city lies in a

level cornice-line, converging vistas, malls of trees, "civic

centres," of what use to tell him that there may be a beauty as well

of non-conformity, when the magic veil of twilight wraps the city

round, and twinkling lamps climb unbelievable heights and all the town

is a mighty nocturne in blue and gold? We would not be thought to say

that New York is always beautiful, or that a great deal of it is not

much of the time ugly beyond hope. But there is not a street of it

from end to end but has some point of pictorial charm, whence one may

see a span of the Brooklyn Bridge leaping over the tenements, or the

scholastic Gothic spire of the City College chapel crowning the rocks

at the close of the vista, or just a rosy sunset over the Hoboken

hills. And there are parks and squares of almost constant charm,

though it be a charm not of the old world, but the new, of the

uprearing steel city of the twentieth century. And finally there are

certain hours when kindly Nature takes a hand at coloring our drab

mortar piles and softening out distances and making our forests of

masonry no less wonderful to look upon than her own forests of timber.

Such an hour is the blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet evening

when the pavements shine with molten gold and the electric signs along

upper Broadway, like King Arthur's dragoned helmet, make "all the

night a steam of fire," and round the tall tower of the Times Building

the vapour clouds drift, now concealing, now revealing some beam of

light from a window high aloft. After all, it is no great credit to

any of us to find the ugliness in New York. The ugliness is rather

obvious. To find the beauty is a worthier task, and might make us more

keen to cherish and to expand it. It is there for the seeing eye.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

_Spring in the Garden_

No daffodils "take the winds of March with beauty" in our Berkshire

gardens. What daffodils we have in that month of alternate slush and

blizzard bloom in pots, indoors. But one sign of spring the gardens

holds no less plain to read, even if some people may not regard it as

so poetic--over across the late snow, close to the hotbed frames, a

great pile of fresh stable manure is steaming like a miniature

volcano. To the true gardener, that sight is thrilling, nay, lyric! I

have always found that the measure of a man's (and more especially a

woman's) garden love was to be found in his (or her) attitude toward

the manure pile. For that reason I put the manure pile in the first

paragraph of my praise of gardens in the spring.

That yellowish-brown, steaming volcano above the slushy snow of March

promises so much! I will not offend sensitive garden owners who hire

others to do their dirty work, by singing the joy of turning it over

with a fork, once, twice, perhaps three times, till it is "working"

evenly all through. Yet there is such joy, accentuated on the second

day by the fact that the thermometer has taken a sudden jump upwards,

the snow is melting fast, and in the shrubs and evergreen hedge the

song-sparrows are singing, and the robins. Last year, I remember, I

paused with the steaming pile half turned, first to roll up my sleeves

and feel the warm sun on my arms--most delicious of early spring

sensations--and then to listen to the love-call of a chickadee, over

and over the three notes, one long and two short a whole tone lower. I

answered him, he replied, and we played our little game for two or

three minutes, till he came close and detected the fraud. Then a

bluebird flashed through the orchard, a jay screamed, as I bent to my

toil again. Beside me were the hotbed frames, the glasses newly

washed, the winter bedding of leaves removed, and behind them last

year's contents rotted into rich loam. Another day or two, and they

would be prepared for seeding--if I only could bring myself to work

hard enough until then!

How much hope goes into a hotbed in late March, or early April! How

much warmth the friendly manure down under the soil sends up by night

to germinate the seeds, though the weather go back to winter

outside--as it invariably does in our mountains! Last year, for

example, we had snow on the ninth of April, and again on the

twenty-third and twenty-ninth, while the year before, on the ninth,

six inches fell. In the lowland regions gardening is easier, perhaps,

but yet there is a certain joy in this fickle spring weather of

ours,--the joy of going out in the morning across a white garden and

sweeping the snow from hotbed mats, lifting the moist, steaming glass,

and catching from within, strong against your face, the pungent warmth

and aroma of the heated soil and the delicate fragrance of young

seedlings. How fast the seeds come--some of them! Others come so

slowly that the amateur gardener is in despair, and angrily decides to

try a new seed house next year. The vegetable frames are sown in

rows--celery, tomatoes, cauliflowers, lettuce, radishes, peppers,

coming up in tiny green ribbons, the radishes racing ahead. The flower

frames, however, are sown in squares, each about a foot across, and

each labeled and marked off with a thin strip of wood. These are the

early plantings of the annuals, for we cannot sow out-of-doors till

the first or even the second week in May in our climate. Sometimes,

indeed, we do not dare to sow even in the frames till well into April.

The asters are usually up first, racing the weeds. The little squares

make, in a week or so, a green checker-board, each promising its quota

of color to the garden, and very soon the early cosmos, thinned to the

strongest plants, has shot up like a miniature forest, towering over

the lowlier seedlings, sometimes bumping its head against the glass

before it can be transplanted to the open ground in May. But most

prolific, most promising, and most bothersome, are the squares labeled

"antirrhinum," coral red, salmon pink, white, dark maroon, and so on;

tiny seeds scattered on the ground and sprinkled with a little sand,

they come up by the hundred, and each seedling has to go into a pot

before it goes into the ground.

There is work for an April day! I sit on a board by the hotbed,

cross-legged like a Turk, while the sun is warm on my neck and I feel

my arms tanning, and removing a mass of the seedlings on a flat

mason's trowel, I lift each strong plant between thumb and finger, its

long, delicate white root dangling like a needle, and pot it in a

small paper pot. When two score pots are ready, I set them in a

cold-frame, sprinkle them, stretch the kink out of my back, listen to

the wood-thrush a moment (he came on the fourteenth and is evidently

planning to nest in our pines), and then return to my job. Patience is

required to pot four or five hundred snapdragons; but patience is

required, after all, in most things that are rightly performed. I

think as I work of the glory around my sundial in July, I arrange and

rearrange the colors in my mind--and presently the job is done.

But the steaming manure pile is not the only sign of spring, nor the

hotbeds the only things to be attended to. If they only were, how

much easier gardening would be--and how much less exciting! There is

always work to be done in the orchard, for instance, some pruning and

scraping. I always go into the orchard on the first really warm,

spring-like March day, with a common hoe, and scrape a little, not so

much for the good of the trees as for the good of my soul. The real

scraping for the scale spray was, of course, done earlier. There is a

curious, faintly putrid smell to old or bruised apple wood, which is

stirred by my scraping, and that smell sweeps over me a wave of

memories, memories of childhood in a great yellow house that stood

back from the road almost in its orchard, and boasted a cupola with

panes of colored glass which made the familiar landscape strange;

memories of youth in that same house, too, dim memories "of sweet,

forgotten, wistful things." My early spring afternoons in the orchard

are very precious to me now, and when the weather permits I always try

to burn the rubbish and dead prunings on Good Friday, the incense of

the apple wood floating across the brown garden like a prayer, the

precious ashes sinking down to enrich the soil.

The bees, too, are always a welcome sign of the returning season,

hardly less than the birds, though the advent of the white-throated

sparrow (who delayed till April twenty-first last year) is always a

great event. He is first heard most often before breakfast, in an

apple tree close to the sleeping-porch, his flute-like triplets

sweetly penetrating my dreams and bringing me gladly out of

bed--something he alone can do, by the way, and not even he after the

first morning! But the bees come long before. The earliest record I

have is March thirty-first, but there must be dates before that which

I have neglected to put down. Some house plant, a hyacinth possibly,

is used as bait, and when the ground is thawing out beneath a warm

spring sun we put the plant on the southern veranda and watch. Day

after day nothing happens, then suddenly, some noon, it has scarcely

been set on the ground when its blossoms stir, and it is murmurous

with bees. Then we know that spring indeed has come, and we begin to

rake the lawns, wherever the frost is out, wheeling great crate loads

of leaves and rubbish upon the garden, and filling our neighbors'

houses with pungent smoke.

There is a certain spot between the thumb and first finger which

neither axe nor golf-club nor saw handle seems to callous. The spring

raking finds it out, and gleefully starts to raise a blister. My hands

are perpetually those of a day-laborer, yet I expect that blister

every spring. Indeed, I am rather disappointed now if I don't get it,

I feel as if I weren't doing my share of work. The work is worth the

blister. I know of few sensations more delightful than that of seeing

the lawn emerging green and clean beneath your rake, the damp mould

baring itself under the shrubbery, the paths, freshly edged, nicely

scarrowed with tooth marks; then of feeling the tug of the barrow

handles in your shoulder sockets; and finally, as the sun is sending

long shadows over the ground, of standing beside the rubbish pile with

your rake as a poker and hearing the red flames crackle and roar

through the heap, while great puffs of beautiful brown smoke go

rolling away across the garden and the warmth is good to your tired

body. Clearing up is such a delight, indeed, that I cannot now

comprehend why I so intensely disliked to do it when I was half my

present age. Perhaps it was because at that time clearing up was put

to me in the light of a duty, not a pleasure.

There is alas, too often a tempering of sadness in the joy of taking

the covers off the garden. One removes them, especially after a cold

open winter, with much the same anxious excitement that one opens a

long-delayed letter from a dear friend who has been in danger. What

signs of life will the peonies show under their four inches of rotted

manure, and the Japanese irises by the pool, and the beds of Darwins,

so confidently relied upon to ring the sundial in late May and early

June, before the succeeding annuals are ready? How will the

hollyhocks, so stately in midsummer all down the garden wall, have

withstood the alternate thaws and freezes which characterized our

abominable January and February? Then there are those two long rows of

foxgloves and Canterbury bells, across the rear of the vegetable

garden, where they were set in the fall to make strong plants before

being put in their permanent places--or rather their season's places,

for these lovely flowers are perversely biennials, and at least seven

times every spring I vow I will never bother with them again, and then

make an even larger sowing when their stately stalks and sky-blue

bells are abloom in summer! Tenderly you lift the pine boughs from

them on a balmy April day (it was not until almost mid-April last

year), when snow still lingers, perhaps, in dirty patches on the north

side of the evergreens. Will they show frozen, flabby, withered

leaves, or will their centers be bright with new promise? It is a

moment to try the soul of the gardener, and no joy is quite like that

of finding them all alive, nor any sorrow like that of finding them

dead. At first I used to give up gardening forever when the perennials

and biennials were winter-killed, just as a beginner at golf gives up

the game forever each time he makes a vile score. Then I began to

compromise on a garden of annuals. Now I have learned philosophy--and

also better methods of winter protection. Likewise, I have learned

that a good many of the perennials which were stone-dead when the

covers were removed have a trick of coming to life under the kiss of

May, and struggling up to some sort of bloom, even if heroically

spindly like lean soldiers after a hard campaign. The hollyhocks,

especially, have a way of seeding themselves undetected, and

presenting you in spring with a whole unsuspected family of children,

some of whom wander far from the parent stem and suddenly begin to

shoot up in the most unexpected places. An exquisite yellow hollyhock

last summer sprouted unnoted beneath our dinning-room window, and we

were not aware of it till one July morning when it poked up above the

sill. A few days later, when we came down to breakfast, there it was

abloom, nodding in at the open window.

Another spring excitement in the garden is the pea planting, both the

sweet peas and what our country folk sometimes call "eatin' peas." No

rivalry is so keen as that between pea-growers. My neighbors and I

struggle for supremacy in sweet peas at the flower show in July, and

great glory goes to him who gets the first mess of green peas on his

table. We have tried sweet-pea sowing in the fall, and it does not

work. So now I prepare a trench in October, partially fill it with

manure, and cover it with leaves, which I remove at the first hint of

warm weather in March. The earth-piles on either side thaw out

quickly, and I get an early sowing, putting in as many varieties as I

can afford (my wife says twice as many as I can afford), jealously

guarding the secret of their number. The vegetable peas are planted

later, usually about the first or second day of April, as soon as the

top soil of the garden can be worked with a fork, and long before the

plowing. We put in first a row of Daniel O'Rourke's, not because they

are good for much, but because they will beat any other variety we

have discovered by two days at least. Then we put in a row of a better

standard early variety. How we watch those rows for the first sprouts!

How we coddle and cultivate them! How eagerly we inspect our

neighbors' rows, trying to appear nonchalant! And doubtless how silly

this sounds to anyone who is not a gardener. Last summer we got our

first mess of peas on June twenty-first, and after eating a spoonful,

we rushed to the telephone, and were about to ring, when somebody

called us. "Hello," we said into the transmitter. A voice on the other

end of the wire, curiously choked and munchy, cried, "We are eating

our first peas! My mouth's full of 'em now!"

"That's nothing," we answered, "we've got our first mouthful all

swallowed."

"Well, anyhow," said our disappointed neighbor, "I called up first!

Good-bye."

How is that for a neck-and-neck finish at the tape?

As April waxes into May, the garden beds are a perpetual adventure in

the expected, each morning bringing some new revelation of old friends

come back, and as you dig deep and prepare the beds for the annuals,

or spade manure around the perennials, or set your last year's

plantings of hollyhocks, larkspur, foxgloves and campanulas into their

places, you move tenderly amid the aspiring red stalks of the peonies,

the Jason's crop of green iris spears, the leaves of tulips and

narcissuses and daffodils, the fresh green of tiny sweet William

plants clustered 'round the mother plant like a brood of chicks around

the hen. You must be at setting them into borders, too, or putting the

surplus into flats and then telephoning your less fortunate friends.

One of the joys of a garden is in giving away your extra plants and

seedlings.

One morning the asparagus bed, already brown again after the April

showers have driven the salt into the ground, is pricked with short

tips. That is a luscious sight! Inch by inch they push up, and thick

and fast they come at last, and more and more and more. My diary shows

me that we ate our first bunch last year on May ninth. On that day,

also, I learn from the same source, the daffodils were out, the Darwin

tulips were budding, and we spent the afternoon burning caterpillars'

nests in the orchard--one spring crop which is never welcome, and

never winter-killed. At this date, too, we are hard at work spraying,

and sowing the annuals out-of-doors in the seed beds, and planting

corn (the potatoes are all in by now), immediately following the

plowing, which was delayed till the first of May by a belated

snowstorm. Winter with us is like a clumsy person who tries over and

over to make his exit from a room but does not know how to accomplish

it. It is a busy time, for no sooner are the annuals planted, and the

vegetables, than some of the seedlings from the hotbeds have to be set

out (such as early cosmos), and the perennial beds already have begun

to bloom, and require cultivation and admiration, and the flowers in

the wild garden--hepaticas and trilliums and bloodroot and

violets--are crying to be noticed, and, confound it all, here is the

lawn getting rank under the influence of its spring dressing, and

demands to be mowed! Yes, and we forget to get the mower sharpened

before we put it away in the fall.

"May fifteen"--it is my diary for last year--"apple blossoms showing

pink, and the rhubarb leaves peeping over the tops of their barrels

this morning, like Ali Baba and the forty thieves."

Well, well; straight, juicy red stalks the length of a barrel, fit for

a pie and the market! It is our second commercial product, the

asparagus slightly preceding it. The garden is getting into shape now,

indeed; the wheel-hoe is traveling up and down the green rows; the

hotbed glasses are entirely removed by day; and the early cauliflower

plants are put into the open ground at the first promise of a shower.

The annuals are up in the seed beds; the pool has been cleaned and

filled, the goldfish are once more swimming in it, the Cape Cod

water-lily, brought from its winter quarters in the dark cellar, has

begun to make a leaf, and we have begun to hope that maybe _this_ year

it will also make a blossom, for we are nothing in mid-May if not

optimistic.

The earlier Darwins are already in bloom. The German irises follow

rapidly. June comes, and we work amid the splendors of the Japanese

irises and the flame-line of Oriental poppies, setting the annuals

into their beds, from the tender, droopy schyzanthus plants to the

various asters and the now sturdy snapdragons. The color scheme had

been carefully planned last winter, and is as cheerfully disregarded

now, as some new inspiration strikes us, such as a border of purple

asters against salvia, with white dahlias behind--a strip of daring

fall color which would delight the soul of Gari Melcher, which

delighted me--and which my wife said was horrible.

So spring comes and goes in the garden, busy and beautiful, ceaseless

work and ceaseless wonder. But there is a moment in its passage, as

yet unmentioned, which I have kept for the close because to me it is

the subtle climax of the resurrection season. It usually comes in

April for us, though sometimes earlier. The time is evening, always

evening, just after supper, when a frail memory of sunset still

lingers in the west and the air is warm. I go out hatless upon the

veranda, thinking of other things, and suddenly I am aware of the song

of the frogs! There are laughing voices in the street, the tinkle of a

far-off piano, the pleasant sounds of village life come outdoors with

the return of spring; and buoying up, permeating these other sounds

comes the ceaseless, shrill chorus of the frogs, seemingly from out of

the air and distance, beating in waves on the ear. Why this first frog

chorus so thrills me I cannot explain, nor what dim memories it wakes.

But the peace of it steals over all my senses, and I walk down into

the dusk and seclusion of my garden, amid the sweet odors of new earth

and growing things, where the song comes up to me from the distant

meadow making the garden-close sweeter still, the air yet more warm

and fragrant, the promise of spring more magical. The garden then is

very intimate and dear, it brings me into closer touch with the

awakening earth about me, and all the years I dwelt a prisoner in

cities are but as the shadow of a dream.

[Illustration]

_The Bubble, Reputation_