“I work in Hildebrant’s saddle and harness shop down in Grant Street.
I’ve worked there five years. I get $18 a week. That’s enough to marry
on, ain’t it? Well, I’m not going to get married. Old Hildebrant is one
of these funny Dutchmen—you know the kind—always getting off bum jokes.
He’s got about a million riddles and things that he faked from Rogers
Brothers’ great-grandfather. Bill Watson works there, too. Me and Bill
have to stand for them chestnuts day after day. Why do we do it? Well,
jobs ain’t to be picked off every Anheuser bush— And then there’s
Laura.
“What? The old man’s daughter. Comes in the shop every day. About
nineteen, and the picture of the blonde that sits on the palisades of
the Rhine and charms the clam-diggers into the surf. Hair the color of
straw matting, and eyes as black and shiny as the best harness
blacking—think of that!
“Me? well, it’s either me or Bill Watson. She treats us both equal.
Bill is all to the psychopathic about her; and me?—well, you saw me
plating the roadbed of the Great Maroon Way with silver to-night. That
was on account of Laura. I was spiflicated, Your Highness, and I wot
not of what I wouldst.
“How? Why, old Hildebrandt says to me and Bill this afternoon: ‘Boys,
one riddle have I for you gehabt haben. A young man who cannot riddles
antworten, he is not so good by business for ein family to provide—is
not that—hein?’ And he hands us a riddle—a conundrum, some calls it—and
he chuckles interiorly and gives both of us till to-morrow morning to
work out the answer to it. And he says whichever of us guesses the
repartee end of it goes to his house o’ Wednesday night to his
daughter’s birthday party. And it means Laura for whichever of us goes,
for she’s naturally aching for a husband, and it’s either me or Bill
Watson, for old Hildebrant likes us both, and wants her to marry
somebody that’ll carry on the business after he’s stitched his last
pair of traces.
“The riddle? Why, it was this: ‘What kind of a hen lays the longest?
Think of that! What kind of a hen lays the longest? Ain’t it like a
Dutchman to risk a man’s happiness on a fool proposition like that?
Now, what’s the use? What I don’t know about hens would fill several
incubators. You say you’re giving imitations of the old Arab guy that
gave away—libraries in Bagdad. Well, now, can you whistle up a fairy
that’ll solve this hen query, or not?”
When the young man ceased the Margrave arose and paced to and fro by
the park bench for several minutes. Finally he sat again, and said, in
grave and impressive tones:
“I must confess, sir, that during the eight years that I have spent in
search of adventure and in relieving distress I have never encountered
a more interesting or a more perplexing case. I fear that I have
overlooked hens in my researches and observations. As to their habits,
their times and manner of laying, their many varieties and
cross-breedings, their span of life, their—”
“Oh, don’t make an Ibsen drama of it!” interrupted the young man,
flippantly. “Riddles—especially old Hildebrant’s riddles—don’t have to
be worked out seriously. They are light themes such as Sim Ford and
Harry Thurston Peck like to handle. But, somehow, I can’t strike just
the answer. Bill Watson may, and he may not. To-morrow will tell. Well,
Your Majesty, I’m glad anyhow that you butted in and whiled the time
away. I guess Mr. Al Rashid himself would have bounced back if one of
his constituents had conducted him up against this riddle. I’ll say
good night. Peace fo’ yours, and what-you-may-call-its of Allah.”
The Margrave, still with a gloomy air, held out his hand.
“I cannot express my regret,” he said, sadly. “Never before have I
found myself unable to assist in some way. ‘What kind of a hen lays the
longest? It is a baffling problem. There is a hen, I believe, called
the Plymouth Rock that—”
“Cut it out,” said the young man. “The Caliph trade is a mighty serious
one. I don’t suppose you’d even see anything funny in a preacher’s
defense of John D. Rockefeller. Well, good night, Your Nibs.”
From habit the Margrave began to fumble in his pockets. He drew forth a
card and handed it to the young man.
“Do me the favor to accept this, anyhow,” he said. “The time may come
when it might be of use to you.”
“Thanks!” said the young man, pocketing it carelessly. “My name is
Simmons.”
Shame to him who would hint that the reader’s interest shall altogether
pursue the Margrave August Michael von Paulsen Quigg. I am indeed
astray if my hand fail in keeping the way where my peruser’s heart
would follow. Then let us, on the morrow, peep quickly in at the door
of Hildebrant, harness maker.
Hildebrant’s 200 pounds reposed on a bench, silver-buckling a raw
leather martingale.
Bill Watson came in first.
“Vell,” said Hildebrant, shaking all over with the vile conceit of the
joke-maker, “haf you guessed him? ‘Vat kind of a hen lays der
longest?’”
“Er—why, I think so,” said Bill, rubbing a servile chin. “I think so,
Mr. Hildebrant—the one that lives the longest— Is that right?”
“Nein!” said Hildebrant, shaking his head violently. “You haf not
guessed der answer.”
Bill passed on and donned a bed-tick apron and bachelorhood.
In came the young man of the Arabian Night’s fiasco—pale, melancholy,
hopeless.
“Vell,” said Hildebrant, “haf you guessed him? ‘Vat kind of a hen lays
der longest?’”
Simmons regarded him with dull savagery in his eye. Should he curse
this mountain of pernicious humor—curse him and die? Why should— But
there was Laura.
Dogged, speechless, he thrust his hands into his coat pockets and
stood. His hand encountered the strange touch of the Margrave’s card.
He drew it out and looked at it, as men about to be hanged look at a
crawling fly. There was written on it in Quigg’s bold, round hand:
“Good for one roast chicken to bearer.”
Simmons looked up with a flashing eye.
“A dead one!” said he.
“Goot!” roared Hildebrant, rocking the table with giant glee. “Dot is
right! You gome at mine house at 8 o’clock to der party.”
XVI
COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON
There are no more Christmas stories to write. Fiction is exhausted; and
newspaper items, the next best, are manufactured by clever young
journalists who have married early and have an engagingly pessimistic
view of life. Therefore, for seasonable diversion, we are reduced to
very questionable sources—facts and philosophy. We will begin
with—whichever you choose to call it.
Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope
under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when childish
sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits’ end. We exhaust our
paltry store of consolation; and then beat them, sobbing, to sleep.
Then we grovel in the dust of a million years, and ask God why. Thus we
call out of the rat-trap. As for the children, no one understands them
except old maids, hunchbacks, and shepherd dogs.
Now comes the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the Tatterdemalion,
and the Twenty-fifth of December.
On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire lost her
rag-doll. There were many servants in the Millionaire’s palace on the
Hudson, and these ransacked the house and grounds, but without finding
the lost treasure. The child was a girl of five, and one of those
perverse little beasts that often wound the sensibilities of wealthy
parents by fixing their affections upon some vulgar, inexpensive toy
instead of upon diamond-studded automobiles and pony phaetons.
The Child grieved sorely and truly, a thing inexplicable to the
Millionaire, to whom the rag-doll market was about as interesting as
Bay State Gas; and to the Lady, the Child’s mother, who was all
form—that is, nearly all, as you shall see.
The Child cried inconsolably, and grew hollow-eyed, knock-kneed,
spindling, and corykilverty in many other respects. The Millionaire
smiled and tapped his coffers confidently. The pick of the output of
the French and German toymakers was rushed by special delivery to the
mansion; but Rachel refused to be comforted. She was weeping for her
rag child, and was for a high protective tariff against all foreign
foolishness. Then doctors with the finest bedside manners and
stop-watches were called in. One by one they chattered futilely about
peptomanganate of iron and sea voyages and hypophosphites until their
stop-watches showed that Bill Rendered was under the wire for show or
place. Then, as men, they advised that the rag-doll be found as soon as
possible and restored to its mourning parent. The Child sniffed at
therapeutics, chewed a thumb, and wailed for her Betsy. And all this
time cablegrams were coming from Santa Claus saying that he would soon
be here and enjoining us to show a true Christian spirit and let up on
the pool-rooms and tontine policies and platoon systems long enough to
give him a welcome. Everywhere the spirit of Christmas was diffusing
itself. The banks were refusing loans, the pawn-brokers had doubled
their gang of helpers, people bumped your shins on the streets with red
sleds, Thomas and Jeremiah bubbled before you on the bars while you
waited on one foot, holly-wreaths of hospitality were hung in windows
of the stores, they who had ’em were getting their furs. You hardly
knew which was the best bet in balls—three, high, moth, or snow. It was
no time at which to lose the rag-doll or your heart.
If Doctor Watson’s investigating friend had been called in to solve
this mysterious disappearance he might have observed on the
Millionaire’s wall a copy of “The Vampire.” That would have quickly
suggested, by induction, “A rag and a bone and a hank of hair.” “Flip,”
a Scotch terrier, next to the rag-doll in the Child’s heart, frisked
through the halls. The hank of hair! Aha! X, the unfound quantity,
represented the rag-doll. But, the bone? Well, when dogs find bones
they—Done! It were an easy and a fruitful task to examine Flip’s
forefeet. Look, Watson! Earth—dried earth between the toes. Of course,
the dog—but Sherlock was not there. Therefore it devolves. But
topography and architecture must intervene.
The Millionaire’s palace occupied a lordly space. In front of it was a
lawn close-mowed as a South Ireland man’s face two days after a shave.
At one side of it, and fronting on another street was a pleasaunce
trimmed to a leaf, and the garage and stables. The Scotch pup had
ravished the rag-doll from the nursery, dragged it to a corner of the
lawn, dug a hole, and buried it after the manner of careless
undertakers. There you have the mystery solved, and no checks to write
for the hypodermical wizard or fi’-pun notes to toss to the sergeant.
Then let’s get down to the heart of the thing, tiresome readers—the
Christmas heart of the thing.
Fuzzy was drunk—not riotously or helplessly or loquaciously, as you or
I might get, but decently, appropriately, and inoffensively, as becomes
a gentleman down on his luck.
Fuzzy was a soldier of misfortune. The road, the haystack, the park
bench, the kitchen door, the bitter round of eleemosynary
beds-with-shower-bath-attachment, the petty pickings and ignobly
garnered largesse of great cities—these formed the chapters of his
history.
Fuzzy walked toward the river, down the street that bounded one side of
the Millionaire’s house and grounds. He saw a leg of Betsy, the lost
rag-doll, protruding, like the clue to a Lilliputian murder mystery,
from its untimely grave in a corner of the fence. He dragged forth the
maltreated infant, tucked it under his arm, and went on his way
crooning a road song of his brethren that no doll that has been brought
up to the sheltered life should hear. Well for Betsy that she had no
ears. And well that she had no eyes save unseeing circles of black; for
the faces of Fuzzy and the Scotch terrier were those of brothers, and
the heart of no rag-doll could withstand twice to become the prey of
such fearsome monsters.
Though you may not know it, Grogan’s saloon stands near the river and
near the foot of the street down which Fuzzy traveled. In Grogan’s,
Christmas cheer was already rampant.
Fuzzy entered with his doll. He fancied that as a mummer at the feast
of Saturn he might earn a few drops from the wassail cup.
He set Betsy on the bar and addressed her loudly and humorously,
seasoning his speech with exaggerated compliments and endearments, as
one entertaining his lady friend. The loafers and bibbers around caught
the farce of it, and roared. The bartender gave Fuzzy a drink. Oh, many
of us carry rag-dolls.
“One for the lady?” suggested Fuzzy impudently, and tucked another
contribution to Art beneath his waistcoat.
He began to see possibilities in Betsy. His first-night had been a
success. Visions of a vaudeville circuit about town dawned upon him.
In a group near the stove sat “Pigeon” McCarthy, Black Riley, and
“One-ear” Mike, well and unfavorably known in the tough shoestring
district that blackened the left bank of the river. They passed a
newspaper back and forth among themselves. The item that each solid and
blunt forefinger pointed out was an advertisement headed “One Hundred
Dollars Reward.” To earn it one must return the rag-doll lost, strayed,
or stolen from the Millionaire’s mansion. It seemed that grief still
ravaged, unchecked, in the bosom of the too faithful Child. Flip, the
terrier, capered and shook his absurd whisker before her, powerless to
distract. She wailed for her Betsy in the faces of walking, talking,
mama-ing, and eye-closing French Mabelles and Violettes. The
advertisement was a last resort.
Black Riley came from behind the stove and approached Fuzzy in his
one-sided parabolic way.
The Christmas mummer, flushed with success, had tucked Betsy under his
arm, and was about to depart to the filling of impromptu dates
elsewhere.
“Say, ‘Bo,” said Black Riley to him, “where did you cop out dat doll?”
“This doll?” asked Fuzzy, touching Betsy with his forefinger to be sure
that she was the one referred to. Why, this doll was presented to me by
the Emperor of Beloochistan. I have seven hundred others in my country
home in Newport. This doll—”
“Cheese the funny business,” said Riley. “You swiped it or picked it up
at de house on de hill where—but never mind dat. You want to take fifty
cents for de rags, and take it quick. Me brother’s kid at home might be
wantin’ to play wid it. Hey—what?”
He produced the coin.
Fuzzy laughed a gurgling, insolent, alcoholic laugh in his face. Go to
the office of Sarah Bernhardt’s manager and propose to him that she be
released from a night’s performance to entertain the Tackytown Lyceum
and Literary Coterie. You will hear the duplicate of Fuzzy’s laugh.
Black Riley gauged Fuzzy quickly with his blueberry eye as a wrestler
does. His hand was itching to play the Roman and wrest the rag Sabine
from the extemporaneous merry-andrew who was entertaining an angel
unaware. But he refrained. Fuzzy was fat and solid and big. Three
inches of well-nourished corporeity, defended from the winter winds by
dingy linen, intervened between his vest and trousers. Countless small,
circular wrinkles running around his coat-sleeves and knees guaranteed
the quality of his bone and muscle. His small, blue eyes, bathed in the
moisture of altruism and wooziness, looked upon you kindly, yet without
abashment. He was whiskerly, whiskyly, fleshily formidable. So, Black
Riley temporized.
“Wot’ll you take for it, den?” he asked.
“Money,” said Fuzzy, with husky firmness, “cannot buy her.”
He was intoxicated with the artist’s first sweet cup of attainment. To
set a faded-blue, earth-stained rag-doll on a bar, to hold mimic
converse with it, and to find his heart leaping with the sense of
plaudits earned and his throat scorching with free libations poured in
his honor—could base coin buy him from such achievements? You will
perceive that Fuzzy had the temperament.
Fuzzy walked out with the gait of a trained sea-lion in search of other
cafés to conquer.
Though the dusk of twilight was hardly yet apparent, lights were
beginning to spangle the city like pop-corn bursting in a deep skillet.
Christmas Eve, impatiently expected, was peeping over the brink of the
hour. Millions had prepared for its celebration. Towns would be painted
red. You, yourself, have heard the horns and dodged the capers of the
Saturnalians.
“Pigeon” McCarthy, Black Riley, and “One-ear” Mike held a hasty
converse outside Grogan’s. They were narrow-chested, pallid striplings,
not fighters in the open, but more dangerous in their ways of warfare
than the most terrible of Turks. Fuzzy, in a pitched battle, could have
eaten the three of them. In a go-as-you-please encounter he was already
doomed.
They overtook him just as he and Betsy were entering Costigan’s Casino.
They deflected him, and shoved the newspaper under his nose. Fuzzy
could read—and more.
“Boys,” said he, “you are certainly damn true friends. Give me a week
to think it over.”
The soul of a real artist is quenched with difficulty.
The boys carefully pointed out to him that advertisements were
soulless, and that the deficiencies of the day might not be supplied by
the morrow.
“A cool hundred,” said Fuzzy thoughtfully and mushily.
“Boys,” said he, “you are true friends. I’ll go up and claim the
reward. The show business is not what it used to be.”
Night was falling more surely. The three tagged at his sides to the
foot of the rise on which stood the Millionaire’s house. There Fuzzy
turned upon them acrimoniously.
“You are a pack of putty-faced beagle-hounds,” he roared. “Go away.”
They went away—a little way.
In “Pigeon” McCarthy’s pocket was a section of one-inch gas-pipe eight
inches long. In one end of it and in the middle of it was a lead plug.
One-half of it was packed tight with solder. Black Riley carried a
slung-shot, being a conventional thug. “One-ear” Mike relied upon a
pair of brass knucks—an heirloom in the family.
“Why fetch and carry,” said Black Riley, “when some one will do it for
ye? Let him bring it out to us. Hey—what?”
“We can chuck him in the river,” said “Pigeon” McCarthy, “with a stone
tied to his feet.”
“Youse guys make me tired,” said “One-ear” Mike sadly. “Ain’t progress
ever appealed to none of yez? Sprinkle a little gasoline on ’im, and
drop ’im on the Drive—well?”
Fuzzy entered the Millionaire’s gate and zigzagged toward the softly
glowing entrance of the mansion. The three goblins came up to the gate
and lingered—one on each side of it, one beyond the roadway. They
fingered their cold metal and leather, confident.
Fuzzy rang the door-bell, smiling foolishly and dreamily. An atavistic
instinct prompted him to reach for the button of his right glove. But
he wore no gloves; so his left hand dropped, embarrassed.
The particular menial whose duty it was to open doors to silks and
laces shied at first sight of Fuzzy. But a second glance took in his
passport, his card of admission, his surety of welcome—the lost
rag-doll of the daughter of the house dangling under his arm.
Fuzzy was admitted into a great hall, dim with the glow from unseen
lights. The hireling went away and returned with a maid and the Child.
The doll was restored to the mourning one. She clasped her lost darling
to her breast; and then, with the inordinate selfishness and candor of
childhood, stamped her foot and whined hatred and fear of the odious
being who had rescued her from the depths of sorrow and despair. Fuzzy
wriggled himself into an ingratiatory attitude and essayed the idiotic
smile and blattering small talk that is supposed to charm the budding
intellect of the young. The Child bawled, and was dragged away, hugging
her Betsy close.
There came the Secretary, pale, poised, polished, gliding in pumps, and
worshipping pomp and ceremony. He counted out into Fuzzy’s hand ten
ten-dollar bills; then dropped his eye upon the door, transferred it to
James, its custodian, indicated the obnoxious earner of the reward with
the other, and allowed his pumps to waft him away to secretarial
regions.
James gathered Fuzzy with his own commanding optic and swept him as far
as the front door.
When the money touched fuzzy’s dingy palm his first instinct was to
take to his heels; but a second thought restrained him from that
blunder of etiquette. It was his; it had been given him. It—and, oh,
what an elysium it opened to the gaze of his mind’s eye! He had tumbled
to the foot of the ladder; he was hungry, homeless, friendless, ragged,
cold, drifting; and he held in his hand the key to a paradise of the
mud-honey that he craved. The fairy doll had waved a wand with her
rag-stuffed hand; and now wherever he might go the enchanted palaces
with shining foot-rests and magic red fluids in gleaming glassware
would be open to him.
He followed James to the door.
He paused there as the flunky drew open the great mahogany portal for
him to pass into the vestibule.
Beyond the wrought-iron gates in the dark highway Black Riley and his
two pals casually strolled, fingering under their coats the inevitably
fatal weapons that were to make the reward of the rag-doll theirs.
Fuzzy stopped at the Millionaire’s door and bethought himself. Like
little sprigs of mistletoe on a dead tree, certain living green
thoughts and memories began to decorate his confused mind. He was quite
drunk, mind you, and the present was beginning to fade. Those wreaths
and festoons of holly with their scarlet berries making the great hall
gay—where had he seen such things before? Somewhere he had known
polished floors and odors of fresh flowers in winter, and—and some one
was singing a song in the house that he thought he had heard before.
Some one singing and playing a harp. Of course, it was Christmas—Fuzzy
thought he must have been pretty drunk to have overlooked that.
And then he went out of the present, and there came back to him out of
some impossible, vanished, and irrevocable past a little, pure-white,
transient, forgotten ghost—the spirit of _noblesse oblige_. Upon a
gentleman certain things devolve.
James opened the outer door. A stream of light went down the graveled
walk to the iron gate. Black Riley, McCarthy, and “One-ear” Mike saw,
and carelessly drew their sinister cordon closer about the gate.
With a more imperious gesture than James’s master had ever used or
could ever use, Fuzzy compelled the menial to close the door. Upon a
gentleman certain things devolve. Especially at the Christmas season.
“It is cust—customary,” he said to James, the flustered, “when a
gentleman calls on Christmas Eve to pass the compliments of the season
with the lady of the house. You und’stand? I shall not move shtep till
I pass compl’ments season with lady the house. Und’stand?”
There was an argument. James lost. Fuzzy raised his voice and sent it
through the house unpleasantly. I did not say he was a gentleman. He
was simply a tramp being visited by a ghost.
A sterling silver bell rang. James went back to answer it, leaving
Fuzzy in the hall. James explained somewhere to some one.
Then he came and conducted Fuzzy into the library.
The lady entered a moment later. She was more beautiful and holy than
any picture that Fuzzy had seen. She smiled, and said something about a
doll. Fuzzy didn’t understand that; he remembered nothing about a doll.
A footman brought in two small glasses of sparkling wine on a stamped
sterling-silver waiter. The Lady took one. The other was handed to
Fuzzy.
As his fingers closed on the slender glass stem his disabilities
dropped from him for one brief moment. He straightened himself; and
Time, so disobliging to most of us, turned backward to accommodate
Fuzzy.
Forgotten Christmas ghosts whiter than the false beards of the most
opulent Kris Kringle were rising in the fumes of Grogan’s whisky. What
had the Millionaire’s mansion to do with a long, wainscoted Virginia
hall, where the riders were grouped around a silver punch-bowl,
drinking the ancient toast of the House? And why should the patter of
the cab horses’ hoofs on the frozen street be in any wise related to
the sound of the saddled hunters stamping under the shelter of the west
veranda? And what had Fuzzy to do with any of it?
The Lady, looking at him over her glass, let her condescending smile
fade away like a false dawn. Her eyes turned serious. She saw something
beneath the rags and Scotch terrier whiskers that she did not
understand. But it did not matter.
Fuzzy lifted his glass and smiled vacantly.
“P-pardon, lady,” he said, “but couldn’t leave without exchangin’
comp’ments sheason with lady th’ house. ’Gainst princ’ples gen’leman do
sho.”
And then he began the ancient salutation that was a tradition in the
House when men wore lace ruffles and powder.
“The blessings of another year—”
Fuzzy’s memory failed him. The Lady prompted:
“—Be upon this hearth.”
“—The guest—” stammered Fuzzy.
“—And upon her who—” continued the Lady, with a leading smile.
“Oh, cut it out,” said Fuzzy, ill-manneredly. “I can’t remember. Drink
hearty.”
Fuzzy had shot his arrow. They drank. The Lady smiled again the smile
of her caste. James enveloped and re-conducted him toward the front
door. The harp music still softly drifted through the house.
Outside, Black Riley breathed on his cold hands and hugged the gate.
“I wonder,” said the Lady to herself, musing, “who—but there were so
many who came. I wonder whether memory is a curse or a blessing to them
after they have fallen so low.”
Fuzzy and his escort were nearly at the door. The Lady called: “James!”
James stalked back obsequiously, leaving Fuzzy waiting unsteadily, with
his brief spark of the divine fire gone.
Outside, Black Riley stamped his cold feet and got a firmer grip on his
section of gas-pipe.
“You will conduct this gentleman,” said the lady, “Downstairs. Then
tell Louis to get out the Mercedes and take him to whatever place he
wishes to go.”
XVII
A NIGHT IN NEW ARABIA
The great city of Bagdad-on-the-Subway is caliph-ridden. Its palaces,
bazaars, khans, and byways are thronged with Al Rashids in divers
disguises, seeking diversion and victims for their unbridled
generosity. You can scarcely find a poor beggar whom they are willing
to let enjoy his spoils unsuccored, nor a wrecked unfortunate upon whom
they will not reshower the means of fresh misfortune. You will hardly
find anywhere a hungry one who has not had the opportunity to tighten
his belt in gift libraries, nor a poor pundit who has not blushed at
the holiday basket of celery-crowned turkey forced resoundingly through
his door by the eleemosynary press.
So then, fearfully through the Harun-haunted streets creep the one-eyed
calenders, the Little Hunchback and the Barber’s Sixth Brother, hoping
to escape the ministrations of the roving horde of caliphoid sultans.
Entertainment for many Arabian nights might be had from the histories
of those who have escaped the largesse of the army of Commanders of the
Faithful. Until dawn you might sit on the enchanted rug and listen to
such stories as are told of the powerful genie Roc-Ef-El-Er who sent
the Forty Thieves to soak up the oil plant of Ali Baba; of the good
Caliph Kar-Neg-Ghe, who gave away palaces; of the Seven Voyages of
Sailbad, the Sinner, who frequented wooden excursion steamers among the
islands; of the Fisherman and the Bottle; of the Barmecides’ Boarding
house; of Aladdin’s rise to wealth by means of his Wonderful Gas-meter.
But now, there being ten sultans to one Sheherazade, she is held too
valuable to be in fear of the bowstring. In consequence the art of
narrative languishes. And, as the lesser caliphs are hunting the happy
poor and the resigned unfortunate from cover to cover in order to heap
upon them strange mercies and mysterious benefits, too often comes the
report from Arabian headquarters that the captive refused “to talk.”
This reticence, then, in the actors who perform the sad comedies of
their philanthropy-scourged world, must, in a degree, account for the
shortcomings of this painfully gleaned tale, which shall be called