New Brooms

The Project Gutenberg eBook, New Brooms, by Robert J. (Robert James) Shores
NEW BROOMS
By ROBERT J. SHORES
INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS
Copyright 1913 The Bobbs-Merrill Company
PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS BROOKLYN, N. Y.
To the Editor of The Idler.
Dear Sir: Though I am not one of your subscribers I am, I believe, one of your most faithful readers. I do not take your magazine, it is true, but I am at present employed in a family some member of which is evidently a subscriber, as the maid brings it out in the waste-paper basket regularly, once a month, when, according to her custom, she permits me to select from the month’s periodicals such journals as seem to me to be worthy of my attention in my leisure hours. I shall not conceal from you the fact that my fancy was first attracted to your publication by the fact that I always found it fresh and clean, with the leaves still uncut, and not soiled, bedraggled and often coverless as are some of the others which suffer more usage before reaching me. But having once cut the leaves with a convenient bread-knife and looked through one of your numbers, I perceived at once that you are, in your way, something of a philosopher, and I have ever been partial to everything that smacked of philosophy. Could you step into my pantry at the present moment you would find upon my shelves Plato and Aristotle as well as the immortal Mrs. Rorer, for I am, in my humble fashion, a philosopher as well as a cook. I do not at all agree with that learned and talented French gentleman who declared that to study philosophy was to learn to die; on the contrary, I hold that to study philosophy is to learn to live, and I see no reason why the study of philosophy is not as fitting an occupation for a cook as for a collegian. Therefore I cook or philosophize according to my inclination, and if it seem to you that I philosophize like a cook, my employer, I am proud to say, will tell you that I cook like a philosopher.