Atlantic Classics

by Unknown

VI

This essay has rambled on an unconscionable while. The shades of editorial night are already descending; and still I have not yet described one of those unexpected and perfect orgies of chamber music,—one of those little earthly paradises full of

Soul-satisfying strains—alas! too few,—

which true fiddlers errant hope to find in each new place they visit, but which usually keep well in advance of them, like the foot of the rainbow.

One such adventure came to me not long ago in a California city, while I was gathering material for a book of travel. On my first evening there I was taken to dine with a well-known writer in his beautiful home, which he had built with his own two hands in the Spanish mission style during fourteen years of joyous labor. This gentleman had no idea that I was to be thrust upon him. But his hospitality went so far as to insist, before the evening was over, that I must stay a week. He would not take no for an answer. And for my part I had no desire to say no, because he was a delightful person, his home with its leaf-filled patio was most alluring, and I had discovered promising possibilities for fiddlers errant in the splendid music-room and the collection of phonograph records of Indian music which mine host had himself made in Arizona and New Mexico. Then too there were rumors of skillful musical vagabonds in the vicinity.

Such an environment fairly cried aloud for impromptu fiddling. So, armed with a note to the best violinist in that part of California, I set forth next morning on the trail of the ideal orgy. At the address given I was told that my man had moved and his address was not known. That was a setback, indeed! But determined fiddlers errant usually land on their feet. On the way back I chanced to hear some masterly strains of Bach-on-the-violin issuing from a brown bungalow. And ringing at a venture I was confronted by the very man I sought.

Blocking the doorway, he read the note, looking as bored as professionals usually do when asked to play with amateurs. But just as he began to tell me how busy he was and how impossible, and so forth, he happened to glance again at the envelope, and a very slight gleam came into his eye.

'You're not by any chance the fellow who wrote that thing about fiddlers in the Atlantic, are you?' he inquired. At my nod he very flatteringly unblocked the doorway and dragged me inside, pumping my hand up and down in a painful manner, shouting for his wife, and making various kind representations, all at the same time. And his talk gradually simmered down into an argument that of course the only thing to do was to fiddle together that very night.

I asked who had the best 'cello in town. He told me the man's name, but looked dubious. 'The trouble is, he loves that big Amati as if it were twins. I doubt if he could bring himself to lend it to any one. Anyway, let's try.'

He scribbled a card to his 'cellist friend and promised, if I were successful, to bring along a good pianist and play trios in the evening. So I set forth on the trail of the Amati. Its owner had just finished his noonday stint in a hotel orchestra and looked somewhat tired and cross. He glanced at the card and then assumed a most conservative expression and tried to fob off on me a cheap 'cello belonging to one of his pupils, which sounded very much as a three-cent cigar tastes. At this point I gave him the secret thumb-position grip and whispered into his ear one of those magic pass words of the craft which in a trice convinced him that I was in a position to dandle a 'cello with as tender solicitude as any man alive. On my promising, moreover, to taxicab it both ways with the sacred burden, he passed the Amati over, and the orgy of fiddlers errant was assured.

And that night how those beautiful Spanish walls did resound to Beethoven and Dvořák and Brahms, most originally interspersed with the voice of the Mexican servant's guitar, with strange, lovely songs of the aboriginal West and South,—and with the bottled sunshine of Californian hill-slopes; while El Alcalde Maiore, the lone gnarled tree-giant that filled the patio, looked in through the open windows and contributed, by way of accompaniment, leafy arpeggios sotto voce. And sometimes, during rests, I remembered to be thankful that I had once snapped my fingers at the howling wolf, and at fat pot-boilers, while I scribbled for the Atlantic that little essay on fiddlers which had gained me this priceless evening.

Turtle Eggs for Agassiz
By Dallas Lore Sharp

IT is one of the wonders of the world that so few books are written. With every human being a possible book, and with many a human being capable of becoming more books than the world could contain, is it not amazing that the books of men are so few? and so stupid!

I took down, recently, from the shelves of a great public library, the four volumes of Agassiz's Contributions to the Natural History of the United States. I doubt if anybody but the charwoman, with her duster, had touched those volumes for twenty-five years. They are an excessively learned, a monumental, an epoch-making work, the fruit of vast and heroic labors, with colored plates on stone, showing the turtles of the United States, and their embryology. The work was published more than half a century ago (by subscription); but it looked old beyond its years—massive, heavy, weathered, as if dug from the rocks. It was difficult to feel that Agassiz could have written it—could have built it, grown it, for the laminated pile had required for its growth, the patience and painstaking care of a process of nature, as if it were a kind of printed coral reef. Agassiz do this? The big, human, magnetic man at work upon these pages of capital letters, Roman figures, brackets, and parentheses in explanation of the pages of diagrams and plates! I turned away with a sigh from the weary learning, to read the preface.

When a great man writes a great book he usually flings a preface after it, and thereby saves it, sometimes, from oblivion. Whether so or not, the best things in most books are their prefaces. It was not, however, the quality of the preface to these great volumes that interested me, but rather the wicked waste of durable book-material that went to its making. Reading down through the catalogue of human names and of thanks for help received, I came to a sentence beginning:—

'In New England I have myself collected largely; but I have also received valuable contributions from the late Rev. Zadoc Thompson of Burlington; ... from Mr. D. Henry Thoreau of Concord; ... and from Mr. J. W. P. Jenks of Middleboro'.' And then it hastens on with the thanks in order to get to the turtles, as if turtles were the one and only thing of real importance in all the world.

Turtles no doubt are important, extremely important, embryologically, as part of our genealogical tree; but they are away down among the roots of the tree as compared with the late Rev. Zadoc Thompson of Burlington. I happen to know nothing about the Rev. Zadoc, but to me he looks very interesting. Indeed any reverend gentleman of his name and day who would catch turtles for Agassiz must have been interesting. And as for Henry Thoreau, we know he was interesting. The rarest wood-turtle in the United States was not so rare a specimen as this gentleman of Walden Woods and Concord. We are glad even for this line in the preface about him; glad to know that he tried, in this untranscendental way, to serve his day and generation. If Agassiz had only put a chapter in his turtle book about it! But this is the material he wasted, this and more of the same human sort, for the Mr. Jenks of Middleboro' (at the end of the quotation) was, years later, an old college professor of mine, who told me some of the particulars of his turtle contributions, particulars which Agassiz should have found a place for in his big book. The preface says merely that this gentleman sent turtles to Cambridge by the thousands—brief and scanty recognition. For that is not the only thing this gentleman did. On one occasion he sent, not turtles, but turtle eggs to Cambridge—brought them, I should say; and all there is to show for it, so far as I could discover, is a sectional drawing of a bit of the mesoblastic layer of one of the eggs!

Of course, Agassiz wanted to make that mesoblastic drawing, or some other equally important drawing, and had to have the fresh turtle egg to draw it from. He had to have it, and he got it. A great man, when he wants a certain turtle egg, at a certain time, always gets it, for he gets someone else to get it. I am glad he got it. But what makes me sad and impatient is that he did not think it worth while to tell about the getting of it, and so made merely a learned turtle book of what might have been an exceedingly interesting human book.

It would seem, naturally, that there could be nothing unusual or interesting about the getting of turtle eggs when you want them. Nothing at all, if you should chance to want the eggs as you chance to find them. So with anything else,—good copper stock, for instance, if you should chance to want it, and should chance to be along when they chance to be giving it away. But if you want copper stock, say of C & H quality, when you want it, and are bound to have it, then you must command more than a college professor's salary. And likewise, precisely, when it is turtle eggs that you are bound to have.

Agassiz wanted those turtle eggs when he wanted them—not a minute over three hours from the minute they were laid. Yet even that does not seem exacting, hardly more difficult than the getting of hen eggs only three hours old. Just so, provided the professor could have had his private turtle-coop in Harvard Yard; and provided he could have made his turtles lay. But turtles will not respond, like hens, to meat-scraps and the warm mash. The professor's problem was not to get from a mud turtle's nest in the back yard to the table in the laboratory; but to get from the laboratory in Cambridge to some pond when the turtles were laying, and back to the laboratory within the limited time. And this, in the days of Darius Green, might have called for nice and discriminating work—as it did.

Agassiz had been engaged for a long time upon his Contributions. He had brought the great work nearly to a finish. It was, indeed, finished but for one small yet very important bit of observation: he had carried the turtle egg through every stage of its development with the single exception of one—the very earliest—that stage of first cleavages, when the cell begins to segment, immediately upon its being laid. That beginning stage had brought the Contributions to a halt. To get eggs that were fresh enough to show the incubation at this period had been impossible.

There were several ways that Agassiz might have proceeded: he might have got a leave of absence for the spring term, taken his laboratory to some pond inhabited by turtles, and there camped until he should catch the reptile digging out her nest. But there were difficulties in all of that—as those who are college professors and naturalists know. As this was quite out of the question, he did the easiest thing—asked Mr. Jenks of Middleboro' to get him the eggs. Mr. Jenks got them. Agassiz knew all about his getting of them; and I say the strange and irritating thing is, that Agassiz did not think it worth while to tell us about it, at least in the preface to his monumental work.

It was many years later that Mr. Jenks, then a gray-haired college professor, told me how he got those eggs to Agassiz.

'I was principal of an academy, during my younger years,' he began, 'and was busy one day with my classes, when a large man suddenly filled the door-way of the room, smiled to the four corners of the room, and called out with a big, quick voice that he was Professor Agassiz.

'Of course he was. I knew it, even before he had had time to shout it to me across the room.

'Would I get him some turtle eggs? he called. Yes, I would. And would I get them to Cambridge within three hours from the time they were laid? Yes, I would. And I did. And it was worth the doing. But I did it only once.

'When I promised Agassiz those eggs I knew where I was going to get them. I had got turtle eggs there before—at a particular patch of sandy shore along a pond, a few miles distant from the academy.

'Three hours was the limit. From the railroad station to Boston was thirty-five miles; from the pond to the station was perhaps three or four miles; from Boston to Cambridge we called about three miles. Forty miles in round numbers! We figured it all out before he returned, and got the trip down to two hours,—record time:—driving from the pond to the station; from the station by express train to Boston; from Boston by cab to Cambridge. This left an easy hour for accidents and delays.

'Cab and car and carriage we reckoned into our time-table; but what we didn't figure on was the turtle.' And he paused abruptly.

'Young man,' he went on, his shaggy brows and spectacles hardly hiding the twinkle in the eyes that were bent severely upon me, 'young man, when you go after turtle eggs, take into account the turtle. No! no! that's bad advice. Youth never reckons on the turtle—and youth seldom ought to. Only old age does that; and old age would never have got those turtle eggs to Agassiz.

'It was in the early spring that Agassiz came to the academy, long before there was any likelihood of the turtles laying. But I was eager for the quest, and so fearful of failure, that I started out to watch at the pond, fully two weeks ahead of the time that the turtles might be expected to lay. I remember the date clearly: it was May 14.

'A little before dawn—along near three o'clock—I would drive over to the pond, hitch my horse near by, settle myself quietly among some thick cedars close to the sandy shore, and there I would wait, my kettle of sand ready, my eye covering the whole sleeping pond. Here among the cedars I would eat my breakfast, and then get back in good season to open the academy for the morning session.

'And so the watch began.

'I soon came to know individually the dozen or more turtles that kept to my side of the pond. Shortly after the cold mist would lift and melt away, they would stick up their heads through the quiet water; and as the sun slanted down over the ragged rim of tree-tops, the slow things would float into the warm, lighted spots, or crawl out and doze comfortably on the hummocks and snags.

'What fragrant mornings those were! How fresh and new and unbreathed! The pond odors, the woods odors, the odors of the ploughed fields—of water-lily, and wild grape, and the dew-laid soil! I can taste them yet, and hear them yet—the still, large sounds of the waking day—the pickerel breaking the quiet with his swirl; the kingfisher dropping anchor; the stir of feet and wings among the trees. And then the thought of the great book being held up for me! Those were rare mornings!

'But there began to be a good many of them, for the turtles showed no desire to lay. They sprawled in the sun, and never one came out upon the sand as if she intended to help on the great professor's book. The embryology of her eggs was of small concern to her; her contribution to the Natural History of the United States could wait.

'And it did wait. I began my watch on the 14th of May; June first found me still among the cedars, still waiting, as I had waited every morning, Sundays and rainy days alike. June first was a perfect morning, but every turtle slid out upon her log, as if egg-laying might be a matter strictly of next year.

'I began to grow uneasy,—not impatient yet, for a naturalist learns his lesson of patience early, and for all his years; but I began to fear lest, by some subtile sense, my presence might somehow be known to the creatures; that they might have gone to some other place to lay, while I was away at the school-room.

'I watched on to the end of the first week, on to the end of the second week in June, seeing the mists rise and vanish every morning, and along with them vanish, more and more, the poetry of my early morning vigil. Poetry and rheumatism cannot long dwell together in the same clump of cedars, and I had begun to feel the rheumatism. A month of morning mists wrapping me around had at last soaked through to my bones. But Agassiz was waiting, and the world was waiting, for those turtle eggs; and I would wait. It was all I could do, for there is no use bringing a china nest-egg to a turtle; she is not open to any such delicate suggestion.

'Then came a mid-June Sunday morning, with dawn breaking a little after three: a warm, wide-awake dawn, with the level mist lifted from the level surface of the pond a full hour higher than I had seen it any morning before.

'This was the day: I knew it. I have heard persons say that they can hear the grass grow; that they know by some extra sense when danger is nigh. That we have these extra senses I fully believe, and I believe they can be sharpened by cultivation. For a month I had been watching, brooding over this pond, and now I knew. I felt a stirring of the pulse of things that the cold-hearted turtles could no more escape than could the clods and I.

'Leaving my horse unhitched, as if he, too, understood, I slipped eagerly into my covert for a look at the pond. As I did so, a large pickerel ploughed a furrow out through the spatter-docks, and in his wake rose the head of an enormous turtle. Swinging slowly around, the creature headed straight for the shore, and without a pause, scrambled out on the sand.

'She was about the size of a big scoop-shovel; but that was not what excited me, so much as her manner, and the gait at which she moved; for there was method in it and fixed purpose. On she came, shuffling over the sand toward the higher open fields, with a hurried, determined see-saw that was taking her somewhere in particular, and that was bound to get her there on time.

'I held my breath. Had she been a dinosaurian making Mesozoic footprints, I could not have been more fearful. For footprints in the Mesozoic mud, or in the sands of time, were as nothing to me when compared with fresh turtle eggs in the sands of this pond.

'But over the strip of sand, without a stop, she paddled, and up a narrow cow-path into the high grass along a fence. Then up the narrow cow-path, on all fours, just like another turtle, I paddled, and into the high, wet grass along the fence.

'I kept well within sound of her, for she moved recklessly, leaving a trail of flattened grass a foot and a half wide. I wanted to stand up,—and I don't believe I could have turned her back with a rail,—but I was afraid if she saw me that she might return indefinitely to the pond; so on I went, flat to the ground, squeezing through the lower rails of the fence, as if the field beyond were a melon-patch. It was nothing of the kind, only a wild, uncomfortable pasture, full of dewberry vines, and very discouraging. They were excessively wet vines and briery. I pulled my coat-sleeves as far over my fists as I could get them, and with the tin pail of sand swinging from between my teeth to avoid noise, I stumped fiercely, but silently, on after the turtle.

'She was laying her course, I thought, straight down the length of this dreadful pasture, when, not far from the fence, she suddenly hove to, warped herself short about, and came back, barely clearing me, at a clip that was thrilling. I warped about, too, and in her wake bore down across the corner of the pasture, across the powdery public road, and on to a fence along a field of young corn.

'I was somewhat wet by this time, but not so wet as I had been before, wallowing through the deep, dry dust of the road. Hurrying up behind a large tree by the fence, I peered down the corn-rows and saw the turtle stop, and begin to paw about in the loose, soft soil. She was going to lay!

'I held on to the tree and watched, as she tried this place, and that place, and the other place—the eternally feminine!—But the place, evidently, was hard to find. What could a female turtle do with a whole field of possible nests to choose from? Then at last she found it, and whirling about, she backed quickly at it, and, tail first, began to bury herself before my staring eyes.

'Those were not the supreme moments of my life; perhaps those moments came later that day; but those certainly were among the slowest, most dreadfully mixed of moments that I ever experienced. They were hours long. There she was, her shell just showing, like some old hulk in the sand alongshore. And how long would she stay there? and how should I know if she had laid an egg?

'I could still wait. And so I waited, when, over the freshly awakened fields, floated four mellow strokes from the distant town clock.

'Four o'clock! Why, there was no train until seven! No train for three hours! The eggs would spoil! Then with a rush it came over me that this was Sunday morning, and there was no regular seven o'clock train,—none till after nine.

'I think I should have fainted had not the turtle just then begun crawling off. I was weak and dizzy; but there, there in the sand, were the eggs! and Agassiz! and the great book! And I cleared the fence, and the forty miles that lay between me and Cambridge, at a single jump. He should have them, trains or no. Those eggs should go to Agassiz by seven o'clock, if I had to gallop every mile of the way. Forty miles! Any horse could cover it in three hours, if he had to; and upsetting the astonished turtle, I scooped out her round, white eggs.

'On a bed of sand in the bottom of the pail I laid them, with what care my trembling fingers allowed; filled in between them with more sand; so with another layer to the rim; and covering all smoothly with more sand, I ran back for my horse.

'That horse knew, as well as I, that the turtles had laid, and that he was to get those eggs to Agassiz. He turned out of that field into the road on two wheels, a thing he had not done for twenty years, doubling me up before the dashboard, the pail of eggs miraculously lodged between my knees.

'I let him out. If only he could keep this pace all the way to Cambridge! or even half way there; and I would have time to finish the trip on foot. I shouted him on, holding to the dasher with one hand, the pail of eggs with the other, not daring to get off my knees, though the bang on them, as we pounded down the wood road, was terrific. But nothing must happen to the eggs; they must not be jarred, or even turned over in the sand before they came to Agassiz.

'In order to get out on the pike it was necessary to drive back away from Boston toward the town. We had nearly covered the distance, and were rounding a turn from the woods into the open fields, when, ahead of me, at the station it seemed, I heard the quick sharp whistle of a locomotive.

'What did it mean? Then followed the puff, puff, puff, of a starting train. But what train? Which way going? And jumping to my feet for a longer view, I pulled into a side road, that paralleled the track, and headed hard for the station.

'We reeled along. The station was still out of sight, but from behind the bushes that shut it from view, rose the smoke of a moving engine. It was perhaps a mile away, but we were approaching, head on, and topping a little hill I swept down upon a freight train, the black smoke pouring from the stack, as the mighty creature pulled itself together for its swift run down the rails.

'My horse was on the gallop, going with the track, and straight toward the coming train. The sight of it almost maddened me—the bare thought of it, on the road to Boston! On I went; on it came, a half—a quarter of a mile between us, when suddenly my road shot out along an unfenced field with only a level stretch of sod between me and the engine.

'With a pull that lifted the horse from his feet, I swung him into the field and sent him straight as an arrow for the track. That train should carry me and my eggs to Boston!

'The engineer pulled the rope. He saw me standing up in the rig, saw my hat blow off, saw me wave my arms, saw the tin pail swing in my teeth, and he jerked out a succession of sharp halts! But it was he who should halt, not I; and on we went, the horse with a flounder landing the carriage on top of the track.

'The train was already grinding to a stop; but before it was near a standstill, I had backed off the track, jumped out, and, running down the rails with the astonished engineers gaping at me, had swung aboard the cab.

'They offered no resistance; they hadn't had time. Nor did they have the disposition, for I looked strange, not to say dangerous. Hatless, dew-soaked, smeared with yellow mud, and holding, as if it were a baby or a bomb, a little tin pail of sand.

"'Crazy," the fireman muttered, looking to the engineer for his cue.

'I had been crazy, perhaps, but I was not crazy now.

'"Throw her wide open," I commanded. "Wide open! These are fresh turtle eggs for Professor Agassiz of Cambridge. He must have them before breakfast."

'Then they knew I was crazy, and evidently thinking it best to humor me, threw the throttle wide open, and away we went.

'I kissed my hand to the horse, grazing unconcernedly in the open field, and gave a smile to my crew. That was all I could give them, and hold myself and the eggs together. But the smile was enough. And they smiled through their smut at me, though one of them held fast to his shovel, while the other kept his hand upon a big, ugly wrench. Neither of them spoke to me, but above the roar of the swaying engine I caught enough of their broken talk to understand that they were driving under a full head of steam, with the intention of handing me over to the Boston police, as perhaps the easiest way of disposing of me.

'I was only afraid that they would try it at the next station. But that station whizzed past without a bit of slack, and the next, and the next; when it came over me that this was the through freight, which should have passed in the night, and was making up lost time.

'Only the fear of the shovel and the wrench kept me from shaking hands with both men at this discovery. But I beamed at them; and they at me. I was enjoying it. The unwonted jar beneath my feet was wrinkling my diaphragm with spasms of delight. And the fireman beamed at the engineer, with a look that said, "See the lunatic grin; he likes it!"

'He did like it. How the iron wheels sang to me as they took the rails! How the rushing wind in my ears sang to me! From my stand on the fireman's side of the cab I could catch a glimpse of the track just ahead of the engine, where the ties seemed to leap into the throat of the mile-devouring monster. The joy of it! of seeing space swallowed by the mile!

'I shifted the eggs from hand to hand and thought of my horse, of Agassiz, of the great book, of my great luck,—luck,—luck,—until the multitudinous tongues of the thundering train were all chiming "luck! luck! luck!" They knew! they understood! This beast of fire and tireless wheels was doing its very best to get the eggs to Agassiz!

'We swung out past the Blue Hills, and yonder flashed the morning sun from the towering dome of the State House. I might have leaped from the cab and run the rest of the way on foot, had I not caught the eye of the engineer watching me narrowly. I was not in Boston yet, nor in Cambridge either. I was an escaped lunatic, who had held up a train, and forced it to carry me to Boston.

'Perhaps I had overdone the lunacy business. Suppose these two men should take it into their heads to turn me over to the police, whether I would or no? I could never explain the case in time to get the eggs to Agassiz. I looked at my watch. There were still a few minutes left, in which I might explain to these men, who, all at once, had become my captors. But it was too late. Nothing could avail against my actions, my appearance, and my little pail of sand.

'I had not thought of my appearance before. Here I was, face and clothes caked with yellow mud, my hair wild and matted, my hat gone, and in my full-grown hands a tiny tin pail of sand, as if I had been digging all night with a tiny, tin shovel on the shore! And thus to appear in the decent streets of Boston of a Sunday morning!

'I began to feel like a hunted criminal. The situation was serious, or might be, and rather desperately funny at its best. I must in some way have shown my new fears, for both men watched me more sharply.

'Suddenly, as we were nearing the outer freightyard, the train slowed down and came to a stop. I was ready to jump, but I had no chance. They had nothing to do, apparently, but to guard me. I looked at my watch again. What time we had made! It was only six o'clock, with a whole hour to get to Cambridge.

'But I didn't like this delay. Five minutes—ten—went by.

"'Gentlemen," I began, but was cut short by an express train coming past. We were moving again, on—into a siding; on—on to the main track; and on with a bump and a crash and a succession of crashes, running the length of the train; on at a turtle's pace, but on,—when the fireman, quickly jumping for the bell-rope, left the way to the step free, and—the chance had come!

'I never touched the step, but landed in the soft sand at the side of the track, and made a line for the yard fence.

'There was no hue or cry. I glanced over my shoulder to see if they were after me. Evidently their hands were full, and they didn't know I had gone.

'But I had gone; and was ready to drop over the high board-fence, when it occurred to me that I might drop into a policeman's arms. Hanging my pail in a splint on top of a post, I peered cautiously over—a very wise thing to do before you jump a high board-fence. There, crossing the open square toward the station, was a big, burly fellow with a club—looking for me.

'I flattened for a moment, when some one in the yard yelled at me. I preferred the policeman, and grabbing my pail I slid over to the street. The policeman moved on past the corner of the station out of sight. The square was free, and yonder stood a cab!

'Time was flying now. Here was the last lap. The cabman saw me coming, and squared away. I waved a paper dollar at him, but he only stared the more. A dollar can cover a good deal, but I was too much for one dollar. I pulled out another, thrust them both at him, and dodged into the cab, calling, "Cambridge!"

'He would have taken me straight to the police station, had I not said, "Harvard College. Professor Agassiz's house! I've got eggs for Agassiz"; and pushed another dollar up at him through the hole.

'It was nearly half-past six.

'"Let him go!" I ordered. "Here's another dollar if you make Agassiz's house in twenty minutes. Let him out; never mind the police!"

'He evidently knew the police, or there were none around at that time on a Sunday morning. We went down the sleeping streets, as I had gone down the wood roads from the pond two hours before, but with the rattle and crash now of a fire brigade. Whirling a corner into Cambridge Street, we took the bridge at a gallop, the driver shouting out something in Hibernian to a pair of waving arms and a belt and brass buttons.

'Across the bridge with a rattle and jolt that put the eggs in jeopardy, and on over the cobble-stones, we went. Half standing, to lessen the jar, I held the pail in one hand and held myself in the other, not daring to let go even to look at my watch.

'But I was afraid to look at the watch. I was afraid to see how near to seven o'clock it might be. The sweat was dropping from my nose, so close was I running to the limit of my time.

'Suddenly there was a lurch, and I dove forward, ramming my head into the front of the cab, coming up with a rebound that landed me across the small of my back on the seat, and sent half of my pail of eggs helter-skelter over the floor.

'We had stopped. Here was Agassiz's house; and without taking time to pick up the scattered eggs, I tumbled out, and pounded at the door.

'No one was astir in the house. But I would stir them. And I did. Right in the midst of the racket the door opened. It was the maid.

'"Agassiz," I gasped, "I want Professor Agassiz, quick!" And I pushed by her into the hall.

'"Go 'way, sir. I'll call the police. Professor Agassiz is in bed. Go 'way, sir!"

'"Call him—Agassiz—instantly, or I'll call him myself."

'But I didn't; for just then a door overhead was flung open, a great, white-robed figure appeared on the dim landing above, and a quick, loud voice called excitedly,—

'"Let him in! Let him in. I know him. He has my turtle eggs!"

'And the apparition, slipperless, and clad in anything but an academic gown, came sailing down the stairs.

'The maid fled. The great man, his arms extended, laid hold of me with both hands, and dragging me and my precious pail into his study, with a swift, clean stroke laid open one of the eggs, as the watch in my trembling hands ticked its way to seven—as if nothing unusual were happening to the history of the world.'

'You were in time then?' I said.

'To the tick. There stands my copy of the great book. I am proud of the humble part I had in it.'

A Father to his Freshman Son
By Edward Sanford Martin

NO doubt, my son, you have got out of me already what there was to help or mar you. You are eighteen years old and have been getting it, more or less and off and on, for at least seventeen of those years. I regret the imperfections of the source. No doubt you have recognized them. To have a father who is attentive to the world, indulgent to the flesh, and with a sort of kindness for the Devil—dear son, it is a good deal of a handicap! Be sure I make allowances for you because of it. Ex eo fonte—fons, masculine, as I remember; fons and mons and pons, and one other. Should the pronoun be illo? As you know, I never was an accurate scholar, and I suppose you're not—Ex eo fonte the stream is bound to run not quite clear.

My advice to you is quite likely to be bad, partly from the imperfection of its source, partly because I am not you, and partly because of my imperfect acquaintance with the conditions you are about to meet. When I came to college my father gave me no advice. He gave me his love and some necessary money, which did not come, I fear, as easy as the love. His venerable uncle who lived with us—my great uncle—gave me his blessing and told me, I remember, that so far as book-learning went, I could learn as much without going to college. Still he did not discourage my going. He was quite right. I could have got more book-learning out of college than I did get in college, and I suppose that you, too, might get, out, more than you will get, in. Of course, that's not the whole story; neither is it true of all people. For me, college abounded in distractions, and I suppose it will for you. And I was incorrigibly sociable and ready to spend time to get acquainted, and more, to stay acquainted, and if you have that propensity you needn't think it was left on the doorstep. You come by it lawfully. Getting acquainted is, for most of us, one of the important branches. But it's only one of them, and to devote one's whole time to it is a mistake, and one that the dean will help you avoid if necessary, which probably, if I know you at all, it won't be.

It is important to know people, but it is more important to be worth knowing. College offers you at least two valuable details of opportunity: a large variety of people to know, and a large variety of means to make yourself better worth knowing. I hope, my son, that you will avail yourself of both these details.

This is a mechanical age, and the most obtrusive of the current mechanisms is the automobile. It has valves and cylinders and those things that give it power and speed, and rubber tires that it runs on, and a wheel and steering-gear and handles and treadles by which it is directed. Your body, especially your stomach, is the rubber tires; your brains are the cylinders and valves; and your will and the spiritual part of you are the chauffeur and his wheel.

I beg you to be kind to your stomach, as heretofore. It needs no alcohol at your time of life—if ever—and the less you find occasion to feed into it, the more prosperous both your physical and mental conditions are likely to be. I am aware that life, and college life in particular, has its convivial intervals; but you might as well understand (and I have been remiss, or have wasted time, if you do not understand it already) that alcohol is one of the chief man-traps, abounding in mischiefs if you play with it too hard. Be wary, always wary, with it, my son, and especially with hard liquor.

Your mind, like your body, is a thing whereof the powers are developed by effort. That is a principal use, as I see it, of hard work in studies. Unless you train your body you can't be an athlete, and unless you train your mind you can't be much of a scholar. The four miles an oarsman covers at top speed is in itself nothing to the good, but the physical capacity to hold out over the course is thought to be of some worth. So a good part of what you learn by hard study may not be permanently retained, and may not seem to be of much final value, but your mind is a better and more powerful instrument because you have learned it. 'Knowledge is power,' but still more the faculty of acquiring and using knowledge is power. If you have a trained and powerful mind, you are bound to have stored it with something, but its value is more in what it can do, what it can grasp and use, than in what it contains; and if it were possible, as it is not, to come out of college with a trained and disciplined mind and nothing useful in it, you would still be ahead, and still, in a manner, educated. Think of your mind as a muscle to be developed; think of it as a searchlight that is to reveal the truth to you, and don't cheat it or neglect it.

As to competitive scholarship, to my mind it is like competitive athletics,—good for those who have the powers and like the game. Tests are useful; they stimulate one's ambition, and so do competitions. But a success in competitive scholarship, like a success in competitive athletics, may, of course, be too dearly bought. Not by you, though, I surmise, my son. If you were more urgent, either as a scholar or as an athlete, I might think it needful to warn you not to wear your tires out scorching too early in life. As things are, I say to you, as I often say to myself: Don't dawdle; don't scramble. When you work, work; when you play, play; when you rest, rest; and think all the time.

When you get hold of an instructor who is worth attention, give him attention. That is one way of getting the best that a college has to offer. A great deal you may get from books, but some of the most valuable things are passed from mind to mind, and can only be had from some one who has them, or else from the great Source of all truth. I suspect that the subtle development we call 'culture' is one of those things, and the great spiritual valuables are apt to come that way.

You know you are still growing, both in mind and body, and will continue so to be for years to come,—I hope, always. One of the valuable things about college is that it gives you time to grow. You won't have to earn any money and will have time to think and get acquainted with yourself and others, as well as with some of the wisdom that is spread upon the records. You would be so engaged, more or less, in these years, wherever you might be. But in college, where you are so much your own man, and are freed from the demands and solicitudes of your parents, the conditions for it are exceptionally favorable. I suppose that is one thing that continues the colleges in business, since I read so often that at present they are entirely misdirected and teach the wrong things in the wrong way.

But nobody denies that they give the young a breathing spell. Breathe, my son; breathe freely. Remember that the aim of all these prospective processes is to bring out the man there is in you, and arm him more or less for the jousts ahead. It is not to make you over into somebody else: that can't be done,—not in three or four years, anyhow; but only to bring out, and train as much as possible of you. There's plenty in most of us if we can only get it out; more, very much more, than we ever do get out. So will you please think of college as a nursery in which you are to grow a while,—and mind you do grow,—and then, presently, to be transplanted. It is not as if college was the chief arena of human effort. Nevertheless, for your effort, while you are there, it is the chief arena, and I am far from giving you the counsel to put off trying until you leave.

I hear a good deal about clubs and societies: how many there are, how important they are; how it is that, if a youth shall gain the whole of scholarship and all athletics and not 'make' a proper club, he shall still fall something short of success in college. Parents I meet who are more concerned about clubs than about either scholarship or deportment. They are concerned and at the same time bothered: so many strategies and chances the clubs involve; so bad it may be to be in this one; so bad to be out of that; so much choice there is between them, and so much choice exercised within them, by which any mother's hopeful may be excluded.

There is a democratic ideal of a great college without any clubs, where the lion and the lamb shall escort one another about with tails entwined, and every student shall be like every other student, and have similar habits and associates. This ideal is a good deal discussed and a good deal applauded in the public press. Whether it will ever come true I can't tell, but there has been some form or other of clubs in our older colleges, I suppose, for one or two centuries, and they are there now and will at least last out your time; so it may be you will have to take thought about them in due time.

Not much, however, until they take thought of you.

You see, clubs seem to be a sort of natural provision, just as tails were, maybe, before humanity outgrew them. I guess there is a propensity of nature toward groups, and the natural basis of grouping seems to be likeness in feathers and habits. The propensity works to include the like and, incidentally but necessarily, to exclude the unlike. Whether it is the Knights of the Round Table or the Knights of the Garter or the Phi Beta Kappa, you see these principles working. The measure of success in a club is its ability to make people want to join it, and that seems to be best demonstrated and preserved by keeping most of them out.

Now the advantages of the clubs are considerable. To have a place always open where you can hang up your hat, and where a hospitable welcome always awaits you, and where there is enough of a crowd and not too much, and where you can in your later years inspect at all times a family of selected undergraduates,—all that is valuable and good, and pleasant besides, and this continuity of interest that the clubs foster among their members helps to keep up in those members a lively and helpful interest in their college. The drawback to the clubs is their essential selfishness, and their disposition to take you out of a large family and limit you to a small one, and one that is not yours by birth, or entirely by choice, but is selected for you largely by other persons.

In any club you yield a certain amount of freedom and individuality, the amount being determined by the degree in which the club absorbs you. Don't yield too much! Don't take the mould of any club! A college is always bigger than its clubs, and the biggest thing in a college is always a man. The object of being in college is to develop as a man. If clubs help in that development,—and I think they do help some men,—they are a gain; but, of course, if they dwarf you down to the dimensions of a club-man, they are a loss. Some men take their club shape, such as it is, and find a sufficient satisfaction in it. Others react on their clubs, take what they have to give, add to it what is to be had elsewhere, and turn out rather more valuable people than if they had had no club experience.

At all events, don't take this matter of the clubs too hard. For those youths, comparatively few, who by luck and circumstances find themselves eligible to them, they are an interesting form of discipline or indulgence, and I will not say that they are unimportant. Neither would I have you keep out of them because of their drawbacks. If you begin by keeping out of all things that have drawbacks, your progress in this world will involve constant hesitations. Alcohol has numerous drawbacks, but I don't advise you to be a teetotaller. Tobacco has drawbacks, but I believe you smoke it. Money has drawbacks, and so has advertisement. But, bless you, we have to take things as they come and deal with them as we can. The trick is to get the kernel and eliminate the shuck. A large proportion of people do the opposite. If you can manage that way with the clubs,—provided you ever get a chance,—you will be amused to observe in due time how large a proportion of your brethren value these organizations chiefly for their shuck, and grasp most eagerly at that. For the shuck, as I see it, is exclusiveness, which is not valuable except to persons justly doubtful of their own merits. Whereas the kernel is the fellowship of like minds which has always been treasured by the wise.

The clubs, my son, some more than others, are recruited considerably from what is known as the leisure class. To be sure, I don't see any very definite or important leisure class about in our land. Everybody who amounts to anything works, and always did and must, for you can't amount to anything otherwise; but the people who have money laid up ahead for them, are apt to work somewhat less strenuously than the rest of us, and not so much for money. Don't get it into your head that you want to tie up to the leisure class, or that the condition of not having to work is desirable. Have it in mind that you are to work just about as hard as the quality of your tires and cylinders will warrant. Plan to get into the game if you have to go on your hands and knees. Plan to earn your living somehow. Don't aim to go through life spoon-fed; don't aim to get a soft seat. If you do, you won't have your fair share of fun. There is no real fun in ease, except as you need it because you have worked hard.

I say, plan to earn your living! Whether you actually earn the money you live on, makes no great difference, though in your case I guess you'll have to if you are going to live at all well. But if you get money without earning it, it leaves you in debt to society. Somebody has to earn the money you spend. In mine, factory, railroad, or office, somebody works for the money that supports you. No matter where the money comes from, that is true: somebody has to earn it. If you get it without due labor of your own, you owe for it. Recognize that debt and qualify yourself to discharge it. Study to put back into the world somewhat more than you take out of it. Study to be somewhat more than merely worth your keep. Study to shoulder the biggest load your strength can carry. That is life. That is the great sport that brings the great compensations to the soul. Getting regular meals and nice clothes, and acceptable shelter and transportation, and agreeable acquaintances, is only a means to an end, and if you accept the means and shirk the end, the means will pall on you.

I said 'agreeable acquaintances.' A very large proportion of the acquaintances you can make will be agreeable if you can bring enough knowledge and a sufficiently hospitable spirit to your relations with them. I don't counsel you to cultivate the arts of popularity, for they are apt not to wash,—apt, that is, to conflict with inside qualities that are vastly more valuable than they are. But keep, in so far as you can, an open heart. There is no one to whom you are not related if only you can find the relation; there is no one but you owe him a benefit if you can see one you can do him.

Don't be too nice. It is such an impediment to usefulness as stuttering is to speech,—a sort of spiritual indigestion; a hesitation in your carbureter. By all means, be a gentleman, in manners and spirit, in so far as you know how, but be one from the inside out.

If you had come as far as you have in life without acquiring manners, you might well blush for your parents and teachers. I don't think you have, but I beg you hold on to all the good manners you have, and get more. Good manners seem to me a good deal to seek among present-day youth, but I suppose they have always been fairly scarce, and the more appreciated for their scarcity. Tobacco manners are uncommonly free and bad in this generation; more so, I think, than they were in mine. Since cigarettes came in, especially, youths seem to feel licensed to smoke them in all places and company. And the boys are prone to too much ease of attitude, and lounge and loll appallingly in company, and I see them in parlors with their legs crossed in such a fashion that their feet might almost as well be in the ladies' laps.

Have a care for these matters of deportment. Be strict with yourself and your postures. Keep your legs and feet where they belong; they were not meant for parlor ornaments. Show respect for people! Lord bless me! the things I see done by males with a claim to be gentlemen: tobacco-smoke puffed in women's faces; men who ought to know better, smoking as they drive out with ladies; men who put their feet on the table and expect you to talk over them! Show respect for people; for all kinds of people, including yourself, for self-respect is at the bottom of all good manners. They are the expression of discipline, of good-will, of respect for other people's rights and comfort and feelings. I suppose good manners are unselfish, but the most selfish people might well cultivate them, they are so remunerative. In the details of life, in the public vehicles, in crowds, and in all situations where the demand presses hard on supply, what you get by hogging is incomparably less than what you get by courtesy. The things you must scramble and elbow for are not worth having; not one of them. They are the swill of life, my son; leave them to swine.

You will have to think more or less about yourself, because that belongs to your time of life, provided you are the sort that thinks at all. But don't overdo it. You won't, because you will find it, as all healthy people do, a subject in which over-indulgence tends rapidly to nausea. To have one's self always on one's mind is to lodge a kill-joy; to act always from calculation is a sure path to blunders.

Most of these specific counsels I set down more for your entertainment than truly to guide you. You don't live by maxims any more than you speak by rules of grammar. You will speak by ear (improving, I hope, in your college environment), and you will live by whatever light there is in you, getting more, I hope, as you go along.

Grow in grace, my son! If your spirit is right, the details of life will take care of their own adjustment. Go to church; if not invariably, then variably. They don't require it any more in college, but you can't afford not to; for the churches reflect and recall—very imperfectly to be sure—the religion and the spirit of Christ; and on that the whole of our civilization rests. Get understanding of that. It is by far the most important knowledge in the whole book, the great fountain of sanity, tolerance, and political and social wisdom, a gateway to all kinds of truth, a rectifying and consoling current through all of life.

Intensive Living
By Cornelia A. P. Comer

SAID Honoria casually,—

'When I was in town yesterday, I went to see Adelaide in her new house.'

The others looked up alertly, Martha from her darning, Grace from her Irish crochet.

'Oh, really? And how did you like the house?'

Honoria hesitated, looking to the wide view for clarification. The three sat on a cottage veranda in the foothills of Southern California, one February day. In front of them the landscape ran, laughing, down-hill to the sea. Spread beneath them like a map were thirty miles of town and country: orange orchards brave with fruit; eucalyptus groves appealing to the sky; friendly roofs inclosed in deep-sheltering trees; great open spaces where the wind moved free; round-topped hills, green near at hand (for the rains had come and gone thus early), changing to a dusky blue out yonder where the bright Pacific flashed at the end of the long, delightful view. For love of this prospect Martha had lately left steep, sturdy hills, brown brooks, elm-shaded streets and old friends, girding at herself as she did so. Honoria had lived here many years, while Grace was but a winter's guest in Honoria's home, whose hospitable brown gables, low and wide-spreading, were visible beyond the cypress hedge encircling Martha's cottage.

'It is a good-looking mansion. She had a capable architect. The building is Tudor,—consistent, graceful, well proportioned. For two people it is a very large house indeed, but it is a good house, and I see perfectly how Adelaide means it to express the idea of dignified, comfortable living. The decorator was not bad of his kind, either.'

'All this sounds like praise,' said Grace, 'yet I feel that you are keeping something back. What is the matter with Adelaide's house?'

Again Honoria hesitated.

'It seems ungracious to find fault with such a perfectly worthy performance, yet I came away chilled and uncomfortable, almost unhappy, indeed. Thinking about the matter on the way home, it became clear to me at last that the house is too large for Adelaide's personality. You know how perfectly she pervaded that old house of hers. Old-fashioned, in some respects inconvenient, with far less perfect fittings, it still was thoroughly delightful, for where the rugs failed or the draperies faltered, Adelaide's personality somehow stepped in and eked out all insufficiencies, corrected all errors. It was hers entirely. In this blameless achievement of architect and decorator, there are no insufficiencies to be eked out, and so Adelaide's personality seems to slip and slide helplessly upon a kind of glacial surface which it cannot penetrate and make its own. I may be expressing myself very poorly, but I know I have hold of something real. Adelaide's new house, good-looking as it is, is not interesting,—that is what I mean,—and even the dear woman herself seems less interesting, and less herself now that she is enfolded in it.'

'Did you know,' interposed Martha, 'that the first winter in a new house the heating actually requires more coal than is ever needed again?'

'No, I didn't know that—but I can well believe it. Why shouldn't it take more coal to warm it when it evidently takes more vitality to cheer it? It's a serious business, this breaking in of a large house to one's self late in life, as so many Americans do. The draughts upon their vital forces are more taxing than the coal bills.'

'We all ought to live in inherited homesteads,' suggested Grace,'where the humanizing of the bricks and mortar has been done for us by our own people.'

'Honoria,' Martha demanded, ignoring this unpractical suggestion, 'tell me the truth! If you were in Adelaide's place and had carte blanche to incarnate your idea of a house for yourself and your family, wouldn't you over-build and over-decorate too? I should enjoy doing it! The furniture in my bungalow is altogether too sketchy at present, and I am tired of eking it out with personality. You would feel differently if you hadn't brought your old mahogany when you came West!'

Honoria set a few stitches, and looked at her friends with eyes in which conviction flamed.

'I don't over-dress, and I don't over-eat, though I have abundant opportunity,' she said, 'but it may be that I would over-build and over-decorate, or at least that I would have done so until yesterday. I don't think I would do it to-day—now that I know what ails Adelaide's house. As for your bungalow, Martha, it is comfortable and it is alive. There isn't a picture on the wall nor an ornament on the mantel that hasn't a reason for being exactly where it is. That is triumph, and you know it. I don't believe you would really exchange your house for Adelaide's.'

'Try me and see! I would like just for once to ignore beauty and suitability, and go in for size and sheer, luxurious comfort.'

'You would go distracted in two weeks in a place that was "sheer, luxurious comfort" and nothing else,' returned Honoria decidedly. 'You would hate it as you hate everything smug and fat and complacent. I have known you too long, Martha, not to know the ways of you with a house. To satisfy you, a domicile has to be livable. If you consider all the houses, little and big, of your friends, you will see that there are fixed limits to the amount of space in them that is truly and pleasantly habitable. You can't get the lovable "lived-in look" in rooms where you do not actually live, and you can't live all over a house that is bigger than your needs. Why! life isn't long enough, especially if you seldom stay at home! Think how dreary are most of the great houses we know. Consider Mrs. King's new marble palace with its commanding site and its ninety rooms. There isn't a single spot in it except her own bed-room and sitting-room that wouldn't give your spirit a congestive chill if you sat there for an hour. I know a woman in Colorado who so loathed her big new house as it left the hands of a New York decorator, that she would have moved back into the old one if she hadn't been afraid of her friends' laughter. And, Grace, even inherited homesteads are sometimes as difficult as uncongenial kin. Old houses have ways and wills of their own.'

'Houses are curious things,' said Grace. 'We take a morsel of illimitable space and wall it in and roof it over. Suddenly it ceases to be part of God's out-of-doors and becomes an entity with an atmosphere of its own. We warm it with our fires, we animate it with our affections, we furnish it with such things as seem good in our eyes. We do this to get shelter for our bodies, but we acquire as well an instrument for our spirits that reacts on us in its turn.'

'In other words,' returned Honoria, warming to her subject, 'as we live our way into a house, adapting it to our need, the bricks and mortar, the paint and plaster, cease to be inert matter and become alive. Superficial sociologists have taunted woman with being "more anabolic or plant-like" than man, but I count it her second glory. The plant is an organism that "slowly turns lifeless into living matter," and this is the thing that woman has done from the beginning with her shelter! In our houses we achieve almost an organic extension of our very selves. That is part of what I was trying to say. But, obviously, there should exist some reasonable ratio between the self and its extensions. I take it, the modern multitude of overgrown mansions, like the Kings' or the Clays' or even Adelaide's smaller dwelling,—all these places whose owners never find out why they are not at home in them,—are symptoms of our modern disease of materialism. The essence of that disease is the desire to grasp more matter than the spirit can fully animate. That the infection can lay hold on Adelaide shows how all-pervading it is, gripping the just as well as the unjust. When I saw her tired and dissatisfied; when I felt the lack of charm and quality in the house, and remembered how full of both her old house and garden had been, I tried to think it out. It all works around to just this: you can't have quality, you can't have charm in your material environment unless you put them into it yourself. It is a plain question of your ability to choose, arrange and vitalize things. And the latter requisite is by far the most important of the three. For I have really seen, with these eyes, poor, mean rooms where absolutely nothing was beautiful or noteworthy, so charged with a gracious and comforting personality that you forgot their shabbiness and said, "What a home-like place!" Please note that that is the adjective we always use of places that draw us by their personality—as if personality and nothing else were the essence of home.

'Now Adelaide's old house had personality; it was completely vitalized. It was all under her hand, and as high as her heart. But Adelaide's big new house is as yet barren and chilly, for it is not vitalized at all. Of course I know that after she has lived in it longer, it is bound to improve, because it is her nature to humanize and modify all her surroundings. But the crucial question is—how big a house can she humanize? Something bigger than a cottage probably—but certainly something much smaller than a hotel. The longer I looked at this question, the more it seemed to me that unconsciously I had put my finger on the vital query that, in the ideal state, should underlie all property, all education, all privilege.

'I have been talking about houses,—they are the most intimate, the most organic of a woman's possessions,—but the argument applies to all we own. It is the mark of our era to want more of everything than we can use, yet when we get the Too-Much we demand, we are crushed by it, as Tarpeia was crushed by the shields.'

'I have often thought' said Grace, 'that the sheer, brute mass of life—of people to know, of books to read, of plays to hear, of pictures to see, of things to do, buy, learn, enjoy—within reach of the well-to-do person in the modern world, far outruns the capacity of any human being to take it in and make of it the sane whole that a life should be.'

'Yes—yet we go crazily on, trying to expand to illimitable possibilities, thinking we shall be happier so soon as we have discarded all our present belongings and opportunities for bigger, newer, richer ones. How many people do you know who have not met a substantial increase of income with a corresponding enlargement of their whole scale of living, a senseless expansion sometimes out-running their increased ability to provide for it? There is no future but chaos for a society with such ambitions. They are centrifugal and can only lead to disintegration.

'The truth is, we have no notion of the value and necessity of a doctrine of limitations. Just as an illustration—not once in all the mass of matter printed in the last twenty years about the gyro-car, the aeroplane or other inventions capable of enormous swiftness, have I seen the faintest intimation that human beings could not intelligently direct a speed of two hundred miles an hour—yet the railroads are now tardily discovering that the capacity of engineers is seriously taxed by sixty miles!

'Don't mistake my meaning. I am not preaching the moral value of poverty. I am no convert to asceticism. That method of ridding one's self of the overweight of the material life is too extreme to the correct solution. I am simply calling attention with all my might to the æsthetic and vital value of Not-Too-Much. I am not afraid of Enough. I am greatly afraid of Too-Much. And the reason I am afraid is this:—

'Just as the capacity of the human stomach is limited to a certain quantity of food, so also is limited the capacity of the human spirit for appropriating and assimilating property in its different forms. Beyond a certain somewhat variable point, material possessions do the holder no more good. The common saying, "All you get in this world is your board and clothes," is the popular acknowledgment of this restricted capacity. The affirmation of bounds to our capacity holds good as regards the property of the mind—education, cultivation, æsthetic satisfactions—just as it does of material goods. There is a definite limit to what we can effectively make our own. Beyond that limit, possession is a detriment.'

'The direct result of helping ourselves to too much of anything is to coarsen and degrade. We can see this clearly as regards the primal necessity of food. Nature promptly writes it, in large letters, all over the man or woman of gross appetites.'

'It is as plainly printed, if in smaller type, on the faces of those who want too much of other things,—houses, notoriety, money, power,—what you will. The porcine brand is there, however disguised. Personally, I fear the Mark of the Pig as I fear nothing else on earth. Shaler says that certain lines of evolution terminate in such grotesque effects that one almost believes the guiding thought behind the process was humorous. I never see a stye with its squealing, shouldering inhabitants, without thinking how tremendously satiric it is—a master-caricature of human greed, not over-drawn! And I say, "Brother Pig, Heaven grant that I keep my voracities better concealed than thou."'

Her companions regarded Honoria, in type thin, nervous, ardent, with a keen and vivid face. The comparison was certainly not apparent—but the heart knoweth its own gluttonies.

'You are doing fairly well at it thus far,' said Martha dryly. 'What's the next step in your argument, Honoria?'

'Since our capacity is limited, and since to glut ourselves beyond it burdens and degrades, clearly the thing for each individual with intelligence to do is to find out where, for him, lies the golden point beyond which riches turns to the poverty of burden. When even the wise and earnest Adelaides get their houses too big and don't know what is the matter, it is time to formulate the principles of First Aid to the Prosperous. I believe the point from which the women of the comfortable classes should attack the problem of a saner living is this doctrine of limitation and selection, and that we should attack it first of all in our homes.

'Now, we human beings really do something to our immediate material surroundings which I can best describe as charging them with our personality. With the revolution of the days, personality accumulates in the things we handle and love and live with, much as electricity gathers upon the accumulator of a static machine with the revolution of the plates. This idea has always been popular with the poets and artists, but people who advance it in everyday life always do so apologetically, with the air of saying, "I know this is slightly fantastic, but doesn't it seem true?" Yet most housekeepers know its utter truth. I never doubted from the time I consciously began to care for old furniture, old rugs, old china—all the beautiful cast-offs of vanished lives—that a vast part of their charm was atmosphere, something imparted to them by the affection of those forgotten ones and now inhering, for the perceptive vision, in their very substance. The craftsman of those elder days is not the only creator of the beauty that has come down to us. Whoever has loved another's work has thereby added something to it. Is it not so? And I, in my turn, ought to be beautifying my belongings for those who come after me.'

Grace and Martha nodded readily enough, for this doctrine needs no long expounding to any woman who has lived her way into her material possessions, and distilled atmosphere from them for the comfort of her household. She knows what she has done, and knows, though she says little about it, that this business of turning lifeless into living things is one of her important natural functions.

'When I studied physics,' Honoria went on, 'I learned that science had been compelled to posit ether, an all-pervading, absolutely elastic, wave-bearing substance, to explain the commonest facts of our physical experience. Later yet, I learned that the passage of thought-waves through ether had found defenders among men of the exact sciences. Naturally I said to myself, "Ah, the scientists are growing 'warm.' Next, they will be demonstrating some of the things women have always known. They will show how we send out vibrations that get caught and entangled in our intimate belongings, never to be wholly freed again. The thing will be worked out and demonstrated like a problem in geometry. Doubtless they will be measuring everybody's wave-lengths and teaching children in the Eighth Grade easy ways of charging their belongings with their personality so unmistakably that stealing will have to become a lost art." Well! They haven't done it yet. In fact, they don't seem so near doing it as they once did. The mechanism of the process by which I take a chair fresh from Grand Rapids and in the course of years make it my chair and no other woman's, is a secret still, but I don't have to argue with anybody who ever had a favorite chair that the thing is as I have stated it. Neither do I have to argue that I could not so appropriate and make my own the output of an entire factory. It must be equally obvious that the dignified, proper environment for me and my family contains what we can thus make our own, and not much more.'

'Of course there are people,' said Martha reflectively, 'the routine of whose living demands large and formal apartments, impossible to do anything with from your point of view.'

'Assuredly there are such people,' Honoria admitted, 'just as there are people whose entertaining must be in the line of banquets rather than little dinners. I am not predicating a world full of model cottages, even though I think it might prove the happiest world. Still, outside of official circles, the need of state drawing-rooms is certainly not general, and it is of the very gist of my argument—my argument isn't all developed yet, Martha, don't think it!—that for the sake of developing a finer and more individual quality in our possessions, we should cut off some superfluous ones. Please listen patiently while I carry the idea to its logical limit, even though that limit lies beyond the bounds of practicability.

'Economists profess that, in an ideal distribution of goods, each man would have as much as he could consume without waste. But this takes no account of the differing needs of men, developed through ages of the upward struggle, nor of their different capabilities of turning goods to account. If you are going to dabble at all in theories of ideal distribution, why not have one that is genuinely ideal—that is, non-material? The true distribution would require that each man should possess what goods he could animate and vitalize. Even so, how vastly would possessions differ in amount and quality!

'If life could be adjusted on this basis, it would automatically become simplified, charged with beauty and with character. We should slough off ugly and useless possessions, or, if we retained through affection things ugly in themselves, that very affection would impart to them a certain importance and distinction. We should then, at least, live in a world in which everything had significance. Think of the infinite satisfaction of that!'

'What do you mean when you say, "if life could be adjusted on this basis," Honoria?' Grace inquired. 'Are you implying some kind of a final socialistic state which calls for an omniscient Distributor of Goods who shall know how much each man can vitalize?'

'Really, Grace, I am not a fool, even when I am evolving a reformed society!' returned Honoria promptly. 'Most conceptions of an improved state demand God for their Chief Executive and an enormous force of government officials with the fine honor which, thus far, has only been developed in human nature by conditions entirely different from those the visionaries are forecasting. Unquestionably we have fallen into the habit of thinking that if we only pass a law, any wrong at which we aim is regulated. In fact, however, so long as that law only expresses the practice of a minority, its enforcement will be evaded. Legislation without character is as helpless as a motor without fuel,—and my little reform, like every other effective change, must proceed from within outward.

'So I believe that if I wish to live in a world where nobody has more food, clothes, houses, wealth, power, than he can make significant and vital use of, it is up to me to remake my own life on that basis first. I am, if not the only woman whom I can reform, at least the most suitable subject for my experimentation. And I admit that I have too many possessions. Sometimes I am ridden to exhaustion by the care of my "things," modest as they are when compared to the goods of my neighbors. I know that if thousands of people did not feel as I do, the "simple life" slogan would never have acquired the popularity it had some years ago. We no longer hear much of the simple life, but we need it increasingly. Personally, I am persuaded that the method I am trying to set forth is workable.

'Why shouldn't a human being, seeking to get the most out of life, take lessons from the husbandman seeking to get the richest returns from the soil? It used to be thought that to cultivate many acres superficially was the way to feed the world and enrich the farmer. But the study of the soil as a science has taught us that we must resort, instead, to the intensive farming which gives greater returns from reduced acreage. What is true of the returns earth makes to our granaries, is true of the returns life makes to our spirits. We need a science of intensive living that we may get the larger crop from the smaller field. It will be worked out by women, and it must begin in their domain, which still is, in spite of the sociologists, the home.'

'The Norwegian maid who cared for my rooms at the hotel last winter had figured out something of the sort for herself,' said Grace. 'After I had put a few bits of things about, she said to me, "I like dis room. It looks like Norway. Dere iss more moneys in America, but in Norway t'ings iss more pretty. Even de kitchen iss good to see. Dere iss shelves an' copper cooking-dishes all shiny, all so happy-looking. I like dem way best. It iss better not so much moneys to haf, but to be more happy wit' one's t'ings!"'

'That is the doctrine in a nutshell! In its poorer, more restricted days, the world learned that secret of the art of living, and it still lingers in corners that our blatant, crashing "civilization" passes by—so that a Norwegian peasant's daughter may know far more than an American girl "who has always had everything" about the priceless secret of being "happy wit' one's t'ings." It is the richest knowledge a woman can possess.'

'What is the real rock-bottom reason why people go on piling up money after they have enough?' Martha demanded.

'I imagine,' said Honoria, 'that excessive accumulation is a form of egotism. Now, if public opinion, the race-ideal, or what you please, once demanded that we vitalize all our possessions; if it were once admitted to be unspeakably gross to demand more property than we can animate, as gross as it now is to over-eat, then the stress upon possession would be transferred at once from "How much" to "How," and large possessions would really become what some of the undistinguished rich now fondly imagine them to be—a direct and sensitive register of the finer qualities.'

Martha suddenly and irresistibly chuckled.

'I have a story for you, Honoria,' she said. 'A lot of ranchers over there,' she vaguely gestured toward the southwest across the hills, 'have grown suddenly rich, raising sugar beets, and have bought motor-cars and other paraphernalia proper to their improved condition. One of them was heard to say, "I b'lieve these college graduates that teach school 'round here really think they're as good as us rich folks." That is the real attitude of your "undistinguished rich" toward the gifts of culture and the finer qualities!'

'Honoria,' said Grace, 'haven't the sages always said, "Give me neither poverty nor riches"? Why should your propaganda succeed where Job and Socrates have failed? Job lived a long while ago! If the race were going to be converted to his view, the process ought to be more advanced. You will need very strong arguments for your doctrine of limitations.'

'Arguments are to be had for the picking up,' returned Honoria. 'What kind will you have? Reasonable limitation on the material side always brings some amazing flowering of mind or spirit like the blossoming of a root-bound plant. If you want a racial argument, consider the Irish—the poorest people in Europe and therefore the richest in spirit. Poverty forced them to concentrate their attention upon their neighbors; there resulted an astonishing increase in sympathy, wit, and general humanness.—If you want an argument from Art, consider the Middle Ages. Peering out of a narrow world, hemmed in by ignorance and squalor, the mediæval artist caught sight of beauty and immediately loved it with such fervent, personal passion that everything he made in its image was vital and wonderful. As his world broadened in the Renaissance, much of his art grew florid and meaningless, lacking that marvelous, intimate quality of the earlier, restricted day.—If you want an argument from literary material, there's the Picciola of Saintine. You can make an imperishable literary masterpiece out of a convict's love for a tiny plant struggling up between two stones in a prison-yard, but you cannot make men listen to tales of great possessions. The interest in Monte Cristo centres upon the process of acquirement, and it is the same in any successful money-romance. Midas is only fit to point a moral, never to adorn a tale.—If you want an argument from philology, consider that the diminutives in every language show the lesser thing to be the dearer thing, always. Remember Marie Antoinette and the Little Trianon! Consider the increasing specialization in science—science which always falls on its feet! I know a thousand arguments! The thing I am in need of is converts!'

'If you could get them,' said Martha, 'there might really be a Woman's Reformation, only it would begin at home instead of at the polls.'

'What other permanent thing is there in life but the hearthstone? Nations rise and fall, laws and institutions come and go—but that remains, the one fixed point in human society. I take it, therefore, it is the one point from which the lever can successfully be brought to bear on human society. If anything is to be moved or altered, the force must be applied there.'

'But human society has changed, Honoria,' urged Grace. 'Look at all our new powers and possessions! Steam and electricity have remade the world, and we are not yet adjusted to the alteration. No generation ever lived under our conditions; thus we have no traditions for handling our new environment. No heritage of ancestral wisdom tells us what of the hundreds of new opportunities to accept, what to reject. Save in so far as we are thinking beings—and that is not very far—we are as much at the mercy of our desires as babies in a toy-shop, grabbing now this and now that, heaping up a lapful of futilities and calling it a life.'

'Yes. But why should we make steam and electricity serve our greed only? Why use them chiefly to darken the world and make life a horror? Dare you affirm that we women and our demands are not at the very centre of the tragic tangle of modern living? Isn't all this horrible speeding-up of business largely an outgrowth of our exactions? What do men do business for, anyhow, except to get us what we want! Homes are to other material possessions what souls are to the bodies—the centre from which the life moves outward. If there is no greed in the home, is there not bound to be less greed in the offices?'

'I'm not so sure, Honoria,' Grace returned. 'No amount of intensiveness in the home would eliminate man's love of power for its own sake.'

'Perhaps. Yet isn't the lust for power a secondary development? We begin by being greedy because we want things; we keep on after we have more things than we know what to do with, because greed has created the power-lust. It is the aftermath from that ugly root. If the pressure the home puts on the man for money were suddenly slackened all along the line, above the point of poverty, might not the matter of unseemly accumulations correct itself? If we women of the more favored classes avowedly undertook to give quality to our belongings, instead of demanding belongings which we hope will confer quality upon us, there would surely be both a lessening in the stress of life and an improvement in its texture. I can think of nothing else but the Golden Rule that would help to solve so many menacing problems, such as the high cost of living, the commercialization of life, and the divorce problem. Oh, it would be very far-reaching, that attitude, if we could only achieve it!'

'Why wouldn't plain Christianity do all your reforming, and do it better?' demanded Martha abruptly.

'Assuredly it would—if Christianity were more generally a condition instead of a theory among us. I wouldn't undertake to say off-hand why the sanctions of common sense seem more precious to the present generation than the sanctions of religion, when in so many points they are identical, but I must conform my theorizings to the fact. Yet with all our neglect of religion the traditions of the spirit have not changed! They are the same from everlasting to everlasting. And one of the things the nineteenth century most wonderfully made clear was that the evolution of the spirit is the thing Nature has been seeking for hundreds of millions of years. I don't suppose that age-long process with the tremendous impetus of all creation behind it is really going to be upset by the turmoil of one materialistic generation. But I do believe that if we go with the current of materialism, we and all our works shall be tossed aside as refuse, thrown into Nature's garbage-can. I tell you, I can't bear the disgrace of it.'

'Honoria, you almost persuade me to be intensive,' said Grace, 'but I am not reconciled to the doctrine at one point—the question of beauty. I admit that one cannot vitalize a lot of senseless luxury. I admit, too, that comfort and a certain amount of beauty can always be successfully domesticated and charged with personality, as you phrase it, and that the result is completely satisfying. But is one never to indulge one's self in all the beauty money will buy, never to have everything of an absolute perfection? You are against great houses, but there is Mountly House, at home. It is big, but so beautiful that you are at home in it all over. What of it, and others like it?'

'Big and beautiful it is, but it is on my side of the argument, none the less. If you remember, the architect was also the decorator. It is the triumph of his imagination. He designed it as a background for a woman of opulent beauty and domestic tastes. He ransacked Europe for the furnishings, tapestries, all sorts of exquisite, ancient things. He was a great artist and he created a work of art. The family fit into the picture more or less awkwardly. It is his house, not theirs at all. And I truly believe that the ultimate purpose of our houses excludes our going up and down another's stairs.

'Yet I believe in all the beauty one can vitalize. It is essentially wholesome. It does not lend itself to morbid demands. The collector's passion looks like greed, and doubtless for a time it is greed. But, sooner or later, Too-Much sickens them. Their adorable possessions teach them there is profanation in having more wonderful things than they can enter into personal relation with. Therefore the inevitable end of all overgrown collections is the museum or the auction-room. I have seen it too often not to know it is true!—If you want a perfect illustration of this in literature read Mrs. Wharton's The Daunt Diana. It cuts down like a knife to the essential fact that our relations with beauty must be limited enough to have the personal quality. And—don't you see?—this automatic destruction of greed that beauty finally teaches to the collector, is the same automatic destruction of it that I dare think intensive living in our homes might bring to all greed. It is a proof of the theory on another plane.'

'I think one might own a Mountly House without greed,' persisted Grace wistfully. 'Having no house at all, I naturally refuse to think of myself as ending my days in any less perfect domicile. What do you mean by the "ultimate purpose" of our houses?'

'Ah! that,' said Honoria, with a quick indrawing of her breath, 'is the very core of all my thought, and I don't know how to make you see it!'

She rose abruptly and walked to the end of the veranda. She stood there a while, looking across at the spreading gables of her own brown bungalow, with the yearning on her face that only house-mothers know. Yonder was her home. Set on a mighty shoulder of the earth, facing the sunset and the sea, it clung to the soil as the brown rocks cling. Behind it were the mighty Sierras with their crests of snow; before it, the sweetest land God ever smiled upon; within it, all the treasures of her eyes, her mind, her heart. Just as it stood there in the February sun, it was an abode compact of love, of aspiration, of desire. The ancient love of man for his shelter had gone into it, and the love of woman for the place of her appointed suffering. Desire for beauty and hope of peace were in its making. Its walls had heard the birth-cries; her children had played about its doors; out from it had been borne her dead. Inconsiderable speck on the vast hill-shoulder that it was, it could defy time and the elements, even as she defied them, for she had given it of her own immortality.

'I have not yet said it all,' she said a little thickly. 'It is hard to say, even to you. I have found an attitude of mind, a path, a way of life I call intensive, for lack of a better name, and I believe in it, not only because it increases my sane satisfaction in living, but also because it finally leads out—out of all this tangle of our material lives, into the eternal spaces.

'I see the world of men's business activities chiefly as a place of wrath and greed, and yet even the most grasping must be blindly seeking through their greed an ultimate satisfaction—not more houses or more automobiles, or railroads, or mines, or even power, but something dimly apprehended as beyond all these and more than they—something that is good and that endures. For we all want the Enduring Thing. One man sees it here, another there. As for me, I see it in my house. I tell you, the Greeks and Romans did not make a religion of the hearthstone; they merely recognized the religion that the hearthstone is. Under that quiet roof I have learned that it is a woman's business to take stones and make them bread. Only she can make our surroundings live and nourish us.

'Beyond the need for bread, a woman's needs are two; deeper than all cravings save the mother's passion, firm-rooted in our endless past, is the heart-hunger. The trees that sweep my chimney have their roots at the world's core! The flowers in my dooryard have grown there for a thousand years! What millenniums have done, shall decades undo? We are not so shallow, so plastic as that! We will go into the mills, the shops, the offices, if we must, but we know we are off the track of life. Neither our desire nor our power is there.

'I have talked glibly enough about restricting superfluous possessions for the sake of developing a finer quality in those we have; I have said only personality gives that quality to our surroundings—but I have not said the final thing. It is this: I believe that in the humble business of loving the material things that are given to us to own and love, in shaping our homes around them, in making them vital and therefore beautiful, so that they serve our spirits in their turn, we are not only making the most of our resources in this life, but are doing more than that. Somehow, I cannot tell you how, I know that we are getting them across—into the timeless places! In making them vital we are making them enduring.

'Christ tells us to lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven. What did that mean to you when you were young? I thought it meant a procession of self-denials and charities, more or less lifeless because the offering was made slightly against the grain! I had no idea that when I loved somebody very much or pitied somebody very much, when I shared my heart or shared my roof eagerly, that I was doing the commanded thing. Still less did I realize, when I worked hard to make my home more comfortable or more beautiful, that I was sending vibrations from my everyday world right into the eternal one—every deed an actual hammer stroke on my house not made with hands. But so sure as that our mortal shall put on immortality, I now hold it that what we first find in the eternal world will be the things into which we have unstintingly flung our vitality, our feeling, while we are briefly here.

'Here we have no continuing city. But when I am making my house live, I and no other, putting into it as I best may something of the serenity of Athens and the sacredness of Jerusalem and the beauty of Siena, then it is taking its place beside my greater loves. Then I am creating a home, not only in this world, but in the next. I have put something over into the eternal world that fire cannot burn, nor floods destroy, nor moth and rust corrupt. It is safe, even from myself, forever! No Heaven can be holy to me if I have not made this spot holy. I shall not ask, even from the mercy of the Merciful, a heavenly mansion if I have failed to make this earthly dwelling live. Eternity begins beside my hearth, shaped by my will. A woman knows!'

Reminiscence with Postscript
By Owen Wister