There's Pippins and Cheese to Come

by Charles S. Brooks

I like these persons who ply their trades upon the sidewalk. My hatter—the fellow who cleans my straw hat each Spring—is a partner of a bootblack. Over his head as he putters with his soap and brushes, there hangs a rusty sign proclaiming that he is famous for his cleaning all round the world. He is so modest in his looks that I have wondered whether he really can read the sign. Or perhaps like a true merchant, he is not squeamish at the praise. As I have not previously been aware that any of his profession ever came to general fame except the Mad Hatter of Wonderland, I have squinted sharply at him to see if by chance it might be he, but there are no marks even of a distant kinship. He does, however, bring my hat to a marvellous whiteness and it may be true that he has really tended heads that are now gone beyond Constantinople.

Bootblacks have a sense of rhythm unparalleled. Of this the long rag is their instrument. They draw it once or twice across the shoe to set the key and then they go into a swift and pattering melody. If there is an unusual genius in the bootblack—some remnant of ancient Greece—he plays such a lively tune that one's shoulders jig to it. If there were a dryad or other such nimble creature on the street, she would come leaping as though Orpheus strummed a tune, but the dance is too fast for our languid northern feet.

Nowhere are apples redder than on a cart. Our hearts go out to Adam in the hour of his temptation. I know one lady of otherwise careful appetite who even leans toward dates if she may buy them from a cart. "Those dear dirty dates," she calls them, but I cannot share her liking for them. Although the cart is a beguiling market, dates so bought are too dusty to be eaten. They rank with the apple-john. The apple-john is that mysterious leathery fruit, sold more often from a stand than from a cart, which leans at the rear of the shelf against the peppermint jars. For myself, although I do not eat apple-johns, I like to look at them. They are so shrivelled and so flat, as though a banana had caught a consumption. Or rather, in the older world was there not a custom at a death of sending fruits to support the lonesome journey? If so, the apple-john came untasted to the end. Indeed, there is a look of old Egypt about the fruit. Whether my fondness for gazing at apple-johns springs from a distant occasion when as a child I once bought and ate one, or whether it arises from the fact that Falstaff called Prince Hal a dried apple-john, is an unsolved question, but I like to linger before a particularly shrivelled one and wonder what its youth was like. Perhaps like many of its betters, it remained unheralded and unknown all through its fresher years and not until the coming of its wrinkled age was it at last put up to the common view. The apple-john sets up kinship with an author.

The day of all fools is wisely put in April. The jest of the day resides in the success with which credulity is imposed upon, and April is the month of easiest credulity. Let bragging travellers come in April and hold us with tales of the Anthropopagi! If their heads are said to grow beneath their shoulders, still we will turn a credent ear. Indeed, it is all but sure that Baron Munchausen came back from his travels in the Spring. When else could he have got an ear? What man can look upon the wonders of the returning year—the first blue skies, the soft rains, the tender sproutings of green stalks without feeling that there is nothing beyond belief? If such miracles can happen before his eyes, shall not the extreme range even of travel or metaphysics be allowed? What man who has smelled the first fragrance of the earth, has heard the birds on their northern flight and has seen an April brook upon its course, will withhold his credence even though the jest be plain?

I beg, therefore, that when you walk upon the street on the next day of April fool, that you yield to the occasion. If an urchin points his finger at your hat, humor him by removing it! Look sharply at it for a supposed defect! His glad shout will be your reward. Or if you are begged piteously to lift a stand-pipe wrapped to the likeness of a bundle, even though you sniff the imposture, seize upon it with a will! It is thus, beneath these April skies, that you play your part in the pageantry that marks the day.

The Friendly Genii

Do you not confess yourself to be several years past that time of greenest youth when burnt cork holds its greatest charm? Although not fallen to a crippled state, are you not now too advanced to smudge your upper lip and stalk agreeably as a villain? Surely you can no longer frisk lightly in a comedy. If you should wheeze and limp in an old man's part, with back humped in mimicry, would you not fear that it bordered on the truth? But doubtless there was a time when you ranged upon these heights—when Kazrac the magician was not too heavy for your art. In those soaring days, let us hope that you played the villain with a swagger, or being cast in a softer role, that you won a pink and fluffy princess before the play was done. Your earliest practice, it may be, was in rigging the parlor hangings as a curtain with brown string from the pantry and safety pins. Although you had no show to offer, you said "ding" three times—as is the ancient custom of the stage when the actors are ready—and drew them wide apart. The cat was the audience, who dozed with an ear twitching toward your activity. A complaint that springs up in youth and is known as "snuffles" had kept you out of school. It had gripped you hard at breakfast, when you were sunk in fear of your lessons, but had abated at nine o'clock. Whether the cure came with a proper healing of the nasal glands or followed merely on the ringing of the school bell, must be left to a cool judgment.

Your theatre filled the morning. When Annie came on her quest for dust, you tooted once upon your nose, just to show that a remnant of your infirmity persisted, then put your golden convalescence on the making of your curtain.

But in the early hours of afternoon when the children are once more upon the street, you regret your illness. Here they come trooping by threes and fours, carrying their books tied up in straps. One would think that they were in fear lest some impish fact might get outside the covers to spoil the afternoon. Until the morrow let two and two think themselves five at least! And let Ohio be bounded as it will! Some few children skip ropes, or step carefully across the cracks of the sidewalk for fear they spoil their suppers. Ah!—a bat goes by—a glove—a ball! And now from a vacant lot there comes the clamor of choosing sides. Is no mention to be made of you—you, "molasses fingers"—the star left fielder—the timely batter? What would you not give now for a clean bill of health? You rub your offending nose upon the glass. What matters it with what deep rascality in black mustachios you once strutted upon your boards? What is Hecuba to you?

My own first theatre was in the attic, a place of squeaks and shadows to all except the valiant. In it were low, dark corners where the night crawled in and slept. But in the open part where the roof was highest, there was the theatre. Its walls were made of a red cambric of a flowered pattern that still lingers with me, and was bought with a clatter of pennies on the counter, together with nickels that had escaped my extravagance at the soda fountain.