| PAGE | |
| An Oxford Symbol | [1] |
| Scapegoats | [7] |
| To a New Yorker a Hundred Years Hence | [12] |
| A Call for the Author | [16] |
| Mr. Pepys’s Christmases | [19] |
| Children as Copy | [25] |
| Hail, Kinsprit! | [30] |
| Round Manhattan Island | [33] |
| The Unknown Citizen | [37] |
| Sir Kenelm Digby | [42] |
| First Impressions of an Amiable Visitor | [58] |
| In Honorem: Martha Washington | [63] |
| According to Hoyle | [67] |
| L. E. W. | [71] |
| Our Extension Course | [75] |
| Some Recipes | [78] |
| Adventures of a Curricular Engineer | [82] |
| Santayana in the Subway | [87] |
| Madonna of the Taxis | [95] |
| Matthew Arnold and Exodontia | [99] |
| Dame Quickly and the Boilroaster | [109] |
| Vacationing with De Quincey | [114] |
| The Spanish Sultry | [132] |
| What Kind of a Dog? | [137] |
| A Letter from Gissing | [140] |
| July 8, 1822 | [143] |
| Midsummer in Salamis | [148] |
| The Story of Ginger Cubes | [153] |
| The Editor at the Ball Game | [183] |
| The Dame Explores Westchester | [191] |
| The Power and the Glory | [197] |
| Gissing Joins a Country Club | [202] |
| Three Stars on the Back Stoop | [208] |
| A Christmas Card | [213] |
| Symbols and Paradoxes | [218] |
| The Return to Town | [223] |
| Maxims and Minims | [228] |
| Two Reviews | [262] |
| Buddha on the L | [271] |
| Intellectuals and Roughnecks | [279] |
| The Fun of Writing | [288] |
| A Christmas Soliloquy | [291] |
THE POWDER OF
SYMPATHY
AN OXFORD SYMBOL
When in October, 1910, we arrived, in a hansom, at the sombre gate of New College, Oxford; trod for the first time through that most impressive of all college doorways, hidden in its walled and winding lane; timidly accosted Old Churchill, the whiskered porter, most dignitarian and genteel of England’s Perfect Servants; and had our novice glimpse of that noble Front Quad where the shadow of the battlemented roof lies patterned across the turf—we were as innocently hopeful, modestly anxious for learning and eager to do the right thing in this strange, thrilling environment as ever any young American who went looking for windmills. No human being (shrewd observers have remarked) is more beautifully solemn than the ambitious Young American. And, indeed, no writer has ever attempted to analyze the shimmering tissue of inchoate excitement and foreboding that fills the spirit of the juvenile Rhodes Scholar as he first enters his Oxford college. He arrives with his mind a gentle confusion of hearsay about Walter Pater, Shelley, boat races, Mr. Gladstone, Tom Brown, the Scholar Gypsy, and Little Mr. Bouncer. Kansas City or Sheboygan indeed seem far away as he crosses those quadrangles looking for his rooms.
But even Oxford, one was perhaps relieved to find, is not all silver-gray mediæval loveliness. The New Buildings, to which Churchill directed us, reached through a tunnel and a bastion in a rampart not much less than a thousand years elderly, were recognizably of the Rutherford B. Hayes type of edification. Except for the look-off upon gray walls, pinnacles, and a green tracery of gardens, and the calculated absence of plumbing (a planned method of preserving monastic hardiness among light-minded youth), the immense cliff of New Buildings might well have been a lobe of the old Johns Hopkins or a New York theological seminary. At the top of four flights we found our pensive citadel. Papered in blue, upholstered in a gruesome red, with yellow woodwork, and a fireplace which (we soon learned) was a potent reeker. It would be cheerful to describe those two rooms in detail, for we lived in them two years. But what first caught our eye was a little green pamphlet lying on the red baize tablecloth. It was lettered
NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD
Information and Regulations
Revised October, 1910
Our name was written upon it in ink, and we immediately sat down to study it. Here, we thought, is our passkey to this new world of loveliness.