DEAR BEVERLEY:
Your highly complimentary and philosophical missive is before my eyes.
You understand French, not I. But I have accumulated a few quotations which I sometimes venture to use in writing, never in my proud oral delivery. If I pronounced to the French the French with which I am familiar, the French themselves would drive their own vernacular out of their land—over into Germany! Here is one of those fond inaudible phrases:
A chaque oiseau
Son nid est beau.
That is to say, in Greek, every Diogenes prefers his own tub.
The lines are a trophy captured at a college-club dinner the other night. One of the speakers launched the linguistic marvel on the blue cloud of smoke and it went bumping around the heads of the guests without finding any head to enter, like a cork bobbing about the edges of a pond, trying in vain to strike a place to land. But everybody cheered uproariously, made happy by the discovery that someone actually could say something at a New York dinner that nobody had heard before. One man next to the speaker (of course coached beforehand) passed a translation to his elbow neighbour. It made its way down the table to me at the other end and I, in the New York way, laid it up for future use at a dinner in some other city. Meantime I use it now on you.
It is true that I arrived in New York from Kentucky some years ago. It is likewise undeniable that for some years previous thereto I had dealings with Louisville florists. But I affirm now, and all these variegated gentlemen, if they are gentlemen, would gladly come on to New York as my witnesses and bear me out in the joyful affidavit, that whatever folly or recklessness or madness marked my behaviour, never once did I commit the futility, the imbecility, of trafficking in ferns.
A great English novelist—ferns! A rising young American novelist—ferns! Frogstools, mushrooms, fungi! Man alive, why don't you ship him a dray-load of Kentucky spiderwebs? Or if they should be too gross for his delicate soul, a birdcage containing a pair of warbling young bluegrass moonbeams?
I am a land-turtle, am I? If it be so, thank God! If I have no imagination, thank God! If I live and move and have my being under the shovel of the five senses and of the practical, thank God! But, my good fellow, whom I love and trust as I love and trust no other man, if I am a turtle, do you know what I think of you as most truly being?
A poor, harmless tinker.