An heirloom is still worse. Each one that you have in your possession might have gone to somebody else, and that somebody else feels that he or she would have appreciated it more than you do. Nevertheless, for you to disburden yourself of a single heirloom by presenting it to the person who coveted it most, would be to precipitate a family crisis.
Take, for instance, that case of stuffed birds. Every time Uncle Lemuel's daughter sees it she tells me how much it always meant to her, and how the old house seems empty without it. Yet whenever I offer to make her a present of it she bursts into tears, and sobs that her dear father wanted me to have it, because I had once told him I liked birds, and that therefore she would be the last person in the world to deprive me of it.
So, along with all the rest of the harmony-killers, I am saddled for life with this ornithological incubus. It is true, as Cousin Ophelia says, that I like birds; but my fondness for them does not continue after they are defunct and stuffed; neither does it include owls, whether alive or dead, and there are no less than three owls in that cabinet—gloomy, dusty, evil-looking fowls, their big yellow glass eyes wide open and staring. I'll wager they had their eyes closed when Uncle Lemuel shot them. He never was much of a sport.
Be that as it may, these lugubrious specimens are on my hands. I kept them in the living-room till I couldn't stand them there any longer. (Strangers would ask me how I happened to take up taxidermy.) Then I removed them to the dining-room, where they promptly took away my appetite. Transferred subsequently to the nursery, they caused Mamma's Pet to go into convulsions of terror. I offered the cook an increase in wages if she would take the cursed things into her room; she threatened to leave. I made a pathetic appeal to my wife to take them into hers; she reminded me coolly that Uncle Lemuel was my uncle. Now they are in my room, in the corner where I used to keep my favorite chair.
But something tells me that they may not endure there forever. I am a mild-dispositioned man, long-suffering, and tractable; but that cabinet of birds is too much.
Some day you may see clouds of smoke pouring out of my windows and fire-engines pulling up at my door. If you do, don't feel sorry for me or censure me. A burning need will be satisfied. It will be a case of sponsored combustion.
[THE WRITING ON THE SCREEN]
Being interested in human nature in all its manifestations, I have lately made a study of handwriting as it is shown in the moving pictures. I undertook this research because I had been given to understand that chirography, when scientifically analyzed, revealed every nuance of human character; and because the personages in moving-pictures, being intensely dramatic, could not fail to have striking individualities as penmen.