“Sure thing, lady,” said the baker-butcher. “Five pounds and a quarter. There’s your 5¼, at 18 cents. There’s your 18. Five tums 8 is 40. Put down the aught and carry 4. Five tums one is 5, and 4 is—is—er—er—Five times 8 is 40. Put down the aught and carry—Hold on. I guess I made a mistake. Call it 97 cents.” He smiled pleasingly.
“Seven cents,” mused she. “M—, won’t you please figure out for me how one-fourth of 18 is 7?”
Well now. I had been paying for meat without ever figuring it out. Considering that with his limited arithmetical powers he was certain to make mistakes, and considering that those mistakes were equally certain to be all in his favor, can you wonder that I have tossed and tossed for hours upon a sleepless couch trying to recall the times I bought meat of him, how much it weighed and what I paid him?
I promised to speak of “Joe’s.” Behold I show you a mystery. I saw a billhead of his. His initial was M. Try my best I couldn’t make out to spell Joe with an M. Yet everybody called him Joe. I asked the Signora, his mother-in-law. She pressed her lips strongly together and wildly shook her head. “Eena Cannodda dey gotta no sensea,” she exclaimed. “Eesa nemma notta Joe. No. Eesa nemma Mike. Michaele. Seguro. Surea tinga. Cannodda mans ee say: ‘Eh Joe? Youra nemma Joe? Eh?’ Ee know dey gotta nuss sense a eena Cannodda. Ee say: ‘Sure a-tinga.’ Eesa neema notta Joe. No. Eesa nemma Mike. Michaele. Seguro. Surea tinga.”
At Joe’s you could buy all things necessary to support life from ham to hairpins, including Canadian tobacco, which needs a protective tariff if ever anything does in this world. Not because it is a weakling though. It biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder. Funny thing about that Canadian smoking tobacco. Sometimes it puts you in mind of sauerkrout, and sometimes it puts you in mind of boneset. I don’t think it is quite as bitter as boneset, though.
Shelter, and food, and water and tobacco being thus accounted for, there remains another prime necessity of life, and that is, sleep. I don’t believe there is one person in a hundred that knows the real luxury of sleep. Consider the uncounted hordes that live in terror of “night air.” Consider the more enlightened that raise their bedroom windows just a trifle, to calk them up as soon as ever it turns a little cool. But even when wide open, a bedroom with a window in it is not by any means the same thing as a tent to sleep in, a tent by the lakeside, its front all flaring open, and its sides and top working like bellowses with the breeze. We had regular wire springs and to the wooden frames we nailed pieces of 2 × 4 for legs. On these were mattresses and bedclothes, plenty of them. For when we read of city folk dying of sunstroke and rolling off their roofs where they had gone to get a mouthful of the lifeless air, robbed of its ozone before it reached them, we were snuggling under one and sometimes two pairs of blankets. And then, I had the pleasure (a small and tepid pleasure you may think it, but very real to me) of trying to prop my eyelids open every night, as I lay stretched out upon my bed, till I could thrust my hand out between the sidewall and the baseboard, and feel the glossy leaves of the cool grapevine, and try to unkink a tendril before I lost consciousness. Sometimes I couldn’t get that far. We’d stay up till all hours, nine and even ten o’clock, fighting off sleep. It was a nightly problem with us which we’d rather do, go to bed and get that lovely sleep, or stay awake a minute or two longer staring at the “friendship fire.”
I have vainly tried to think which held the greater fascination for me: The lake as it shifted its hues before my eyes from reddish brown to vivid apple-green through leaded gray and royal purple, the farther shore now so sharp and clear that you could see the houses on it, now but a thin slice of pearl against a pearly sky, the water between us and it now a floor veined and streaked like marble, and now ridgy with billows, that practised, as it were, their scales upon the yellow beach, their hand-backs remembering what the teacher said, “no knuckles,” and their finger tips dancing in the white froth: or, the fire of evenings, fluttering its ribbons of orange taffeta against the back log, snapping its blank cartridges in sport at us, the red coals so many heaps of glowing jewels in an Indian prince’s treasure-house. The lake enthralled me in the day-time. It numbed my brain; it paralyzed my pen-hand, and left me only the still and speechless joy of living. When the darkness fell, the firelight drew me with the master-spell. From the lake I now and then could turn my eyes. The fire was jealous. Not for a full minute would it let me go. In its genial warmth and light our souls expanded, and we sang the old songs that everybody knows, the songs that lie so near the heart its strings must thrill in concord with them, but, through all, our eyes were fastened on the fire. What magic it must be that thus can charm unhaltingly through all the long, long centuries that have drifted by like mist since first men gathered about the friendly flame! The wonder of it! The wonder of it! Without the Fire there could never be the Family, with all that means to us; no Hearth, no Home, with all that means to us. The first priestess was she that kept the coals alive; an altar is but a cooking-place. Lineal descendant of the first flickering blaze fed with twigs is all our god-like industry, all that has made us lords of earth and sea. Back to nature we may go, but farther back than fire we dare not, lest we perish body and soul.
Perhaps it was the dumb fear of this, the heritage of pre-historic ancestry that made us sigh when the time came to tear the logs apart and quench them for the night.
How happy were those dear idle days! Happy, not only in the retrospect, but each moment savoring pleasant to the taste. Once I thought that Heaven must be rather bore-ous with nothing left to strive for, no ambition, no anxiety. I know better now. I could live on and on forever in that camp and never wish for anything but to live. As I write, the pictures of the sweet, calm evenings out upon the placid lake in the canoe return to me. It heaves in gentle swells, the umber water netted on its ripple-crests with soft reflections of the flushed sky fading into tints too delicate for words of color. Black against the lucent edge of heaven march the slim poplars. The stars are struggling out, and taking pattern from them, the riding-lights of yachts shine yellowly. The waves plash gently on the shell that holds us, and the water gurgles against the paddle that urges onward, or tinkles in drops like tiny bells. Something catches in the throat. It is too beautiful, too heavenly for earth-born. From far across the waters comes Caruso’s voice, by magic reproduced, sweet to suffocation.
“Un regal serto sul crin possarti