THE URCHIN AT THE ZOO

At Easter, 1765, he confesses sadly that he often lies abed until two in the afternoon; which, after all, was not so deplorable, for he usually went to bed very late. Boswell has spoken of "the unseasonable hour at which he had habituated himself to expect the oblivion of repose." On New Year's Day, 1767, he prays: "Enable me, O Lord, to use all enjoyments with due temperance, preserve me from unseasonable and immoderate sleep." Two years later than this he writes:

"I am not yet in a state to form many resolutions; I purpose and hope to rise early in the morning at eight, and by degrees at six; eight being the latest hour to which bedtime can be properly extended; and six the earliest that the present system of life requires."

One of the most pathetic of his entries is the following, on September 18, 1768:

"This day it came into my mind to write the history of my melancholy. On this I purpose to deliberate; I know not whether it may not too much disturb me."

From time to time there have been stupid or malicious people who have said that Johnson's marriage with a homely woman twenty years older than himself was not a love match. For instance, Mr. E.W. Howe, of Atchison, Kan., in most respects an amiable and well-conducted philosopher, uttered inHowe's Monthly(May, 1918) the following words, which (I hope) he will forever regret:

"I have heard that when a young man he (Johnson) married an ugly and vulgar old woman for her money, and that his taste was so bad that he worshiped her."

Against this let us set what Johnson wrote in his notebook on March 28, 1770:

Thisis the day on which, in 1752, I was deprived of poor dear Tetty. When I recollect the time in which we lived together, my grief of her departure is not abated; and I have less pleasure in any good that befalls me, because she does not partake it. On many occasions, I think what she would have said or done. When I saw the sea at Brighthelmstone, I wished for her to have seen it with me. But with respect to her, no rational wish is now left but that we may meet at last where the mercy of God shall make us happy, and perhaps make us instrumental to the happiness of each other. It is now 18 years.

Let us end the memorandum with a less solemn note. On Good Friday, 1779, he and Boswell went to church together. When they returned the good old doctor sat down to read the Bible, and he says, "I gave Boswell Les Pensées de Pascal, that he might not interrupt me." Of this very copy Boswell says: "I preserve the book with reverence." I wonder who has it now?

So let us wish Doctor Johnson many happy returns of the day, sure that as long as paper and ink and eyesight preserve their virtue he will bide among us, real and living and endlessly loved.

I don't know just what urchins think about; neither do they, perhaps; but presumably by the time they're twenty-eight months old they must have formed some ideas as to what is possible and what isn't. And therefore it seemed to the Urchin's curators sound and advisable to take him out to the Zoo one Sunday afternoon just to suggest to his delightful mind that nothing is impossible in this curious world.

Of course, the amusing feature of such expeditions is that it is always the adult who is astounded, while the child takes things blandly for granted. You or I can watch a tiger for hours and not make head or tail of it—in a spiritual sense, that is—whereas an urchin simply smiles with rapture, isn't the least amazed, and wants to stroke the "nice pussy."

It was a soft spring afternoon, the garden was thronged with visitors and all the indoor animals seemed to be wondering how soon they would be let out into their open-air inclosures. We filed through the wicket gate and the Urchin disdained the little green go-carts ranked for hire. He preferred to navigate the Zoo on his own white-gaitered legs. You might as well have expected Adam on his first tour of Eden to ride in a palanquin.

The Urchin entered the Zoo much in the frame of mind that must have been Adam's on that original tour of inspection. He had been told he was going to the Zoo, but that meant nothing to him. He saw by the aspect of his curators that he was to have a good time, and loyally he was prepared to exult over whatever might come his way. The first thing he saw was a large boulder—it is set up as a memorial to a former curator of the garden. "Ah," thought the Urchin, "this is what I have been brought here to admire." With a shout of glee he ran to it. "See stone," he cried. He is an enthusiast concerning stones. He has a small cardboard box of pebbles, gathered from the walks of a city square, which is very precious to him. And this magnificent big pebble, he evidently thought, was the marvelous thing he had come to examine. His custodians, far more anxious than he to feast their eyes upon lions and tigers, had hard work to lure him away. He crouched by the boulder, appraising its hugeness, and left it with the gratified air of one who has extracted the heart out of a surprising and significant experience.

The next adventure was a robin, hopping on the lawn. Every child is familiar with robins which play a leading part in so much Mother Goose mythology, so the Urchin felt himself greeting an old friend. "See Robin Red-breast!" he exclaimed, and tried to climb the low wire fence that bordered the path. The robin hopped discreetly underneath a bush, uncertain of our motives.

Now, as I have no motive but to attempt to record the truth, it is my duty to set down quite frankly that I believe the Urchin showed more enthusiasm over the stone and the robin than over any of the amazements that succeeded them. I suppose the reason for that is plain. These two objects had some understandable relation with his daily life. His small mind—we call a child's mind "small" simply by habit; perhaps it is larger than ours, for it can take in almost anything without effort—possessed well-known classifications into which the big stone and the robin fitted comfortably and naturally. But what can a child say to an ostrich or an elephant? It simply smiles and passes on. Thereby showing its superiority to some of our most eminent thinkers. They, confronted by something the like of which they have never seen before—shall we say a League of Nations or Bolshevism?—burst into shrill screams of panic abuse and flee the precinct! How much wiser the level-headed Urchin! Confronting the elephant, certainly an appalling sight to so small a mortal, he looked at the curator, who was carrying him on one shoulder, and said with an air of one seeking gently to reassure himself, "Elphunt won't come after Junior." Which is something of the mood to which the Senate is moving.

It was delightful to see the Urchin endeavor to bring some sense of order into this amazing place by his classification of the strange sights that surrounded him. He would not confess himself staggered by anything. At his first glimpse of the emu he cried ecstatic, "Look, there's a—," and paused, not knowing what on earth to call it. Then rapidly to cover up his ignorance he pointed confidently to a somewhat similar fowl and said sagely, "And there's another!" The curious moth-eaten and shabby appearance that captive camels always exhibit was accurately recorded in his addressing one of them as "poor old horsie." And after watching the llamas in silence, when he saw them nibble at some grass he was satisfied. "Moo-cow," he stated positively, and turned away. The bears did not seem to interest him until he was reminded of Goldylocks. Then he remembered the pictures of the bears in that story and began to take stock of them.

The Zoo is a pleasant place to wander on a Sunday afternoon. The willow trees, down by the brook where the otters were plunging, were a cloud of delicate green. Shrubs everywhere were bursting into bud. The Tasmanian devils those odd little swine that look like small pigs in a high fever, were lying sprawled out, belly to the sun-warmed earth, in the same whimsical posture that dogs adopt when trying to express how jolly they feel. The Urchin's curators were at a loss to know what the Tasmanian devils were and at first were led astray by a sign on a tree in the devils' inclosure. "Look, they're Norway maples," cried one curator. In the same way we thought at first that a llama was a Chinese ginkgo. These errors lead to a decent humility.

There is something about a Zoo that always makes one hungry, so we sat on a bench in the sun, watched the stately swans ruffling like square-rigged ships on the sparkling pond, and ate biscuits, while the Urchin was given a mandate over some very small morsels. He was much entertained by the monkeys in the open-air cages. In the upper story of one cage a lady baboon was embracing an urchin of her own, while underneath her husband was turning over a pile of straw in a persistent search for small deer. It was a sad day for the monkeys at the Zoo when the rule was made that no peanuts can be brought into the park. I should have thought that peanuts were an inalienable right for captive monkeys. The order posted everywhere that one must not give the animals tobacco seems almost unnecessary nowadays, with the weed at present prices. The Urchin was greatly interested in the baboon rummaging in his straw. "Mokey kicking the grass away," he observed thoughtfully.

Down in the grizzly-bear pit one of the bears squatted himself in the pool and sat there, grinning complacently at the crowd. We explained that the bear was taking a bath. This presented a familiar train of thought to the Urchin and he watched the grizzly climb out of his tank and scatter the water over the stone floor. As we walked away the Urchin observed thoughtfully, "He's dying." This somewhat shocked the curators, who did not know that their offspring had even heard of death. "What does he mean?" we asked ourselves. "He's dying," repeated the Urchin in a tone of happy conviction. Then the explanation struck us. "He's drying!" "Quite right," we said. "After his bath he has to dry himself."

We went home on a crowded Girard Avenue car, thinking impatiently that it will be some time before we can read "The Jungle Book" to the Urchin. In the summer, when the elephants take their bath outdoors, we'll go again. And the last thing the Urchin said that night as he fell asleep was, "Mokey kicking the grass away."

Robert Urwick, the author, was not yet so calloused by success that he was immune from flattery. And so when he received the following letter he was rather pleased:

Mr. Robt. Urwick, dear sir I seen your story in this weeks Saturday Evn Cudgel, not that I can afford to buy journals of that stamp but I pick up the copy on a bench in the park. Now Mr. Urwick I am a poor man but I was brought up a patron of the arts and I am bound to say that story of yours called Brass Nuckles was a fine story and I am proud to compliment you upon it. Mr. Urwick that brings me to another matter upon which I have been intending to write you upon for a long time but did not like to risk an intrusion. I used to dable in literature to some little extent myself if that will lend a fellow feeling for a craftsman in distress. I am a poor man, out of work through no fault of mine but on account of the illness of my wife and my sitting up with her at nights for weeks and weeks I could not hold my job whch required mentle concentration of a vigorous sort. Now Mr. Urwick I have a sick wife and seven children to support, and the rent shortly due and the landlord threatens to eject us if I don't pay what I owe. As it happens my wife and I are hoping to be blessed again soon, with our eighth. Owing to my love and devotion for the fine arts we have named all the earlier children for noted authors or writers Rudyard Kipling, W.J. Bryan, Mark Twain, Debs, Irvin Cobb, Walt Mason and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Now Mr. Urwick I thought that I would name the next one after you, seeing you have done so much for literature Robert if a boy or Roberta if a girl with Urwick for a middle name thus making you a godfather in a manner of speaking. I was wondering whether you would not feel like making a little godfathers gift for this innocent babe now about to come into the world and to bare your name. Say twenty dollars, but not a check if it can be avoided as owing to tempry ambarrassment I am not holding any bank account, and currency would be easier for me to convert into the necesity of life.I wrote this letter once before but tore it up fearing to intrude, but now my need compels me to be frank. I hope you will adorn our literature with many more beautiful compositions similiar to Brass Nuckles.Yours trulyMr Henry Phillips454 East 34 St.

I wrote this letter once before but tore it up fearing to intrude, but now my need compels me to be frank. I hope you will adorn our literature with many more beautiful compositions similiar to Brass Nuckles.

Mr. Urwick, after reading this remarkable tribute twice, laughed heartily and looked in his bill-folder. Finding there a crisp ten-dollar note, he folded it into an envelope and mailed it to his admirer, inclosing with it a friendly letter wishing success to the coming infant who was to carry his name.

A fortnight later he found on his breakfast table a very soiled postal card with this message:

Dear and kind friend, the babe arrived and to the joy of all is a boy and has been cristened Robert Urwick Phillips. Unfortunately he is a sicly infant and the doctor says he must have port wine at once or he may not survive. His mother and I were overjoyed at your munificant gift and hope some day to tell the boy of his beanefactor, Mr. Kipling only sent five spot to his namesake. Do you think you could spare five dollars to help pay for port wineYours gratefullyHenry Phillips?

Mr. Urwick was a little surprised at the thought of port wine for one so young, but happening to be bound down town that morning he thought it might be interesting to look in at Mr. Phillips' residence and find out how his godchild was faring. If the child were really in distress he might perhaps contribute a small sum to insure proper medical care.

The address proved to be a shabby tenement house hedged by saloons. A ragged little girl (he wondered whether she were Ella Wheeler Wilcox Phillips) pointed him to Mr. Phillips's door. Meeting no answer, he entered.

The room was empty—a single room, with a cot bed, an oil stove and a table littered with stationery and stamps. Of Mrs. Phillips, his namesake or the other seven he saw no signs. He advanced to the table.

Evidently Mr. Phillips was not a ready writer and his letters cost him some pains. Several lay open on the table in different stages of composition. They were all exactly the same in wording as the first one Urwick had received. They were addressed to Booth Tarkington, Don Marquis, Ellen Glasgow, Edna Ferber, Agnes Repplier, Holworthy Hall and Fannie Hurst. Each letter offered to name some coming child after these Parnassians. Near by lay a pile of old magazines from which the industrious Mr. Phillips evidently culled the names of his literary favorites.

Urwick smiled grimly and tiptoed from the room. On the stairs he met a fat charwoman. He asked her if Mr. Phillips were married. "Whisky is his wife and child," she replied.

A month later Urwick put Phillips into a story which he sold to theSaturday Evening Cudgelfor $500. When it was published he sent a marked copy of the magazine to the father of Robert Urwick Phillips with the following note:

"Dear Mr. Phillips—I owe you about $490. Come around some day and I'll blow you to lunch."

Man with key ring

I know a man who carries in his left-leg trouser pocket a large heavy key ring, on which there are a dozen or more keys of all shapes and sizes. There is a latchkey, and the key of his private office, and the key of his roll-top desk, and the key of his safe deposit box, and a key to the little mail box at the front door of his flat (he lives in what is known as a pushbutton apartment house), and a key that does something to his motor car (not being an automobilist, I don't know just what), and a key to his locker at the golf club, and keys of various traveling bags and trunks and filing cases, and all the other keys with which a busy man burdens himself. They make a noble clanking against his thigh when he walks (he is usually in a hurry), and he draws them out of his pocket with something of an imposing gesture when he approaches the ground glass door of his office at ten past nine every morning. Yet sometimes he takes them out and looks at them sadly. They are a mark and symbol of servitude, just as surely as if they had been heated red-hot and branded on his skin.

Not necessarily an unhappy servitude, I hasten to remark, for servitude is not always an unhappy condition. It may be the happiest of conditions, and each of those little metal strips may be regarded as a medal of honor. In fact, my friend does so regard them. He does not think of the key of his roll-top desk as a reminder of hateful tasks that must be done willy-nilly, but rather as an emblem of hard work that he enjoys and that is worth doing. He does not think of the latchkey as a mandate that he must be home by seven o'clock, rain or shine; nor does he think of it as a souvenir of the landlord who must be infallibly paid on the first of the month next ensuing. No, he thinks of the latchkey as a magic wand that admits him to a realm of kindness "whose service is perfect freedom," as say the fine old words in the prayer book. And he does not think of his safe deposit box as a hateful little casket of leases and life insurance policies and contracts and wills, but rather as the place where he has put some of his own past life into voluntary bondage—into Liberty Bondage—at four and a quarter per cent. Yet, however blithely he may psychologize these matters, he is wise enough to know that he is not a free man. However content in servitude, he does not blink the fact that it is servitude.

"Upon his will he binds a radiant chain," said Joyce Kilmer in a fine sonnet. However radiant, it is still a chain.

So it is that sometimes, in the lulls of telephoning and signing contracts and talking to salesmen and preparing estimates and dictating letters "that must get off to-night" and trying to wriggle out of serving on the golf club's house committee, my friend flings away his cigar, gets a corncob pipe out of his desk drawer, and contemplates his key ring a trifle wistfully. This nubby little tyrant that he carries about with him always makes him think of a river in the far Canadian north, a river that he visited once, long ago, before he had built up all the barbed wire of life about his spirit. It was a green lucid river that ran in a purposeful way between long fringes of pine trees. There were sandy shelves where he and a fellow canoeist with the good gift of silence built campfires and fried bacon, or fish of their own wooing. The name of that little river (his voice is grave as he recalls it), was the Peace; and it was not necessary to paddle if you didn't feel like it. "The current ran" (it is pathetic to hear him say it) "from four to seven miles an hour."

The tobacco smoke sifts and eddies into the carefully labeled pigeonholes of his desk, and his stenographer wonders whether she dare interrupt him to ask whether that word was "priority" or "minority" in the second paragraph of the memo to Mr. Ebbsmith. He smells that bacon again; he remembers stretching out on the cool sand to watch the dusk seep up from the valley and flood the great clear arch of green-blue sky. He remembers that there were no key rings in his pocket then, no papers, no letters, no engagements to meet Mr. Fonseca at a luncheon of the Rotary Club to discuss demurrage. He remembers the clear sparkle of the Peace water in the sunshine, its downward swell and slant over many a boulder, its milky vexation where it slid among stones. He remembers what he had said to himself then, but had since forgotten, that no matter what wounds and perplexities the world offers, it also offers a cure for each one if we know where to seek it. Suddenly he gets a vision of the whole race of men, campers out on a swinging ball, brothers in the common motherhood of earth. Born out of the same inexplicable soil bred to the same problems of star and wind and sun, what absurdity of civilization is it that has robbed men of this sense of kinship? Why he himself, he feels, could enter a Bedouin tent or an Eskimo snow-hut and find some bond of union with the inmates. The other night, he reflects, he saw moving pictures of some Fiji natives, and could read in their genial grinning faces the same human impulses he knew in himself. What have men done to cheat themselves of the enjoyment of this amazing world? "We've been cheated!" he cries, to the stenographer's horror.

He thinks of his friends, his partners, his employees, of conductors on trains and waiters in lunchrooms and drivers of taxicabs. He thinks, in one amazing flash of realization, of all the men and women he has ever seen or heard of—how each one nourishes secretly some little rebellion, some dream of a wider, freer life, a life less hampered, less mean, less material. He thinks how all men yearn to cross salt water, to scale peaks, to tramp until weary under a hot sun. He hears the Peace, in its far northern valley, brawling among stones, and his heart is very low.

"Mr. Edwards to see you," says the stenographer.

"I'm sorry, sir," says Edwards, "but I've had the offer of another job and I think I shall accept it. It's a good thing for a chap to get a chance--"

My friend slips the key ring back in his pocket.

"What's this?" he says. "Nonsense! When you've got a good job, the thing to do is to keep it. Stick to it, my boy. There's a great future for you here. Don't get any of those fool ideas about changing around from one thing to another."

Loitering perchance on the western pavement of Madison avenue, between the streets numbered 38 and 39, and gazing with an observant eye upon the pedestrians passing southward, you would be likely to see, about 8:40 o'clock of the morning, a gentleman of remarkable presence approaching with no bird-like tread. This creature, clad in a suit of subfuse respectable weave, bearing in his hand a cane of stout timber with a right-angled hornblende grip, and upon his head a hat of rich texture, would probably also carry in one hand (the left) a leather case filled with valuable papers, and in the other hand (the right, which also held the cane) a cigarette, lit upon leaving the Grand Central subway station. This cigarette the person of our tale would frequentatively apply to his lips, and then withdraw with a quick, swooping motion. With a rapid, somewhat sidelong gait (at first somehow clumsy, yet upon closer observation a mode of motion seen to embrace certain elements of harmony) this gentleman would converge upon the southwest corner of Madison avenue and 38th street; and the intent observer, noting the menacing contours of the face, would conclude that he was going to work.

Man with cane and leather case

This gentleman, beneath his sober but excellently haberdashered surtout, was plainly a man of large frame, of a Sam Johnsonian mould, but, to the surprise of the calculating observer, it would be noted that his volume (or mass) was not what his bony structure implied. Spiritually, in deed, this interesting individual conveyed to the world a sensation of stoutness, of bulk and solidity, which (upon scrutiny) was not (or would not be) verified by measurement. Evidently, you will conclude, a stout man grown thin; or, at any rate, grown less stout. His molded depth, one might assess at 20 inches between the eaves; his longitude, say, five feet eleven; his registered tonnage, 170; his cargo, literary; and his destination, the editorial sancta of a well-known publishing house.

This gentleman, in brief, is Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday (but not the "stout Cortes" of the poet), the editor ofThe Bookman.

"It would seem that whenever Nature had a man of letters up her sleeve, the first gift with which she has felt necessary to dower him has been a preacher sire."

R.C.H. of N.B. Tarkington.

Mr. Holliday was born in Indianapolis on July 18, 1880. It is evident that ink, piety and copious speech circulated in the veins of his clan, for at least two of his grandfathers were parsons, and one of them, Dr. Ferdinand Cortez Holliday, was the author of a volume called "Indiana Methodism" in which he was the biographer of the Rev. Joseph Tarkington, the grandfather of Newton B. Tarkington, sometimes heard of as Booth Tarkington, a novelist. Thus the hand of Robert C. Holliday was linked by the manacle of destiny to the hand of Newton B. Tarkington, and it is a quaint satisfaction to note that Mr. Holliday's first book was that volume "Booth Tarkington," one of the liveliest and soundest critical memoirs it has been our fortune to enjoy.

Like all denizens of Indianapolis—"Tarkingtonapolis," Mr. Holliday calls it—our subject will discourse at considerable volume of his youth in that high-spirited city. His recollections, both sacred and profane, are, however, not in our present channel. After a reputable schooling young Robert proceeded to New York in 1899 to study art at the Art Students' League, and later became a pupil of Twachtman. The present commentator is not in a position to say how severely either art or Mr. Holliday suffered in the mutual embrace. I have seen some of his black and white posters which seemed to me robust and considerably lively. At any rate, Mr. Holliday exhibited drawings on Fifth avenue and had illustrative work published byScribner's Magazine. He did commercial designs and comic pictures for juvenile readers. At this time he lived in a rural community of artists in Connecticut, and did his own cooking. Also, he is proud of having lived in a garret on Broome street. This phase of his career is not to be slurred over, for it is a clue to much of his later work. His writing often displays the keen eye of the painter, and his familiarity with the technique of pencil and brush has much enriched his capacity to see and to make his reader see with him. Such essays as "Going to Art Exhibitions," and the one-third dedication of "Walking-Stick Papers" to Royal Cortissoz are due to his interest in the world as pictures.

While we think of it, then, let us put down our first memorandum upon the art of Mr. Holliday:

First Memo—Mr. Holliday's stuff is distilled from life!

It is not said why our hero abandoned bristol board and india ink, and it is no duty of this inquirendo to offer surmise. The fact is that he disappeared from Broome street, and after the appropriate interval might have been observed (odd as it seems) on the campus of the University of Kansas. This vault into the petals of the sunflower seems so quaint that I once attempted to find out from Mr. Holliday just when it was that he attended courses at that institution. He frankly said that he could not remember. Now he has no memory at all for dates, I will vouch; yet it seems odd (I say) that he did not even remember the numerals of the class in which he was enrolled. A "queer feller," indeed, as Mr. Tarkington has called him. So I cannot attest, with hand on Book, that he really was at Kansas University. He may have been a footpad during that period. I have often thought to write to the dean of the university and check the matter up. It may be that entertaining anecdotes of our hero's college career could be spaded up.

Just why this remote atheneum was sconce for Mr. Holliday's candle I do not hazard. It seems I have heard him say that his cousin, Professor Wilbur Cortez Abbott (of Yale) was then teaching at the Kansas college, and this was the reason. It doesn't matter now; fifty years hence it may be of considerable importance.

However, we must press on a little faster. From Kansas he returned to New York and became a salesman in the book store of Charles Scribner's Sons, then on Fifth avenue below Twenty-third street. Here he was employed for about five years. From this experience may he traced three of the most delightful of the "Walking-Stick Papers." It was while at Scribner's that he met Joyce Kilmer, who also served as a Scribner book-clerk for two weeks in 1909. This friendship meant more to Bob Holliday than any other. The two men were united by intimate adhesions of temperament and worldly situation. Those who know what friendship means among men who have stood on the bottom rung together will ask no further comment. Kilmer was Holliday's best man in 1913; Holliday stood godfather to Kilmer's daughter Rose. On Aug. 22, 1918, Mrs. Kilmer appointed Mr. Holliday her husband's literary executor. His memoir of Joyce Kilmer is a fitting token of the manly affection that sweetens life and enriches him who even sees it from a distance.

Just when Holliday's connection with the Scribner store ceased I do not know. My guess is, about 1911. He did some work for the New York Public Library (tucking away in his files the material for the essay "Human Municipal Documents") and also dabbled in eleemosynary science for the Russell Sage Foundation; though the details of the latter enterprise I cannot even conjecture. Somehow or other he fell into the most richly amusing post that a belletristic journalist ever adorned, as general factotum ofThe Fishing Gazette, a trade journal. This is laid bare for the world in "The Fish Reporter."

About 1911 he began to contribute humorous sketches to the Saturday Magazine of the New YorkEvening Post. In 1912-13 he was writing signed reviews for the New YorkTimesReview of Books. 1913-14 he was assistant literary editor of the New YorkTribune. His meditations on the reviewing job are embalmed in

Drawing of WWI helmet resting on a laurel wreath

"That Reviewer Cuss." In 1914 the wear and tear of continual hard work on Grub Street rather got the better of him: he packed a bag and spent the summer in England. Four charming essays record his adventures there, where we may leave him for the moment while we warm up to another aspect of the problem. Let us just set down our second memorandum:

Second Memo—Mr. Holliday knows the Literary Game from All Angles!

Perhaps I should apologize for treating Mr. Holliday's "Walking-Stick Papers" in this biographical fashion. And yet I cannot resist it for this book is Mr. Holliday himself. It is mellow, odd, aromatic and tender, just as he is. It is (as he said of something else) "saturated with a distinguished, humane tradition of letters."

The book is exciting reading because you can trace in it the growth and felicitous toughening of a very remarkable talent. Mr. Holliday has been through a lively and gruelling mill. Like every sensitive journalist, he has been mangled at Ephesus. Slight and debonair as some of his pieces are, there is not one that is not an authentic fiber from life. That is the beauty of this sort of writing—the personal essay—it admits us to the very pulse of the machine. We see this man: selling books at Scribner's, pacing New York streets at night gloating on the yellow windows and the random ring of words, fattening his spirit on hundreds of books, concocting his own theory of the niceties of prose. We see that volatile humor which is native in him flickering like burning brandy round the rich plum pudding of his theme. With all his playfulness, when he sets out to achieve a certain effect he builds cunningly, with sure and skillful art. See (for instance) in his "As to People," his superbly satisfying picture (how careless it seems!) of his scrubwoman, closing with the précis of Billy Henderson's wife, which drives the nail through and turns it on the under side—

BillyHenderson's wife is handsome; she is rich; she is an excellent cook; she loves Billy Henderson.

See "My friend the Policeman," or "On Going a Journey," or "The Deceased"—this last is perhaps the high-water mark of the book. To vary the figure, this essay dips its Plimsoll-mark full under. It is freighted with far more than a dozen pages might be expected to carry safely. So quietly, so quaintly told, what a wealth of humanity is in it! Am I wrong in thinking that those fellow-artists who know the thrill of a great thing greatly done will catch breath when they read this, of the minor obits in the press—

Wego into the feature headed "Died," a department similar to that on the literary page headed "Books Received." ... We are set in small type, with lines following the name line indented. It is difficult for me to tell with certainty from the printed page, but I think we are set without leads.

In such passages, where the easy sporting-tweed fabric of Mr. Holliday's merry and liberal style fits his theme as snugly as the burr its nut, one feels tempted to cry joyously (as he says in some other connection), "it seems as if it were a book you had written yourself in a dream." And follow him, for sheer fun, in the "Going a Journey" essay. Granted that it would never have been written but for Hazlitt and Stevenson and Belloc. Yet it is fresh distilled, it has its own sparkle. Beginning with an even pace, how it falls into a swinging stride, drugs you with hilltops and blue air! Crisp, metrical, with a steady drum of feet, it lifts, purges and sustains. "This is the religious side" of reading an essay!

Mr. Holliday, then, gives us in generous measure the "certain jolly humors" which R.L.S. says we voyage to find. He throws off flashes of imaginative felicity—as where he says of canes, "They are the light to blind men." Where he describes Mr. Oliver Herford "listing to starboard, like a postman." Where he says of the English who use colloquially phrases known to us only in great literature—"There are primroses in their speech." And where he begins his "Memoirs of a Manuscript," "I was born in Indiana."

We are now ready to let fall our third memorandum:

Third Memo—Behind his colloquial, easygoing (apparently careless) utterance, Mr. Holliday conceals a high quality of literary art.

Mr. Holliday was driven home from England and Police Constable Buckington by the war, which broke out while he was living in Chelsea. My chronology is a bit mixed here; just what he was doing from autumn, 1914, to February, 1916, I don't know. Was it then that he held the fish reporter job? Come to think of it, I believe it was. Anyway, in February, 1916, he turned up in Garden City, Long Island, where I first had the excitement of clapping eyes on him. Some of the adventures of that spring and summer may be inferred from "Memories of a Manuscript." Others took place in the austere lunch cathedral known at the press of Doubleday, Page & Company as the "garage," or on walks that summer between the Country Life Press and the neighboring champaigns of Hempstead. The full story of the Porrier's Corner Club, of which Mr. Holliday and myself are the only members, is yet to be told. As far as I was concerned it was love at first sight. This burly soul, rumbling Johnsonianly upon lettered topics, puffing unending Virginia cigarettes, gazing with shy humor through thick-paned spectacles—well, on Friday, June 23, 1916, Bob and I decided to collaborate in writing a farcical novel. It is still unwritten, save the first few chapters. I only instance this to show how fast passion proceeded.

It would not surprise me if at some future time Mrs. Bedell's boarding house, on Jackson Street in Hempstead, becomes a place of pilgrimage for lovers of the essay. They will want to see the dark little front room on the ground floor where Owd Bob used to scatter the sheets of his essays as he was retyping them from a huge scrapbook and grooming them for a canter among publishers' sanhedrim. They will want to see (but will not, I fear) the cool barrel-room at the back of George D. Smith's tavern, an ale-house that was blithe to our fancy because the publican bore the same name as that of a very famous dealer in rare books. Along that pleasant bar, with its shining brass scuppers, Bob and I consumed many beakers of well-chilled amber during that warm summer. His urbanolatrous soul pined for the city, and he used in those days to expound the doctrine that the suburbanite really has to go to town in order to get fresh air.

In September, 1916, Holliday's health broke down. He had been feeling poorly most of the summer, and continuous hard work induced a spell of nervous depression. Very wisely he went back to Indianapolis to rest. After a good lay-off he tackled the Tarkington book, which was written in Indianapolis the following winter and spring. And "Walking-Stick Papers" began to go the rounds.

I have alluded more than once to Mr. Holliday's book on Tarkington. This original, mellow, convivial, informal and yet soundly argued critique has been overlooked by many who have delighted to honor Holliday as an essayist. But it is vastly worth reading. It is a brilliant study, full of "onion atoms" as Sydney Smith's famous salad, and we flaunt it merrily in the face of those who are frequently crapehanging and dirging that we have no sparkling young Chestertons and Rebecca Wests and J.C. Squires this side of Queenstown harbor. Rarely have creator and critic been joined in so felicitous a marriage. And indeed the union was appointed in heaven and smiles in the blood, for (as I have noted) Mr. Holliday's grandfather was the biographer of Tarkington's grandsire, also a pioneer preacher of the metaphysical commonwealth of Indiana. Mr. Holliday traces with a good deal of humor and circumstance the various ways in which the gods gave Mr. Tarkington just the right kind of ancestry, upbringing, boyhood and college career to produce a talented writer. But the fates that catered to Tarkington with such generous hand never dealt him a better run of cards than when Holliday wrote this book.

The study is one of surpassing interest, not merely as a service to native criticism but as a revelation of Holliday's ability to follow through a sustained intellectual task with the same grasp and grace that he afterward showed in the memoir of Kilmer in which his heart was so deeply engaged. Of a truth, Mr. Holliday's success in putting himself within Tarkington's dashing checked kuppenheimers is a fine achievement of projected psychology. He knows Tarkington so well that if the latter were unhappily deleted by some "wilful convulsion of brute nature" I think it undoubtable that his biographer could reconstruct a very plausible automaton, and would know just what ingredients to blend. A dash of Miss Austen, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Daudet; flavored perhaps with coal smoke from Indianapolis, spindrift from the Maine coast and a few twanging chords from the Princeton Glee Club.

Fourth Memo—Mr. Holliday is critic as well as essayist.

It was the summer of 1917 when Owd Bob came back to New York. Just at that juncture I happened to hear that a certain publisher needed an editorial man, and when Bob and I were at Browne's discussing the fate of "Walking-Stick Papers" over a jug of shandygaff, I told him this news. He hurried to the office in question through a drenching rain-gust, and has been there ever since. The publisher performed an act of perspicuity rare indeed. He not only accepted the manuscript, but its author as well.

So that is the story of "Walking-Stick Papers," and it does not cause me to droop if you say I talk of matters of not such great moment. What a joy it would have been if some friend had jotted down memoranda of this sort concerning some of Elia's doings. The book is a garner of some of the most racy, vigorous and genuinely flavored essays that this country has produced for some time. Dear to me, every one of them, as clean-cut blazes by a sincere workman along a trail full of perplexity and struggle, as Grub Street always will be for the man who dips an honest pen that will not stoop to conquer. And if you should require an accurate portrait of their author I cannot do better than quote what Grote said of Socrates:

Nothingcould be more public, perpetual, and indiscriminate as to persons than his conversation. But as it was engaging, curious, and instructive to hear, certain persons made it their habit to attend him as companions and listeners.

Owd Bob has long been the object of extreme attachment and high spirits among his intimates. The earlier books have been followed by "Broome Street Straws" and "Peeps at People," vividly personal collections that will arouse immediate affection and amusement among his readers. And of these books will be said (once more in Grote's words about Socrates):

Notonly his conversation reached the minds of a much wider circle, but he became more abundantly known as a person.

Let us add, then, our final memorandum:

Fifth Memo—These essays are the sort of thing you cannot afford to miss. In them you sit down to warm your wits at the glow of a droll, delightful, unique mind.

So much (at the moment) for Bob Holliday.

Drawing of woman with apple

The other evening we went to dinner with a gentleman whom it pleases our fancy to call the Caliph.

Now a Caliph, according to our notion, is a Haroun-al-Raschid kind of person; one who governs a large empire of hearts with a genial and whimsical sway; circulating secretly among his fellow-men, doing kindnesses often not even suspected by their beneficiaries. He is the sort of person of whom the trained observer may think, when he hears an unexpected kindness-grenade exploding somewhere down the line, "I'll bet that came from the Caliph's dugout!" A Caliph's heart is not surrounded by barbed wire entanglements or a strip of No Man's Land. Also, and rightly, he is stern to malefactors and fakers of all sorts.

It would have been sad if any one so un-Caliphlike as William Hohenzollern had got his eisenbahn through to Bagdad, the city sacred to the memory of a genial despot who spent his cabarabian nights in an excellent fashion. That, however, has nothing to do with the story.

Mr. and Mrs. Caliph are people so delightful that they leave in one's mind a warm afterglow of benevolent sociability. They have an infinite interest and curiosity in the hubbub of human moods and crotchets that surrounds us all. And when one leaves their doorsill one has a genial momentum of the spirit that carries one on rapidly and cheerfully. One has an irresistible impulse to give something away, to stroke the noses of horses, to write a kind letter to the fuel administrator or do almost anything gentle and gratuitous. The Caliphs of the world don't know it, but that is the effect they produce on their subjects.

As we left, Mr. and Mrs. Caliph pressed upon us an apple. One of those gorgeous apples that seem to grow wrapped up in tissue paper, and are displayed behind plate glass windows. A huge apple, tinted with gold and crimson and pale yellow shading off to pink. The kind of apple whose colors are overlaid with a curious mist until you polish it on your coat, when it gleams like a decanter of claret. An apple so large and weighty that if it had dropped on Sir Isaac Newton it would have fractured his skull. The kind of apple that would have made the garden of Eden safe for democracy, because it is so beautiful no one would have thought of eating it.

That was the kind of apple the Caliph gave us.

It was a cold night, and we walked down Chestnut street dangling that apple, rubbing it on our sleeve, throwing it up and down and catching it again. We stopped at a cigar store to buy some pipe tobacco. Still running on Caliph, by which we mean still beguiled by his geniality, we fell into talk with the tobacconist. "That's a fine apple you have there," said he. For an instant we thought of giving it to him, but then we reflected that a man whose days are spent surrounded by rich cigars and smokables is dangerously felicitous already, and a sudden joy might blast his blood vessels.

The shining of the street lamps was reflected on the polished skin of our fruit as we went our way. As we held it in our arms it glowed like a huge ruby. We passed a blind man selling pencils, and thought of giving it to him. Then we reflected that a blind man would lose half the pleasure of the adventure because he couldn't see the colors. We bought a pencil instead. Still running on Caliph, you see.

In our excitement we did what we always do in moments of stress—went into a restaurant and ordered a piece of hot mince pie. Then we remembered that we had just dined. Never mind, we sat there and contemplated the apple as it lay ruddily on the white porcelain tabletop. Should we give it to the waitress? No, because apples were a commonplace to her. The window of the restaurant held a great pyramid of beauties. To her, an apple was merely something to be eaten, instead of the symbol of a grand escapade. Instead, we gave her a little medallion of a buffalo that happened to be in our pocket.

Already the best possible destination for that apple had come to our mind. Hastening zealously up a long flight of stairs in a certain large building we went to a corner where sits a friend of ours, a night watchman. Under a drop light he sits through long and tedious hours, beguiling his vigil with a book. He is a great reader. He eats books alive. Lately he has become much absorbed in Saint Francis of Assisi, and was deep in the "Little Flowers" when we found him.

"We've brought you something," we said, and held the apple where the electric light brought out all its brilliance.

He was delighted and his gentle elderly face shone with awe at the amazing vividness of the fruit.

"I tell you what I'll do," he said. "That apple's much too fine for me. I'll take it home to the wife."

Of course his wife will say the same thing. She will be embarrassed by the surpassing splendor of that apple and will give it to some friend of hers whom she thinks more worthy than herself. And that friend will give it to some one else, and so it will go rolling on down the ages, passing from hand to hand, conferring delight, and never getting eaten. Ultimately some one, trying to think of a recipient really worthy of its deliciousness, will give it to Mr. and Mrs. Caliph. And they, blessed innocents, will innocently exclaim, "Why we never saw such a magnificent apple in all our lives."

And it will be true, for by that time the apple will gleam with an unearthly brightness, enhanced and burnished by all the kind thoughts that have surrounded it for so long.

As we walked homeward under a frosty sparkle of sky we mused upon all the different kinds of apples we have encountered. There are big glossy green apples and bright red apples and yellow apples and also that particularly delicious kind (whose name we forget) that is the palest possible cream color—almost white. We have seen apples of strange shapes, something like a pear (sheepnoses, they call them), and the Maiden Blush apples with their delicate shading of yellow and debutante pink. And what a poetry in the names—Winesap, Pippin, Northern Spy, Baldwin, Ben Davis, York Imperial, Wolf River, Jonathan, Smokehouse, Summer Rambo, Rome Beauty, Golden Grimes, Shenango Strawberry, Benoni!

We suppose there is hardly a man who has not an apple orchard tucked away in his heart somewhere. There must be some deep reason for the old suspicion that the Garden of Eden was an apple orchard. Why is it that a man can sleep and smoke better under an apple tree than in any other kind of shade? Sir Isaac Newton was a wise man, and he chose an apple tree to sit beneath. (We have often wondered, by the way, how it is that no one has ever named an apple the Woolsthorpe after Newton's home in Lincolnshire, where the famous apple incident occurred.)

An apple orchard, if it is to fill the heart of man to the full with affectionate satisfaction, should straggle down a hillside toward a lake and a white road where the sun shines hotly. Some of its branches should trail over an old, lichened and weather-stained stone wall, dropping their fruit into the highway for thirsty pedestrians. There should be a little path running athwart it, down toward the lake and the old flat-bottomed boat, whose bilge is scattered with the black and shriveled remains of angleworms used for bait. In warm August afternoons the sweet savor of ripening drifts warmly on the air, and there rises the drowsy hum of wasps exploring the windfalls that are already rotting on the grass. There you may lie watching the sky through the chinks of the leaves, and imagining the cool, golden tang of this autumn's cider vats.

You see what it is to have Caliphs in the world.

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