Hints to Pilgrims

Out in Gilmer, Texas, there is a hog with six legs – "alive and healthy. Five hundred dollars take it." Here is a merchant who will sell you "snake, frog and monkey tights." After your church supper, on the stage of the Sunday school, surely, in such a costume, my dear madam, you could draw a crowd. Study the trombone and double your income. Can you yodle? "It can be learned at home, evenings, in six easy lessons."

A used popcorn engine is cut in half. A waffle machine will be shipped to you on trial. Does no one wish to take the road with a five-legged cow? Here is one for sale – an extraordinary animal that cleaned up sixty dollars in one afternoon at a County Fair in Indiana. "Walk up, ladies and gentlemen! The marvel of the age. Plenty of time before the big show starts. A five-legged cow. Count 'em. Answers to the name of Guenevere. Shown before all the crowned heads of Europe. Once owned by the Czar of Russia. Only a dime. A tenth of a dollar. Ten cents. Show about to start."

Or perhaps you think it more profitable to buy a steam calliope – some very good ones are offered second-hand in the Paste-Brush– and tour your neighboring towns. Make a stand at the crossroads under the soldiers' monument. Give a free concert. Then when the crowd is thick about you, offer them a magic ointment. Rub an old man for his rheumatism. Throw away his crutch, clap him on the back and pronounce him cured. Or pull teeth for a dollar each. It takes but a moment for a diagnosis. When once the fashion starts, the profitable bicuspids will drop around you.

And Funny Castles can be bought. Perhaps you do not know what they are. They are usual in amusement parks. You and a favorite lady enter, hand in hand. It is dark inside and if she is of an agreeable timidity she leans to your support. Only if you are a churl will you deny your arm. Then presently a fiery devil's head flashes beside you in the passage. The flooring tilts and wobbles as you step. Here, surely, no lady will wish to keep her independence. Presently a picture opens in the wall. It is souls in hell, or the Queen of Sheba on a journey. Then a sharp draft ascends through an opening in the floor. Your lady screams and minds her skirts. A progress through a Funny Castle, it is said, ripens the greenest friendship. Now take the lady outside, smooth her off and regale her with a lovers' sundae. Funny Castles, with wind machines, a Queen of Sheba almost new, and devil's head complete, can be purchased. Remit twenty-five per cent with order. The balance on delivery.

Perhaps I am too old for these high excitements. Funny Castles are behind me. Ladies of the circus, alas! who ride in golden chariots are no longer beautiful. Cleopatra in her tinsel has sunk to the common level. Clowns with slap-sticks rouse in me only a moderate delight.

At this moment, as I write, the clock strikes twelve. It is noon and school is out. There is a slamming of desks and a rush for caps. The boys scamper on the stairs. They surge through the gate. The acrobat on the billboard greets their eyes – the clown, also the lady with the pink legs. They pause. They gather in a circle. They have fallen victims to her smile. They mark the great day in their memory.

The wind is from the south. The daffodils flourish along the fences. The street organ hangs heavily on its strap. There will be a parade in the morning. The freaks will be on their platforms by one o'clock. The great show starts at two. I shall buy tickets and take Nepos, my nephew.

In Praise of a Lawn-Mower

IDO not recall that anyone has written the praises of a lawn-mower. I seem to sow in virgin soil. One could hardly expect a poet to lift up his voice on such a homely theme. By instinct he prefers the more rhythmic scythe. Nor, on the other hand, will mechanical folk pay a full respect to a barren engine without cylinders and motive power. But to me it is just intricate enough to engage the interest. I can trace the relation of its wheels and knives, and see how the lesser spinning starts the greater. In a printing press, on the contrary, I hear only the general rattle. Before a gas-engine, also, I am dumb. Its sixteen processes to an explosion baffle me. I could as easily digest a machine for setting type. I nod blankly, as if a god explained the motion of the stars. Even when I select a motor I take it merely on reputation and by bouncing on the cushions to test its comfort.

It has been a great many years since I was last intimate with a lawn-mower. My acquaintance began in the days when a dirty face was the badge of freedom. One early Saturday morning I was hard at work before breakfast. Mother called down through the upstairs shutters, at the first clicking of the knives, to ask if I wore my rubbers in the dew. With the money earned by noon, I went to Conrad's shop. The season for tops and marbles had gone by. But in the window there was a peerless baseball with a rubber core, known as a cock-of-the-walk. By indecision, even by starting for the door, I bought it a nickel off because it was specked by flies.

It did not occur to me last week, at first, that I could cut the grass. I talked with an Irishman who keeps the lawn next door. He leaned on his rake, took his pipe from his mouth and told me that his time was full. If he had as many hands as a centipede – so he expressed himself – he could not do all the work that was asked of him. The whole street clamored for his service. Then I talked with an Italian on the other side, who comes to work on a motor-cycle with his lawn-mower across his shoulder. His time was worth a dollar an hour, and he could squeeze me in after supper and before breakfast. But how can I consistently write upstairs – I am puttering with a novel – with so expensive a din sounding in my ears? My expected royalties shrink beside such swollen pay. So I have become my own yard-man.

Last week I had the lawn-mower sharpened, but it came home without adjustment. It went down the lawn without clipping a blade. What a struggle I had as a child getting the knives to touch along their entire length! I remember it as yesterday. What an ugly path was left when they cut on one side only! My bicycle chain, the front wheel that wobbled, the ball-bearings in the gear, none of these things were so perplexing. Last week I got out my screw-driver with somewhat of my old feeling of impotence. I sat down on the grass with discouragement in contemplation. One set of screws had to be loosened while another set was tightened, and success lay in the delicacy of my advance. What was my amazement to discover that on a second trial my mower cut to its entire width! Even when I first wired a base-plug and found that the table lamp would really light, I was not more astonished.

This success with the lawn-mower has given me hope. I am not, as I am accused, all thumbs. I may yet become a handy man around the house. Is the swirl of furnace pipes inside my intellect? Perhaps I can fix the leaky packing in the laundry tubs, and henceforth look on the plumber as an equal brother. My dormant brain cells at last are wakened. But I must curb myself. I must not be too useful. There is no rest for a handy man. It is ignorance that permits a vacant holiday. At most I shall admit a familiarity with base-plugs and picture-wire and rubber washers – perhaps even with canvas awnings, which smack pleasantly of the sea – but I shall commit myself no further.

Once in a while I rather enjoy cleaning the garage – raking down the cobwebs from the walls and windows with a stream from the hose – puddling the dirt into the central drain. I am ruthless with old oil cans and with the discarded clothing of the chauffeur we had last month. Why is an old pair of pants stuffed so regularly in the tool drawer? There is a barrel at the alley fence – but I shall spare the details. It was the river Alpheus that Hercules turned through the Augean stables. They had held three thousand oxen and had not been cleaned for thirty years. Dear me! I know oxen. I rank this labor ahead of the killing of the Hydra, or fetching the golden apples of the Hesperides. Our garage can be sweetened with a hose.

But I really like outside work. Last week I pulled up a quantity of dock and dandelions that were strangling the grass. And I raked in seed. This morning, when I went out for the daily paper, I saw a bit of tender green. The Reds, as I noticed in the headline of the paper, were advancing on Warsaw. France and England were consulting for the defense of Poland, but I ignored these great events and stood transfixed in admiration before this shimmer of new grass.

Our yard, fore and aft, is about an afternoon's work. And now that I have cut it once I have signed up for the summer. It requires just the right amount of intelligence. I would not trust myself to pull weeds in the garden. M – has the necessary skill for this. I might pull up the Canterbury bells which, out of season, I consider unsightly stalks. And I do not enjoy clipping the grass along the walks. It is a kind of barber's job. But I like the long straightaways, and I could wish that our grass plot stretched for another hundred feet.

And I like the sound of a lawn-mower. It is such a busy click and whirr. It seems to work so willingly. Not even a sewing-machine has quite so brisk a tempo. And when a lawn-mower strikes a twig, it stops suddenly on its haunches with such impatience to be off again. "Bend over, won't you," it seems to say, "and pull out that stick. These trees are a pesky nuisance. They keep dropping branches all the while. Now then! Are we ready? Whee! What's an apple? I can cut an apple all to flinders. You whistle and I'll whirr. Let's run down that slope together!"

On Dropping Off to Sleep

ISLEEP too well – that is, I go to sleep too soon. I am told that I pass a few minutes of troubled breathing – not vulgar snores, but a kind of uneasy ripple on the shore of wakefulness – then I drift out with the silent tide. Doubtless I merit no sympathy for my perfection – and yet —

Well, in the first place, lately we have had windy, moonlit nights and as my bed sets at the edge of the sleeping porch and the rail cuts off the earth, it is like a ride in an aëroplane to lie awake among the torn and ragged clouds. I have cast off the moorings of the sluggish world. Our garden with its flowering path, the coop for our neighbor's chickens, the apple tree, all have sunk from sight. The prow of my plane is pitched across the top of a waving poplar. Earth's harbor lights are at the stern. The Pleiades mark the channel to the open sky. I must hang out a lantern to fend me from the moon.

I shall keep awake for fifteen minutes, I think. Perhaps I can recall Keats's sonnet to the night:

"When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance – "

and those lines of Milton about the moon rising in clouded majesty, unveiling her peerless light.

Here a star peeps out. Presently its companions will show themselves and I shall know the constellation. Are they playing like little children at hide-and-seek? Do I catch Arcturus looking from its cover? Shall I shout hi-spy to Alpha Lyra? A shooting star, that has crouched behind a cloud, runs home to the goal untagged. Surely these glistening worlds cannot be hard-fisted planets like our own, holding a close schedule across the sky. They have looted the shining treasure of the sunset. They sail the high fantastic seas like caravels blown from India. In the twilight they have lifted vagrant anchors and they will moor in strange havens at the dawn.

Are not these ragged clouds the garment of the night? Like the beggar maiden of an ancient tale she runs with flying raiment. She unmasks her beauty when the world's asleep. And the wind, like an eager prince upon his wooing, rides out of the stormy north.

And then! Poof! Sleep draws its dark curtain across the glittering pageant —

Presently I hear Annie, the cook, on the kitchen steps below, beating me up to breakfast. She sounds her unwelcome reveille on a tin pan with an iron spoon. Her first alarm I treat with indifference. It even weaves itself pleasantly into my dreams. I have been to a circus lately, let us say, and this racket seems to be the tom-tom of a side-show where a thin gentleman swallows snakes. Nor does a second outburst stir me. She only tries the metal and practices for the later din. At the third alarm I rise, for now she nurses a mighty wrath. I must humor the angry creature lest in her fury she push over a shelf of crockery. There is a cold jump for slippers – a chilly passage.

I passed a week lately at a country hotel where there were a number of bad sleepers – men broken by the cares of business, but convalescent. Each morning, as I dressed, I heard them on the veranda outside my window, exchanging their complaints. "Well," said one, "I slept three hours last night." "I wish I could," said a second. "I never do," said a third. No matter how little sleep the first man allowed himself, the second clipped off an hour. The third man told the bells he had heard – one and two and three and four – both Baptist and Methodist – and finished with his preceding competitor at least a half hour down. But always there was an old man – an ancient man with flowing beard – who waited until all were done, and concluded the discussion just at the breakfast gong: "I never slept a wink." This was the perfect score. His was the golden cup. Whereupon the insomnious veranda hung its defeated head with shame, and filed into the dining-room to be soothed and comforted with griddle-cakes.

This daily contest recalled to me the story of the two men drowned in the Dayton and Johnstown floods who boasted to each other when they came to heaven. Has the story gone the rounds? For a while they were the biggest lions among all the angels, and harps hung untuned and neglected in their presence. As often as they met in the windy portico of heaven, one of these heroes, falling to reminiscence of the flood that drowned him, lifted the swirling water of Johnstown to the second floor. The other hero, not to be outdone, drenched the Dayton garrets. The first was now compelled to submerge a chimney. Turn by turn they mounted in competition to the top of familiar steeples. But always an old man sat by – an ancient man with flowing beard – who said "Fudge!" in a tone of great contempt. Must I continue? Surely you have guessed the end. It was the old mariner himself. It was the survivor of Ararat. It was Noah. Once, I myself, among these bad sleepers on the veranda, boasted that I had heard the bells at two o'clock, but I was scorned as an unfledged novice in their high convention.

Sleeping too well seems to argue that there is nothing on your mind. Your head, it is asserted by the jealous, is a vacancy that matches the empty spaces of the night. It is as void as the untwinkling north. If there has been a rummage, they affirm, of important matters all day above your ears, it can hardly be checked at once by popping the tired head down upon a pillow. These fizzing squibs of thought cannot be smothered in a blanket. When one has planned a railroad or a revolution, the mighty churning still progresses in the dark. A dubious franchise must be gained. Villains must be pricked down for execution. Or bankers have come up from Paraguay, and one meditates from hour to hour on the sureness of the loan. Or perhaps an imperfect poem searches for a rhyme, or the plot of a novel sticks.

It is the shell, they say, which is fetched from the stormy sea that roars all night. My head, alas, by the evidence, is a shell which is brought from a stagnant shore.

Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep! Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care! That is all very well, and pretty poetry, but I am afraid, when everything is said, that I am a sleepy-head. I do not, of course, have to pinch myself at a business meeting. At high noon I do not hear the lotus song. I do not topple, full of dreams, off the platform of a street-car. The sleepy poppy is not always at my nose.

Nor do I yawn at dinner behind a napkin, or doze in the firelight when there are guests about. My manners keep me from this boorishness. In an extremity, if they sit too late, I stir the fire, or I put my head out of doors for the wind to waken me. I show a sudden anxiety whether the garage is locked. I pretend that the lawn-mower is left outside, or that the awnings are loose and flapping. But I do not dash out the lights when our guests are still upon the steps. I listen at the window until I hear their motor clear the corner. Then I turn furiously to my buttons. I kick off my shoes upon the staircase.

Several of us were camping once in the woods north of Lake Superior. As we had no guides we did all the work ourselves, and everyone was of harder endurance than myself. Was it not Pippa who cried out "Morning's at seven"? Seven! I look on her as being no better than a slug-a-bed. She should have had her dishes washed and been on her way by six. Our day began at five. Our tents had to be taken down, our blankets and duffle packed. We were regularly on the water an hour before Pippa stirred a foot. And then there were four or five hours of paddling, perhaps in windy water. And then a new camp was made. Our day matched the exertions of a traveling circus. In default of expert knowledge I carried water, cut brouse for the beds and washed dishes. Little jobs, of an unpleasant nature, were found for me as often as I paused. Others did the showy, light-fingered work. I was housemaid and roustabout from sunrise to weary sunset. I was never allowed to rest. Nor was I permitted to flop the bacon, which I consider an easy, sedentary occupation. I acquired, unjustly, – let us agree in this! – a reputation for laziness, because one day I sat for several hours in a blueberry patch, when work was going forward.

And then one night, when all labor seemed done and there was an hour of twilight, I was asked to read aloud. Everyone settled himself for a feast of Shakespeare's sonnets. But it was my ill luck that I selected the sonnet that begins, "Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed." A great shout went up – a shout of derision. That night I read no more. I carried up six or eight pails of water from the spring and followed the sonneteer's example.

There are a great many books that I would like to read of a winter's evening if I could stay awake – all of the histories, certainly, of Fiske. And Rhodes, perhaps. I might even read "The Four Horsemen," "Trilby" and "The Education of Henry Adams," so as not to be alone. It is snug by the fire, and the very wind taps on the window as if it asked for invitation to share the hearth. I could compile a list, a five-foot shelf, for these nights of tempest. There is a writer in a Boston paper who tells us every week the books that he would like to read. His is a prospect rather than a review, for it is based on his anticipation. But does he ever read these books? Perhaps he, too, dozes. His book slips off his knee and his chin drops to comfort on his front. Let me inform him that a wood fire – if the logs are hardly dry – is a corrective. Its debility, as water oozes at the end, requires attendance every five minutes. Even Wardle's fat boy at Manor Farm could have lasted through the evening if the poker had been forced into his hand so often. "I read," says Tennyson, "before my eyelids dropt their shade." And wasn't Alice sitting with her book when she fell asleep and down the rabbit-hole? "And so to bed," writes Pepys. He, too, then, is one of us.

I wonder if that phrase – he who runs may read – has not a deeper significance than lies upon the surface. Perhaps the prophet – was it Habakkuk who wrote the line? – it does not matter – perhaps the bearded prophet had himself the sleepy habit, and kept moving briskly for remedy around his study. I can see him in dressing-gown and slippers, with book in hand – his whiskers veering in the wind – quickening his lively pace around the kerosene lamp, steering among the chairs, stumbling across the cat —

In ambition I am a night-hawk. I would like to sit late with old books and reconstruct the forgotten world at midnight. These bells that I hear now across the darkness are the mad bells of Saint Bartholomew. With that distant whistle – a train on the B. & O. – Guy Fawkes gathers his villains to light the fuse. Through my window from the night I hear the sounds of far-off wars and kingdoms falling.

And I would like, also, at least in theory, to sit with a merry company of friends, and let the cannikin clink till dawn.

I would like to walk the streets of our crowded city and marvel at the windows – to speculate on the thousand dramas that weave their webs in our common life. Here is mirth that shakes its sides when its neighbors sleep. Here is a hungry student whose ambition builds him rosy castles. Here is a light at a fevered pillow where hope burns dim.

On some fairy night I would wish to wander in the woods, when there are dancing shadows and a moon. Here Oberon holds state. Here Titania sleeps. I would cross a silver upland. I would stand on a barren hill-top, like the skipper of the world in its whirling voyage.

But these high accomplishments are beyond me. Habakkuk and the fat boy, and Alice and Pepys and I, and all the others, must be content. Even the wet wood and the poker fail. The very wind grows sleepy at the window. Our chins fall forward. Our books slip off our knees.

And now, at last, our buoyant bed floats among the stars. I have cast off the moorings of the sluggish world. Earth's harbor lights are at the stern. The Pleiades mark the channel to the moon —

Poof! Sleep draws again its dark curtain across the glittering pageant.

Who Was Jeremy?

WHO was Jeremy Bentham? I have run on his name recently two or three times. I could, of course, find out. The Encyclopedia – volume Aus to Bis– would enlighten me. Right now, downstairs in the bookcase – up near the top where the shabby books are kept – among the old Baedekers – there is a life of him by Leslie Stephen. No! That is a life of Hobbes. I don't know anything about Hobbes either. It seems to me that he wrote the "Leviathan," whatever that was. But there is a Bentham somewhere around the house. But I have not read it.

In a rough way I know who Bentham was. He lived perhaps a hundred years ago and he had a theory of utility. Utility was to clean the infected world. Even the worst of us were to rise out of the tub white and perfect. It was Bentham who wished to revisit the world in a hundred years to see how sweet and clean we had become. He was to utility what Malthus was to population. Malthus! There is another hard one. It is the kind of name that is cut round the top of a new City Hall to shame citizens by their ignorance.

I can go downstairs this minute and look up Bentham. Is it worth while? But then I might be called to dinner in the middle of the article, or I might be wanted to move the refrigerator. There is a musty smell, it seems, in the drain pipe, and the stubborn casters are turned sidewise. It hardly seems worth the chance and effort.

There are a great many things that really do stir my curiosity, and even those things I don't look up. Or tardily, after my ignorance has been exposed. The other day the moon arose – as a topic – at the round table of the club where I eat lunch. It had really never occurred to me that we had never seen its other side, that we never could – except by a catastrophe – unless it smashed into a planet and was thrown heels up. How does it keep itself so balanced that one face is forever hid? Try to roll an apple around a pumpkin and meanwhile spin the pumpkin. Try this on your carpet. I take my hat off to the moon.