Part 29 (1/2)
That stork is a busy bird. It left a 10-lb baby girl at Ned Mickles last Thursday night. Ned is a neighbor of Cy Deaver.
_UPON JULIA'S ARCTICS._
_Whenas galoshed my Julia goes, Unbuckled all from top to toes, How swift the poem becometh prose!
And when I cast mine eyes and see Those arctics flopping each way free, Oh, how that flopping floppeth me!_
”We are all in the dark together,” says Anatole France; ”the only difference is, the savant keeps knocking at the wall, while the ignoramus stays quietly in the middle of the room.” We used to be intensely interested in the knocking of the savants, but as nothing ever came of it, we have become satisfied with the middle of the room.
A GOOD MOTTO.
I was conversing with Mr. Carlton the Librarian, and he quoted from memory a line from Catulle Mendes that seemed to me uncommonly felicitous: ”La vie est un jour de Mi-Careme. Quelques-uns se masquent; moi, je ris.”
In his declining years M. France has a.s.sociated himself with the bunch called ”Clarte,” a conscious group organized by Barbusse, the object of which is the ”union of all partisans of the true right and the true liberty.” How wittily the Abbe Coignard would have discussed ”Clarte,”
and how wisely M. Bergeret would have considered it! Alas! it is sad to lose one's hair, but it is a tragedy to lose one's unbeliefs.
Chicago, as has been intimated, rather broadly, is a jay town; but it is coming on. A department store advertises ”cigarette cases and holders for the gay sub-deb and her great-grandmother,” also ”a diary for 'her'
if she leads an exciting life.”
We infer from the reviews of John Burroughs' ”Accepting the Universe”
that John has decided to accept it. One might as well. With the reservation that acceptance does not imply approval.
It is possible that Schopenhauer wrote his w. k. essay on woman after a visit to a bathing beach.
We heard a good definition of a bore. A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.
The sleeping sickness (not the African variety) is more mysterious than the flu. It will be remembered that two things were discovered about the flu: first, that it was caused by a certain bacillus, and, second, that it was not caused by that bacillus. But all that is known about the sleeping sickness is that it attacks, by preference, carpenters and plumbers.
Slangy and prophetic Merimee, who wrote, in ”Love Letters of a Genius”: ”You may take it from me that ... short dresses will be the order of the day, and those who are blessed with natural advantages will be at last distinguished from those whose advantages are artificial only.”
Happy above all other writing mortals we esteem him who, like Barrie, treads with sure feet the borderland 'twixt fact and faery, stepping now on this side, now on that. One must write with moist eyes many pages of such a fantasy as ”A Kiss for Cinderella.” There are tears that are not laughter's, nor grief's, but beauty's own. A lovely landscape may bring them, or a strain of music, or a written or a spoken line.