Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

[Social life in the Grand Siècle] is the school of what is called honour, the universal master who shall be everywhere our guide. Three things we observe there, and find constantly mentioned: that our virtues should be touched with a certain nobleness, our morals with a certain freedom, our manners with a certain politeness. The virtues exhibited in this society are always less what one owes to others than what one owes to oneself; they are not so much a response to an appeal from our fellow-citizens as a mark of distinction between us and them.

—MONTESQUIEU.

DURING the period I have been canvassing we lived in Brooklyn, the City of Churches. Our neighbourhood had somewhat the appearance of a moderately well-to-do suburban locality just before a congested population has crept up on it. Chelsea, Greenwich, Harlem, probably looked more or less like it in the early days of New York. The high-life of Brooklyn lived on the Heights, which is still the most desirable residence-site in the city, though the winter winds which sweep up from the bay are colder than death. Between us and the high-life lay a sprawling amorphous population of which we knew little. Residence-blocks had but barely reached us, though they were fast on their way. Apartment-houses were yet to come; I think there were hardly any of them anywhere in Brooklyn. The houses in our locality were roomy in a Victorian style, hence ugly enough; their grounds were spacious, all extremely well-kept, and almost all the properties were owned by those who lived on them.

Our district served the function of a modern suburban town, for the heads of our families mostly had their occupations in what is now called Manhattan, and were actually commuters, going to-and-fro daily by way of the horse-car lines down Gates or Fulton Avenue to the East River ferries. They spent about the same length of time in transit as their successors who now swarm in from Summit or New Rochelle; but the pace being slower, their daily journey was less tiring, and (since comfort largely resides in a state of mind) more comfortable. It was also less tedious, for Ruskin’s observation that “travel becomes uninteresting in exact proportion to its rapidity” applies as well to commuters’ travel as to any other.

The rus in urbe type of existence prevailed among us quite considerably. One neighbour kept a flock of guinea-fowl which ran so wild over his rearward premises that when he wanted one for dinner he would shoot it. Our own place, one of the few rented ones there, must have had at least a hundred-foot frontage, I think more. The house was well back from the street, and the garden running the full length of a long block behind it was remarkable for having large fruit-trees in it and a line of oversized blackberry-bushes down one side. I was more circumspect about blackberries after the day when I came within an ace of pawing in on a hideous huge spider which was sitting in the centre of its web amidst the thick bushes. This monster was of a bright yellow colour with black stripes. I have seen others of the same kind since then, but never one much more than half its size.

Another neighbour, a patriarchal old Englishman with a white beard, kept a great stand of bees. I remember his incessant drumming on a tin pan to marshal them when they were swarming, and myself as idly wondering who first discovered that this was the thing to do, and why the bees should fall in with it. It struck me that if the bees were as intelligent as bees are cracked up to be, instead of mobilising themselves for old man Reynolds’s benefit, they would sting him soundly and then fly off about their business. I always think of this when I see a file of soldiers, wondering why the sound of a drum does not incite them to shoot their officers, throw away their rifles, go home, and go to work. Why, instead of producing this effect which seems natural and reasonable, does it produce one which seems exactly the opposite? In the course of time I found that Virgil had remarked the fact about bees, and that in his parable called The Drum Count Tolstoy had remarked the fact about the human animal. Neither, however, had accounted for the fact. Virgil had not tried to account for it, and Count Tolstoy’s attempt was scattering and unsatisfactory.

Something perhaps worth mentioning, if only for its oddity, is that none of us children ever had any toys except such as we made for ourselves; odder too, possibly, that none of us wanted any. I might have had toys if I had asked for them, but I did not care enough about them to ask, and no one offered me any, even at Christmas when we all had nice things of one kind or another given us. Such cronies as I had seemed to be in the same state of indifference. I vaguely remember seeing a dilapidated rocking-horse in our cellar, but I think it was something I fell heir to, like the alphabet-blocks and the Primer. At any rate, I did nothing with it and cared nothing for it. When I was six or seven I collected some pieces of board and knocked together a very good nest for myself in the upper branches of a tree near the house, whence I surveyed the landscape after the manner of Alexander Selkirk. I also made a practicable swing, but soon got out of the way of using it, being attracted into fields of larger adventure.

One side of our premises was bordered by a big stretch of vacant land which, with the garden, gave us a playground practically illimitable. For some reason, huge piles of broken rock had been dumped on these vacant lots, which vastly increased their interest. We did tricks in Alpine-climbing over these, picking out ways which involved the most hazardous feats of balancing. One day I discovered some ten-cent pieces scattered at the foot of one pile, and this set us off on a gold-rush at once, exploring all the depths and crevasses of the porous heap in a search for further loot, but we did not find any.

In all, I led a very active, busy and wholesome outdoor life, the year round. In summer, we were hard at work in all the primitive occupations which youngsters devise for themselves out of such resources as they happen to find in their way, though curiously little imagination had play in our enterprises. We did not build any castles in Spain or pretend to be Indians, pirates, explorers, or the like. I do not know why this immemorial privilege of childhood was lost to us, but our more prosaic doings filled our days so full that we did not miss it. Apparently our world of practical affairs was so large, abundant and satisfactory that we had more than enough to do with taking it as it was. Our nearest approach to the make-believe was in organising snowball-battles. We would build a snow fort, then divide ourselves into attacking and defending forces, using shields made out of barrel-heads, with leather straps through which to pass the left fore-arm, Roman style. We had a tacit convention against “soakers”—ammunition dipped in water and left to freeze hard—and also against snowballs weighted with a stone core. All such practices were blacklisted according to the doctrine that “fair’s fair” even in war. We were too young to know that this doctrine was fast going out of fashion among our elders, but in our innocence it seemed quite the right thing; so clearly the right thing that I do not recall ever having heard it discussed or even mentioned.

Sometimes we got intimations of a larger world surrounding ours. Once I wandered a long way eastward to where a railway ran, and there I saw two locomotives, gorgeous with red paint and glittering brass, bearing the strange names of Wouter van Twiller and Pieter Minuit. This led to my learning that a very fine people called Hollanders or Dutchmen lived across the ocean, and once long ago a colony of them had settled here. Indeed, some of their descendants were still here, and were much respected. I thought their governors must have been most tremendous fellows to have such scrumptious engines named for them, and I was especially keen on seeing some of those descendants. There were none handy to us at the time, however, so my curiosity had to go unsatisfied for many years. This experience not only gave me a justly high opinion of the Dutch, but it also set up a great love for the old graceful type of locomotive, which has never left me; and, by consequence, I now look on the nondescript electric locomotive and the slithering, sneaking, dishonest-looking type of “streamlined” Diesel locomotive with the utmost abhorrence and disgust.

Although there were no Dutch in our neighbourhood, our social atmosphere had a distinct bracing tang of cosmopolitanism which I very early learned to breathe with interest and enjoyment. The only female playmate I ever had came into my life at the age of four, and soon went out again; a tiny frail blonde French girl—she impressed me as frail, but judging by others I have seen since then, I now think she was faussemaigre. She knew not a word of English, nor I a word of French, yet we conversed fluently enough, and like the gifted souls at Pentecost, we somehow managed to come at some sort of understanding, in a general way. I think I never knew what her name was, but for purposes of identification I spoke of her as “little Oui-oui,” which answered well enough. She did not take to me particularly, nor I to her, but we carefully observed the diplomatic amenities in all our relations, and the chances of a sentimental attachment, if ever there were any, died a-bornin’.

We had several English families among us, all out of the best that the upper-middle class could show, and with most of the objectionable insular angularities peculiarly British worn down by attrition. One family named Brown came from the Indian civil service. The French critic who said, rightly enough, that in matters of colonial administration les Anglais sont justes, mais pas bons, would gladly have made an exception for this amiable family. Mrs. Brown taught my mother to make curry secundum artem, the real thing, which was one of the cardinal joys of my life at home. Memories of it today make me explode in wrath like a retired colonel from Poona or Allahabad when I see the messes which miserable defaulting devils stew up and put before me under the name of curry.

A few Germans lived among us, one named Kreuter, a little brisk old man, a great friend of my father, and a master hand at making sauerkraut. When he had got a batch of sauerkraut in prime condition, he would bring over a couple of quarts for my father to sample and pass expert judgement on. The discussions were so long and the aroma so pervasive that my mother finally laid down the law that my father and Kreuter should hold their sessions outdoors or in the woodshed. She said she always knew when Kreuter was coming, if the wind was right, for she could smell his tin pail long before he hove in sight. She also declared she could see the fumes of his sauerkraut push up the cover of the pail once in a while, like the action of a safety-valve, as he was proceeding along; but this may have been an illusion of some kind.

Between the Kreuters and a grocer named Mahnken whom we patronised, I picked up a bit of German which I used sometimes not really knowing whether I was speaking German or English. Probably it is in consequence of this that occasionally now when I try to think of an English word, the German equivalent will come to me long before the English word produces itself. This of course seldom happens, but it has happened, and once or twice very awkwardly, as it did only a few days ago when I was pointing out a stone-quarry as a landmark for some motorists who asked for directions. I lost the word completely, and after fishing around in my mind for a moment or two while the motorists waited, I made the silliest possible show of myself by turning to the people with me and asking what a Steingrube is in English.

The cosmopolitan character of our neighbourhood was rounded out by the presence of a north-of-Ireland Scots Protestant family which in the eternal fitness of things bore the name of Irons. When one laid eyes on old Irons one said to oneself, Behold England’s age-long difficulty in governing Ireland! He was a living, breathing allegory of what Burke called “the dissidence of Dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion”; that is, he was everything that a sentimental, quickwitted people like the southern Irish would regard with frantic loathing. He looked like Sir Edward Carson, and his harsh sepulchral voice was Carson’s own; or Ralph Nickleby’s, as Dickens describes it. He regarded all non-Calvinist doctrine as a lie and a heathenish superstition, and he was especially strong for burning the Romish and High Anglican hierarchies at the stake. Rabelais’s description of Gaster fitted him like a poultice. Nothing could be done with Irons, “for he is imperious, blunt, hard, severe, uneasy and inflexible; you cannot make him believe, represent unto him, or persuade him anything; he does not hear.” My parents got an immense deal of amusement out of Irons, though none in an ill-natured way, for there was never a grain of ill-nature in our household. In their view, human character in all its unaccountable manifestations is simply the most diverting thing in the world, and as such they accepted it. Irons was a prize exhibit after his kind; luck had thrown him our way as a kind of spiritual windfall, to be highly appreciated for what he was, an uncommonly interesting and comical object of character-study.

I think I am safe in saying that the touch of cosmopolitanism in our surroundings affected me favourably and permanently. What with the Dutch names on the locomotives, Kreuter’s sauerkraut, the little French girl, the English, and the inveterate, almost homicidal intransigence of old Irons, all interpreted through my family’s humorous, penetrating and tolerant view of humanity-at-large, I got the impression of an interesting and rather delightful variety of cultures, traditions, modes of thought, and habits of life; and I am sure I must also have got some inkling of what always has seemed to me, and still seems, the most rational and practical attitude towards them. One of the most offensive things about the society in which I later found myself was its monstrous itch for changing people. It seemed to me a society made up of congenital missionaries, natural-born evangelists and propagandists, bent on re-shaping, re-forming and standardising people according to a pattern of their own devising—and what a pattern it was, good heavens! when one came to examine it. It seemed to me, in short, a society fundamentally and profoundly ill-bred. A very small experience of it was enough to convince me that Cain’s heresy was not altogether without reason or without merit; and that conviction quickly ripened into a great horror of every attempt to change anybody; or I should rather say, every wish to change anybody, for that is the important thing. The attempt is relatively immaterial, perhaps, for it is usually its own undoing, but the moment one wishes to change anybody, one becomes like the socialists, vegetarians, prohibitionists; and this, as Rabelais says, “is a terrible thing to think upon.”

In all our little cosmopolitan variety, I had the luck to see examples which were invariably good, not only in the older generation, but in my own as well. The boys of our neighbourhood were a well-brought-up lot, manly and decent. By pure accident one day a burly English lad named Growtege hit me on the back of my head with a stone, hurting me severely. When he helped me home and turned me over to my mother, his manly shouldering of responsibility and the equally manly way he “took on” about his carelessness, were quite remarkable. I remember some trivial bits of mischief done now and then, but I do not recall anything mean, low, shabby or wilfully damaging, on the part of any among us.

A mysterious outsider turned up in our midst at irregular intervals, and terrorised the neighbourhood. Nowadays he would probably be called a problem child, whatever that is, but as a matter of fact he was a born cutthroat and plug-ugly. None of us knew who he was or where he came from, or anything about him. Oddly, he was always neat, clean-looking and well-dressed. He had the strange faculty of appearing suddenly out of nowhere and then as suddenly disappearing, like the prophet Elijah; and if he chanced to meet another boy, he would fall on him without a word and beat him unmercifully. We soon became fed up with him and organised a posse comitatus or vigilance-committee to lie in wait and demolish him on his next arrival; which we did so effectively that he never reappeared.

II

I have recounted these minutiæ of my upbringing, or I might better say upgrowing, to correct a false impression which I may have given of myself as a sheltered and bookish creature, something of an infant prodigy. Perhaps too, though I hope not, I have given the impression of a family surreptitiously forcing a precocious and repulsive development. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I was a child of the great outdoors, active, strong, full-blooded, never ill. My literary pursuits were purely an indoor sport in which I was neither encouraged nor discouraged, nor had I any more notion of educating myself than I had of flying. I did not know what education was; I doubt that I ever heard the word mentioned at any time in that early period. All the books in the house were free to me, even those in my father’s professional library, and my choices were not influenced or even noticed, as far as I could see. There they were, and that was all.

Only one thing took place which might be debited against this account, though I am sure it should not be. My father was far from being a finished scholar, but he knew some Latin, and rather more Greek than Latin. When I was beginning to talk,—at the age when a child is eager to memorise anything, no matter what, so long as somebody gives it something to memorise,—my father taught me a great string of Greek and Latin paradigms. I am sure he had no ulterior motive in this, but did it mainly because he had no other repetitious jingles to teach me; neither he nor my mother knew any nursery-rhymes.

It may seem odd that a child of that period should grow up without hearing a nursery-rhyme, but so it was; and I can cite another fact about my infancy which is perhaps more unusual. My father and mother both had glorious voices, as had most of my aunts and uncles. The love of music ran strong through both families, many of their friends were musical, music of sorts was always going on about the house; yet I was never sung to sleep, never heard a lullaby or a child’s song. All hands played or sang around me, none ever to me. Thus the first strain of music to stick in my memory was not a lullaby or a nursery-song or a hymn-tune; it was a few measures from the final chorus in the second act of la Traviata. Offenbach’s experience with the eight bars from Zimmer’s waltz was like mine, but I have not happened to hear of another like it.

Our small section of Brooklyn resembled the modern commuter’s town in maintaining a social life of its own, distinct and separate from those of the Heights and the nondescript district lying between. Measured by the standards which the student of civilised man would apply, our social life was perhaps a rather commonplace affair; a poor thing, but our own, as Touchstone said of his lady-love. Yet as measured by the standards then prevailing in America, it had its merits; and as measured by those prevailing now, it was attractive and agreeable. The curse of hardness had not wholly come upon it, nor wholly cleared a way for the attendant curse of hideousness, of a blighting and dishevelling ennui. My mention of Offenbach a moment ago reminds me that it had one thing which was destined shortly to disappear from American life, a sound sense of gaiety. Its spontaneous manifestations of true gaiety were the first I saw in America, and they were also the last. I have seen plenty of vapid frivolity since then; boisterousness, hysterical nerve-tensions, mechanical escape-devices, all manner of pitiful and vulgar travesties on the real thing; but not since I was ten years old have I encountered the free play of a collective instinct for the best in a civilised desipere in loco. Nor is it altogether without reason that this should be so, for as a French writer lately remarked, American society is the only one which has passed directly from barbarism into decadence without once knowing civilisation.

III

As a rule our district kept little track of the high-life’s affairs down on the Heights, and such news as occasionally seeped through to us came as from another world. I did not come along in time to be caught in the backwash of the great Beecher-Tilton scandal, but I heard casual mention of it in the family circle years afterward. This cataclysm razed the Heights from end to end, and rocked the whole country; there had never been such a devastating social upheaval. It is forgotten now, as it should not be by students of society at least, for its history is a compendious index to the character and quality of American social life in Mrs. Wharton’s “days of innocence.” No critic can hope to know precisely what representative American society was like in that period unless he makes himself letter-perfect in a study of this affair.

My family’s attitude towards all this commotion could hardly have made a distinct impression on me, for I knew nothing about Beecher or his alleged misdoings, and cared as little. Yet when I read Paxton Hibben’s excellent study of Beecher a few years ago, it instantly interpreted that attitude for me as one of calm and humorous detachment. Everyone in those days subscribed tacitly to a pretty fairly uniform code of morals, but there was a snuffiness about the ostentatious pieties and moralities of those concerned in the Beecher-Tilton imbroglio which made it impossible to take their contentions or representations seriously. What people! one said at once. What a life! What a society! In its dulness, its fatuity, its simian inability to see when it was making itself ridiculous, was there ever anything on earth like it? My family clearly had little doubt, on the evidence offered, that the scandal rested on a sound basis of fact; that Beecher had been entertaining himself in dalliance with one at least, and perhaps more, of his female parishioners. But to arraign him for that, and then to get up a great pother about it, all on the sheer score of religion and morality (and afterward, yes, actually, on the score of legality, when Tilton haled Beecher into the civil courts on a charge of alienation)—this procedure would seem the acme of a stilted burlesque.

Yet to regard a matter with humour and detachment is by no means the same as regarding it lightly. My parents would have been the last to regard any matter of adultery lightly, the last to dismiss it with Lincoln’s droll saying that for those who like that sort of thing it is probably about the sort of tiling they like. On the contrary, their view would naturally be, and I am sure was, much more serious than any which the affair brought to light. The eye of common sense would see simply that the courts of law, religion and morals were not courts of competent jurisdiction. Their sanctions were of debatable validity in the premises, and when as egregiously overpressed as they were in the case of Beecher, the effort to apply them became ridiculous. The court of undebatably competent jurisdiction would be the court of taste and manners. Whatever law, religion and morals may say or not say, the best reason and spirit of man resents adultery as in execrably bad taste, and from this decision there is no appeal. Moreover, the three incompetent courts could not take proper cognisance of the fact that Beecher and Tilton were intimate friends. The court of taste and manners could and would; and a properly enlightened social resentment would be accordingly enhanced, for all but the very lowest of bad manners exempts the wives of one’s friends. On the other hand, the three courts can and do take into account the principle of raw expediency, which in the affair of Beecher was made almost paramount, to the intense disgust of all who had any sense of what was due to common propriety and decency. The court of taste and manners takes no account of it.

I grew up in the conviction that in a truly civilised society the sanctions of taste and manners would have a compelling force at least equal to those of law, religion and morals. By way of corollary I became convinced that expediency is the worst possible guide of life. Bentham’s doctrine of expediency, on which Michel Chevalier a century ago observed that American society was founded, seemed to me thoroughly false, corrupting and despicable; and in my opinion the present state of the society based on it affords the strongest evidence that it is so. I would not say in the broad didactic manner that it was this-or-that piece of experience,—say, the code governing our snowball-fights, or my family’s view of the Beecher-Tilton affair,—which first put me on the way to that conviction. Rather I would say it was the general view of human conduct prevailing around me which did this; a view which these experiences and many others essentially like them, fitted in with and illustrated.

Whether by one means or another, I was somehow prepared to see, as when I was still quite young I did see, that in our society the purview of legal, religious and ethical sanctions was monstrously over-extended. They had usurped control over an area of conduct much larger than right reason would assign them. On the other hand, I saw that the area of conduct properly answerable to the sanctions of taste and manners was correspondingly attenuated. One could easily understand how this had come about. Law is the creature of politics, and the general course of politics, as among others Mr. Jefferson, Franklin and John Adams had clearly perceived, is always determined by an extremely low order of self-interest and self-aggrandisement. Changing the legal maxim a little, est boni politici ampliare jurisdictionem, as we everywhere see. Again, when Christianity became organised it immediately took on a political character radically affecting its institutional concept of religion and its institutional concept of morals; and the same tendencies observable in secular politics at once set in upon the politics of organised Christianity. Thus the area of conduct in which men were free to recognise the sanctions of taste and manners was still further straitened.

The consequence was that the one set of sanctions atrophied, and the other set broke down; thus leaving human conduct bereft of any sanctions at all, save those of expediency. In other words, each person was left to do that which was right in his own eyes. What with Bentham on one side and the hierarchs of law, religion and morals on the other, American society had got itself crosslifted into a practical doctrine of predatory and extremely odious nihilism. When the sanctions of law, religion and morals broke down through persistent misapplication to matters of conduct quite outside their purview, the sanctions of taste and manners had become too frail and anæmic to be of any practical good. For obvious reasons the resulting state of our society seems beyond hope of improvement. Attempts to galvanise the sanctions of law, religion and morals for further misapplication are ineffectual; and ineffectual also must be the attempt to root the saving criteria of taste and manners in an ethical soil laid waste by the Benthamite doctrine of expediency.

IV

Besides the qualities I have previously mentioned, the social life in our section of Brooklyn preserved some vestigial characteristics which made it especially wholesome and pleasant for children. It was leisurely, kept down to the tempo of the horse-car. It was also cheerful. Nothing needful to our pleasure or contentment cost much. Our people had resources in themselves which enabled them to get on with few mechanical aids to amusement. Living among them, one could see a great deal of force in Spencer’s observation that “happy people are the greatest benefactors of society.” I think our people were perhaps as nearly happy as people could be in a land where so acute an observer as Stendhal found that “the springs of happiness seem to have dried up” in the general population; and where Edison, at the end of his life, told reporters that “I am not acquainted with any one who is happy.” Like Napoleon in exile, they may have been “not happy, precisely, but contented,” but their contentment was a very passable imitation of happiness, quite good enough to enable us unthinking children to get a vast deal of enjoyment out of very little.

Once or twice each summer I was taken down to Coney Island’s “long, bare, unfrequented shore,” a Sabbath-day’s journey at that time. These excursions were usually made in behalf of some visitor’s turn for sight-seeing. Even then Manhattan Beach was by no means so desolate as Whitman’s line suggests. It had a hotel of credit and renown, where some notable persons spent their summers, and several smaller enterprises had sprung up for the accommodation of day-trippers like ourselves. There was a similar development at Brighton. Gilmore’s band played at one of the two beaches, but I do not remember which one; I think it was Brighton. I remember the cornetist Levy’s playing to my complete satisfaction, and I was also impressed by the fine stirring effects of a small park of artillery brought in at the ending of the programme with some piece like 1812. I do not remember what the piece I heard actually was, but it was something in the military way.

What I most enjoyed on these excursions was digging clams to take home. Excellent small quohaugs abounded on those shores, especially at Canarsie; I suppose the last one disappeared from Coney Island all of forty years ago, probably dying of chagrin. The general cheapness of things in our neighbourhood is fairly well indicated by the price of clams. Once a week or so a large round man in his shirt-sleeves, with a yellow paintbrush beard and a tattered straw hat, would drive up from Canarsie and around our district with a wagon-load of quohaugs in bulk. My mother said he had three prices; his cry was “Hard clams, twenty-five cents a hundred; hard clams, quarter a hundred; hard clams, two shillin’ a hundred.” Four fresh sweet quohaugs for a penny, delivered, seems nowadays like good living; and indeed we did live royally well.

The outings I most enjoyed were when my father would take me over to New York with him for the day. He had an office there, where I was vastly entertained by observing all sorts and conditions of men who dropped in to hob-nob with him. I never knew another man who had a genius for friendship like his; I have sometimes wished I had inherited some of it. He had what Cardinal de Retz called “the terrible gift of intimacy”; a terrible gift indeed, if one misuses it, which my father never did; with all his gregariousness and his immense power of attracting people to himself, he remained always one of the best of men. He had an unerring flair for queer originals, odd fish like old Irons, and got no end of amusement out of them. My mother did not share his partialities, regarding these peculiar cronies as mostly the scum of the earth, though she never interfered with his enjoyment of them, but rather countenanced it and even mildly encouraged him in it.

Aside from these human oddities, the feature of my excursions to New York which most fascinated me was the shipping in the East River. The wharves were lined with sailing-ships; it is hard to believe now that the harbour was full of sails right up to the turn of the century. Now they are no more, and sailors are no more; only mechanicians of sorts. Coentjes Slip was full of canal-boats when I saw it then; they are scarce now, and I presume the canalboatman of early days has given way to some anomalous type. Once our ferryboat passed close to a steamer of the Royal Netherlands line. I could read its name, another Dutch name to be filed away in my memory alongside the names of the locomotives; it was the Prins Willem III. It had but just backed out of its slip and was almost motionless, poised to stand downstream on its long glorious voyage of almost a month’s time. It would make seven or eight West Indian and Caribbean ports with fascinating names like Jéremie, Miragoane, Jacmel, Aux Cayes, all the way to Surinam; then cut over to Madeira and up to Amsterdam. What an entrancing voyagel What an incomparably delightful way to reach Europe, if one liked the sea and had the time! I made a firm resolve to take that journey some day, and of course on that very ship, no other. But I did not know then how short the life of a steamship is, even as measured by the little life of man. When I was travelling by that line a few years ago, Captain Haasters stopped me on the deck one day, and said, “The purser tells me you can remember the Prins Frederik Hendrik.” “Yes, sir,” I said, “and I can do better than that. I can remember the Prins Willem III.” He shook his head. “Too far back for me,” he said, and went on.

Once when my father and I were on a Fulton ferryboat, there happened a most amusing incident which profoundly affected my practical attitude towards men and things throughout my life. It was on a clear winter evening, with a bright moon which threw a sharp streak of light about three feet wide on the after deck of the boat while it was tied up to the bridge. Presently a man appeared, carrying a carpet-bag, such as one almost never saw any more, even then; they probably went out of fashion in the days of reconstruction, when the carpetbagger gained an evil name, deservedly enough. As this man came down the bridge, he saw the streak of moonlight and took it for an open space, thinking the boat had started. He charged down the bridge at full speed, made a tremendous leap over the streak of moonlight, slipped and fell; the carpetbag flew out of his hand, flew open, and distributed its contents all over the deck.

As I said, I have never forgotten this incident. In principle, as the diplomatists say, the same ludicrous thing has come under my observation time and time again, in every relation of life. That it has so seldom happened to me is due wholly to the salutary object-lesson furnished by the man with the carpetbag. Many times in my life I have seen it happen, not only to individuals, but to great masses of people, even sometimes amounting to whole populations. Considering the causes and circumstances of its happening, and the kind of people whom these causes and circumstances victimise, one is lost in wonderment as the Psalmist was when he faced the kittle question, What is man?, and could find no answer.