MY

TRAVELED MINDS

BY F. M. COLBY

Y table companion seems to have kept going around the world untouched by any wayside curiosity, impelled solely by hatred of those people who do not make a thorough job of it. Proceeding along the equator, or as close to it as possible, and always making a continuous voyage, he cannot endure anyone who goes around a smaller circle, or zigzags, or hesitates. So far as I can judge from his conversation, he revolves around a totally naked planet, deriving nothing from it but a sort of circumferential hauteur. Like other globe-trotters, he is insufferable.

Yet I suppose we ought to feel more kindly toward globe-trotters and toward travelers generally, for that matter. Perhaps no interesting person is ever allowed to go around the world, being detained by others for the pleasure of his company; whereas the uninteresting person, being undesired by anybody at any point of the circumference, naturally keeps going around. Perhaps globetrotting is not an act of will at all, but a series of ejections, the man being spat out rapidly from one place after another, and thus involuntarily completing the circuit. At all events, it disposes the mind more leniently toward travelers when they talk if they be thought of as ejected from some place rather than as going to another.

Take, for example, a newspaper correspondent just back from Bulgaria. Instead of blaming him for being as tiresome as he always is about Bulgaria, or, what is still more unreasonable, instead of blaming Bulgaria, one should reflect that perhaps he had not the slightest

desire to go to Bulgaria and may have even tried hard not to go there, but, being objectionable to all intermediate populations, found himself one day off in Bulgaria, the nearest point on the earth's surface at which people could bear him. It almost seems as if the hand of Providence were in the thing, the man just back from China being so often the very man you would have chosen to send there. I commend this thought by way of a bit of sunshine to cynics who, in their ennui at the traveler's return, forget the blessing of his absence.

But, while I believe that the sort of people who travel extensively ought to travel even more extensively than they do, touching at a home port seldom, if ever, I would reverse all the rules implied in the writings of novelists and educators. And after a century of colonial reverence among our educated classes I would discourage all direct mention of a visit abroad. As to our literary class, I would expose no good American writer to a European background, but only the bad ones. Rarely has an American writer been exposed to a European background without becoming rather foolish or disagreeable on the subject. The frequency and volubility of these exposures have prolonged the colonialism of American literature. Of course a year in England might do no harm to an American writer if he could refrain from writing about it, but as this apparently is impossible, he had better stay near home. A good writer will invent a better country than he will ever see, and travel disposes him to substitute quite ordinary gazetteer matter for the products of his imagination.

The indiscriminate esteem of travel common to our educated class seems to

be constantly setting the wrong kind of man in motion. To the simpler forms of intellectual life travel probably does no harm. Aside from outer wear and tear, travel apparently makes no more difference in a serviceable senator, financier, college president, newspaper correspondent, or fashionable person than in a good valise, these simple organisms being valued only for their social contents and not for any personal quality. Individu ality is not desired of a senator, for example, as it is desired of a novelist, but only soundness, as is desired of a suitcase; and loss of imagination, assuming that a senator had any, would make him all the more senatorial. And it is the same way with all these other classes who subsist by uniformity, not by varia tion, and are serviceable mainly as re positories of public thoughts. The public mind can be put in and taken out of any one more conveniently if he has no mind of his own.

But in the more complex literary organisms, valued in the long run for diversity, there is always a loss when the mere actualities of travel experience are substituted for invention. Everybody is still interested in what Mark Twain did not see and nobody ever cared a rap about what he did see, his best work being done on the Mississippi River in the dark and his worst while traveling around the world with his eyes open. I think it may be fairly inferred from his volume, Following the Equator, that the more things Mark Twain looked at in the actual world the worse it was for his readers. Jail would have been better for him as for many other writers, for the more things that happened to them from without, the fewer things happened inside them, whereas the fancy often took its farthest flights out of disagreeable little nests of circumstance. Jail would have developed remarkable powers in Mark Twain as it did in Bunyan. Freedom is so often followed by literary evaporation, that when a good author is seen gadding cheerfully about the world his readers almost always have

reason to be sad. On the other hand, the news that Mr. H. G. Wells, for example, was about to spend a year in jail would justify his true admirers in the highest literary expectations.

Perhaps Kipling is a better example of this inverse ratio of literary result to external experience, for everybody must have noticed how uninteresting Kipling always becomes when interesting things are happening around him. The more he stirs about the less he stirs his readers and when he writes from the thick of a Boer war or a world conflict it is almost impossible to keep your eyes open. Dropped from an airplane and saved by a miracle, Kipling would cable immediately to the London Times something on the order of "Twinkle, twinkle, little star." When exposed to great adventures and the clash of worlds his mind fills up at once with little scraps of news

paper.

And the same strange inner attenuation was observed of the best contemporary writers during the war, when the whole world was thundering with dramatic circumstances around them. The more tremendous the event, the milder the literary consequence, and in the general excitement even Henry James became quite simple-minded. He lost not only his second manner, but his first, and to the astonishment of everybody became an elemental, primitive man not unlike the writer of a leading article in the London Spectator. Stir an author too much and he will merely join in the ejaculations commonly heard in stirring times. If he runs along with great events he falls behind in literature. All of which is perceived in a dim way even by contemporary educators and publishers. They know it is true of greater men than Mark Twain or Kipling, and they do not measure writers by square miles of ground covered or piquancy of external incident. Even an educator does not argue that advantages of air travel would have made Shelley more ethereal, or visits to volcanos made Carlyle doubly eruptive. Yet if Petro

grad is in utter confusion everybody seems delighted to learn that Mr. Wells is on the spot growing more and more confused. And wherever there is a great disturbance there is sure to be some novelist in the midst of it who is apparently expected to write a better novel when greatly disturbed.

And it is insisted that persons far inferior to Mark Twain or Kipling are not only benefited by travel themselves, but benefit the rest of us. Thus, the superstition of our educated class that contact with an older civilization will even cure a man of his natural dullness; thus, also, the remarkably low standard of intelligence applied to a man who has passed a season in Rome, as compared with that applied, say, to a man who has passed a winter in Philadelphia. Nature must have done a great deal for the man who is interesting on the subject of Philadelphia. For the man back from Rome nature need have done nothing at all.

Nor did we forget to lift reverently the carpet that protects the tablet let into the

tombstone of Izaac Walton. After tea, that pleasant function, we drove to the Hospital

of St. Cross, beautiful and always dear to me, being, as it is, the scene of Trollope's lovely story, The Warden.

No American magazine addressed to the cultivated classes has ever refused a string of these remarks within the memory of any man now living.

From the characteristics of this huge mass of pious transatlantic testimony one would naturally conclude that contact with the older civilization lowered the vitality of American literary pilgrims, which, of course, would be a mistake. Following in the footsteps of Samuel Johnson probably does not lower a pilgrim's vitality, but only pilgrims of low vitality follow in the footsteps of Samuel Johnson. So strong is the faith of our cultivated class in the efficacy of the older civilization that they never notice anything amiss with anybody who can prove that he has been exposed

to it. Persons suffering from the gravest literary defects, fatal in other circumstances, have naturally taken advantage of the situation.

"WHO LET IN THE HIPPOPOTAMUS?” BY GRACE HODSDON BOUTELLE

ON

NCE there was a dinner party. Everyone was having a delightful time. Nothing had to be explained. No one used too many words, and the words they did use flowered spontaneously out of what had been said before. A stiff mantle of lifelong shyness was visibly sliding off the shoulders of one of the younger guests. None of us had ever seen her like this before. The man opposite watched her with amazement and delight. He had been away for years. They had once been in the same school, two classes apart. Now he was obviously wondering if this could possibly be the same person. By and by they began spinning back and forth across the table the most delicate and shining web of wit and fancy imaginable. Once she paused, unmistakably for the sheer delight in choosing among a dozen words, the exquisitely right one

"Tell me, how is your Aunt Sarah? Never saw you look so much like her before. Been getting thinner, haven't you?"

It was the voice of somebody's visiting cousin. People always spoke of him as bluff and hearty. Up to this moment he had been blessedly, unexpectedly silent. The shy girl answered him. One could see her shoulders taking on their accustomed burden again. It was her Aunt Sarah who once had told her what became of little girls who wrote lies when she had found an unfinished fairy story scribbled on a slate. It was Aunt Sarah who had told her the day she was valedictorian and curled her hair, that plain girls were a laughing stock when they tried to prettify themselves. Also it was Aunt

Sarah whose large-boned gauntness had passed into a neighborhood proverb.

The man who had been to the same school remembered Aunt Sarah very well. He had not seen her for years, but he knew that even Time would find her rigidly unmodifiable. One could see him savagely wishing that the bluff cousin had never been born. As a forlorn hope, he flung another glinting thread across for the girl to catch and spin back to him. The thing could not be done. The whole bright web was irreparably broken. Some one, unhappily impelled to save the situation, asked him how his latest idea was coming on. (I forgot to say that he was an inventor.) Naturally this was quite fatal. A slowly rising fog of ineptness enveloped the table. Even the candlelight seemed dim. Only the bluff cousin's appalling heartiness remained intact. It was indeed his opportunity. He told a story-the steam-calliope kind-desperately we leaped on to the conversational merry-go-round, clinging tensely to the mane of prancing wooden jokes. (Incidentally, it was years before the shy girl and the inventor thoroughly found each other again.)

That night I had a dream. The starting point was the garden. Beyond that was a paddock. There were ponies in the paddock, and I am fond of ponies. Also there was a calico horse, and I wanted to see if he had white eyelashes. So I went out through the garden gate, and did not stop to shut it. In the far corner of the paddock there was a low, dark, indistinguishable mass of something which did not interest me. seemed to be slowly, almost imperceptibly moving. The calico horse refused to let me examine his eyelashes, and the ponies were sleepy. I climbed over the stile and followed a footpath across the fields till I began to be hungry and came back to the house, where apparently I was a guest.

It

The Duke was dining with us that night. My maid told me. In a voice

VOL. CXLIII.-No. 858.-101

husky with reverence, she assured me that he was Thrice-Royal. She laid out for me a gown of exquisitely fluted French pastry. We both knew that this was the only proper thing to wear when dining with Royalty. Presently I came down the broad staircase with dignity and splendor. The ThriceRoyal One had come already, but no ceremonial silence enshrined him. He looked warm and rather bewildered. Nothing makes one hotter than to have everyone talking at once in high, excited voices.

The host rushed to meet me.

"You haven't seen anything of it upstairs, have you?" he asked, anxiously. "Seen what?" His manner dazed me. "The hippopotamus!" he said.

Just then some one cried: "There he is-look out of this window-he's chewing up the aeroplane!"

The eldest son started violently, then heroically swallowed his anguish. For his father said with a large and noble gesture: "Be that as it may, this is the dinner hour. Food for the Duke!"

So we all went into the dining room. There were no flowers upon the table. The hostess looked severely at the head butler. They conferred in whispers. I heard him murmur despairingly: "E made one bite o' the garden, and then 'e sat down on the conservat❜ry."

The Duke, sitting at her Ladyship's right, looked away tactfully as if he did not hear. She sighed, and turned to him confidentially.

"Sometimes I think heirlooms are a mistake," she said.

"How true that is!" he answered with deep feeling. "But really, you know-a hippopotamus—all the oldest families have those!"

This remark seemed to cheer us all greatly. The conversation began to grow light and sparkling, in spite of the sound of rending wood and linen which came in through the window. There was the most spirited unanimity among We were all in thorough agreement as to fundamentals, and yet no two of

us.

us approached the same topic from the same angle. Logic floated like thistledown on a sunbeam, and fantasy went off like a rocket into multi-colored stars. The Duke beamed. "Real table talk," he said. "I always hoped to hear some. It isn't done at the Castle, you know," he added, wistfully. We all looked modest and felt superior. At that instant the eldest son leaped from his chair. He stared with a fixed, ecstatic incredulity at the door.

"Can you beat it?" he muttered, rapturously. "What do you know about-" the rest was lost in a composite shriek. We had all seen at once what was coming in. With a slow, majestic thud of his huge, inexorable feet the hippopotamus advanced upon

us.

Nearer he came, still nearer, till the rose-and-silver-shaded candlelight gleamed distressingly upon his nose. He deliberately climbed over me on to the table, and lay down upon the candles, the china, and the table talk. This done, he fell asleep and snored prodigiously.

The hostess became hysterical. Gallantly the Duke did his best to cope with the situation.

"I think," I bleated feebly, "I had better go and latch the garden gate."

The dinner guests growled at me menacingly. Above the terrible sound I heard the reproachful voice of the Thrice-Royal Duke.

"You have ruined the table talk," he said, with bitterness, "the only good table talk I ever heard." The company rushed upon me . . . and I awoke.

Since that dream I have more than once seen the hippopotamus lie down upon the dinner table and snore. Happily, I have not always been the guilty one who let him in. Almost always it is when the conversation floats and turns and shimmers in the air like a flight of radiant bubbles that we are all delightedly blowing. Then from somewhere comes a heavy, thudding footfall, and the hippopotamus climbs

"Who let in the hippopotamus?" he asked with awful emphasis.

Secure in my innocence, I laughed scornfully. "Whoever it was," I said, speaking with icy deliberateness, “it certainly was not I. I never saw your stodgy hippopotamus before."

At this point, two things happened

and lies down upon the candles, the flowers, the china, and the table talk. And always one wonders uneasily: "Did I latch that garden gate?"

EMBROIDERERS

BY FRANCES KELLEY DEL PLAINE

UR good literalist relative, Aunt

and a court pet when Cousin Offa was King of Mercia."

And the eldest son transfixed me with baleful glare, and said bitingly, "What about the garden gate?"

a

drawn a sigh of relief in the feeling that they may now relax somewhat the scriptural austerity of speech necessary in her presence. I fear we were a real trial to her; we did our best, but cheer