that Verne was on a ship which would dock that afternoon.

The dilemma may seem a trifling one, but to Stockton's sensitive nature
it was gross indeed. He and his wife knew that they could offer but
little to make the poet's visit charming. New Utrecht, on the way to
Coney Island, is not a likely perching ground for poets; the house was
small, shabby, and the spare room had long ago been made into a workshop
for the two boys, where they built steam engines and pasted rotogravure
pictures from the Sunday editions on the walls. The servant was an
enormous coloured mammy, with a heart of ruddy gold, but in appearance
she was pure Dahomey. The bathroom plumbing was out of order, the
drawing-room rug was fifteen years old, even the little lawn in front of
the house needed trimming, and the gardener would not be round for
several days. And Verne had given them only a few hours' notice. How
like a poet!

In his letters Stockton had innocently boasted of the pleasant time they
would have when the writer should come to visit. He had spoken of
evenings beside the fire when they would talk for hours of the things
that interest literary men. What would Verne think when he found the
hearth only a gas log, and one that had a peculiarly offensive odour?
This sickly sweetish smell had become in years of intimacy very dear to
Stockton, but he could hardly expect a poet who lived in Well Walk,
Hampstead (O Shades of Keats!), and wrote letters from a London literary
club, to understand that sort of thing. Why, the man was a grandson of
Jules Verne, and probably had been accustomed to refined surroundings
all his life. And now he was doomed to plumb the sub-fuse depths of New
Utrecht!

Stockton could not even put him up at a club, as he belonged to none but