their covers so grotesque and so pathetic, so inexplicable and so queer
as the folks that jostle one another on the streets! There is the
precise female who nips along in a little apologetic way, as though
there was an impropriety in the very act of locomotion for which she
would fain atone. From the crown of her head to her boot tips she is
proper, stupid and decorous, but too much of her company would prove to
endurance what sultry weather proves to cream. In fact, I think if I
were told I had to live with some of the women I meet on the streets, I
would fall on my hat pin, as the old Romans did upon their swords, as
the pleasanter alternative. There is nothing more charming than a
bright woman, but she must be superior to her own environments and be
able to talk and think about other things than a correct code of
etiquette, her costumes and her domestic concerns.

There is a man I sometimes encounter on the street between whom and
myself there looms a day of bitter reckoning. He wears rubbers if the
day is at all moist, and next to ear muffs, galoshes on an able bodied
man goad me to fury. If the Lord made you a man, be a man and not a
molly-coddle. Soup without meat, bread without salt, pie-crust without
a filling, slack-baked dough, all these are prototypes of the man
without endurance or sufficient stamina to stand getting his delicate
feet dashed with dew, or his shell-like ears nipped by frost.




XXXVII.

A DREAM GARDEN.