Part 4

We picked out a plump little clerk-lady with woolly hair and brown eyes. We don't know why we picked her out particularly, except that she was the sort of girl we would naturally pick out. She seemed a young person who would know about hug-me-tights. So we went right up to her and--remembering just in time not to take off our hat as if she were a "ladifren" of ours--we asked her as casually as the nature of the case would permit where we could get a hug-me-tight.

"A hug-me-tight--you want a hug-me-tight? You--you?" and the shameless little huzzy buried her face in a pair of blankets with blue borders and bleated convulsively.

We moved on--with dignity, but hurriedly. It was a painful thing to have happen. There are dissolute and daring characters who would perhaps have enjoyed the situation. They might even have taken occasion from it to enter into conversation and find out the young lady's Christian name--if Christian--and whether or not she liked movie-shows. But ours is a mind above such trivial manoeuvres. We moved on, while a clammy perspiration bedewed our brow.

The next time we picked out the oldest and homeliest clerk we could see in that department. Taking courage from the thought that here was a woman who could not possibly put any personal significance into a request for a hug-me-tight, we went up to her and told her we wanted one. Involuntarily we lowered our voice till it was little above a whisper. Too late we realized our mistake. She gave us one horrified glance, and then, no doubt, recalling all the terrible stories she had read of young and pretty girls being "loored" to "roon" and never heard of more, she turned to cry for help. But we stopped her short.

"Madam," we said sternly, "the hug-me-tight referred to is a nice garment for a woolly old lady--no, no, a woolly garment for a nice old lady--and the sole motive in asking you for it is the hope that you might direct----"

"Three circles to the left!" she snapped in a sour tone, which for a wild moment suggested that she was disappointed. But we would hate to think that--at her age, too!

It was fully ten minutes before we could nerve ourself sufficiently to go to that third circle. Instead, we went over and looked at a lot of assorted mittens for children. We gazed at them with an intensity that must have given the young lady behind the counter the impression that we were the father of at least ten children--all small.

We even got a silly notion of buying a pair of them for the old lady--she has rather small hands. And there was a nice pair of red ones on a tape. Whenever she went out in the back-yard to make snowballs--but we decided against it. We were told to get a hug-me-tight; and a hug-me-tight we were resolved to get, even if they sent in a hurry-up call for the Morality Squad.

By this time, however, we were aware that a hug-me-tight was not a thing for a nervous man to ask a young lady for, without preparing her mind gently. We have always believed that we have a spiritual face--the grave, sweet expression of a monk who is happy in his calling. But any healthy man who says he can look spiritual while asking a lady-clerk for a hug-me-tight is a liar. We hate to be vulgar, but no other word will do. The thing isn't possible--that's all. So we were politic.

"Have you any woollen garments, something in the nature of a jacket," we asked in our most elaborately casual tone, while the blond person patted her hair and stared negligently past our right ear, "which would be suitable for an elderly lady to wear in the house or under a coat?"

"Oh, what you want is a hug-me-tight," she said.

And she never batted an eye! The self-control of women at times is really a wonderful thing. So we got our hug-me-tight at last. But never again--s'elp us! We'll get that nice old lady a meerschaum pipe first.

*Ventilation*

This is the season of the year--we are writing on a fine brisk December day, friend reader--when ventilation becomes one of the paramount issues. To open the window or not to open it, that is the question. Discussions on this topic have been known to split families. They have even led to the splitting of heads.

Heaven only knows how many divorces have been started by arguments as to how much air should be let into the bedroom o' nights--with the number of blankets and the thickness of the eiderdown as sub-headings of debate.

Consider the sad lot of the ordinary poor anaemic husband married to one of those hardy modern women, who are so full-blooded that they can't bear to wear anything to speak of above the corset-top or below the knees. We saw one on the street the other day, and about the only difference between her and "September Morn" was a sealskin coat thrown back on the shoulders, and the fact that she didn't stand the same way as the lady in the picture. It was a cold day, too.

Naturally persons of such airy inclinations and fervid temperament wouldn't want to be burdened with a whole lot of blankets and quilts when they go by-by. Obviously you can't take a really truly "beauty sleep" with several layers of bed-clothes piled up on you like the roof of a dug-out. The thing isn't done--not in any pictures that we have seen, that is. As a pious and embarrassed bachelor, of course, we speak of such matters purely from report and from such evidences as we have gleaned from the movies and from those bed-room scenes now so popular in stage-performances. Stage-beds never have any blankets. Their appointments always are of pink silk, and no conscientious actress would dream of pulling them up any higher than the lace-work on her nighty.

But consider the case of the modern husband. He, poor devil, is not hardened by going around the streets with his shirt laid open so as to expose everything from his collar-bone to his solar-plexus. Also his pants are of wool--or so the tailor claims--and they extend to his feet. If they were made of georgette (we got this from a department-store "ad") and cut off at the knee so as to display about three dollars' worth of transparent silk stocking, they might help to harden his constitution--also his nerve. But, as a matter of fact, he would probably get double pneumonia while the first policeman he met was dragging him off to the station. If he didn't get double pneumonia, he would certainly get three months.

Naturally such a man is soft and sensitive to cold. If he lets any draught into his room at night, he wants a nice, tame little draught that will coil up quietly under the dresser and stay there. His wife on the other hand, accustomed to the rigors of the open street with hardly any other defence than her natural beauty, insists on letting into the room one of those northern zephyrs that play about exposed street-corners in the month of January. That is where the trouble starts, and--well, when we finally get a divorce court in Canada, this will probably be regarded as one of the statutory causes.

Of course, it isn't only a man's wife that drives him into nightly cold storage. There is the pressure of public opinion, for instance. The same absurd force of custom which drags a man out of bed in the morning, blue and shivering, and plunges him into a tub full of icy water, directs that he shall leave his window open all night for fear of what the neighbors would think of him if he didn't.

We are a coward like everyone else, and we do it. We don't believe the health-hints we see in the magazines. We have no wife to bully us in the matter of the aeration of our boudoir. And yet we cower miserably under the clothes all winter long, while icy gales leap in through the window, chucking our garments off the chair where we pile them up, blowing the undress portraits of our favorite characters in ancient history, Helen of Troy, Venus, and Phryne, about the room, and reaching under the clothes to tickle our feet with icicles.

It isn't good for us. It isn't good for any man to spend the night with his head under the pillow instead of on top of it. But what are we to do about it? We don't dare keep our window closed--what would our landlady say, if she found out? She'd probably decide we had measles, and throw us out to prevent the house being quarantined.

And next morning! Great guns, but that room is cold! It would be just about right for a little Esquimau, but we are not a little Esquimau. We don't rub ourself all over with train-oil or whale-blubber. We don't even know how to induce a whale to blubber on us. Neither do we sleep in fur pyjamas, which also serve for business and social purposes. Little Esquimaus don't even have to put their hats on when they get up. They are all dressed as it is.

The terrible predicament of a civilized man dressing in a cold room is that he has to take off what little he has on before he can put on anything else. One's flannelette nighty may be no great shakes as a protection, but at least one has been able to warm it up a little during the night. And then to take it off, while your teeth chatter and your blood congeals--there are few sadder partings than this.

One's only safety lies in speed. If you could only see us as we leap--oh, with a chaperon, of course, dearie--no, no, we don't mean that we leap with a chaperon, but that it would be all right for you to see us if you brought a chaperon--oh, well, anyway, we certainly leap.

But it must be admitted that civilized male habiliments are not adapted to speedy dressing. Neither are female, for that matter, judging by the length of time we have to wait whenever we take anyone to the theatre. If they would only devise some sort of clothes--for the winter months, at any rate--that a man could jump into and fasten with one or two buttons! You know how a firehorse runs into his harness. Well, something along that line would do.

As it is, we drop our _robe de nuit_ like Psyche at the bath--only a little more hurriedly, perhaps--and then we start a deadly wrestle with a set of underwear which has deliberately tied itself up in a series of fancy knots. Our feet stick halfway in, and we stagger about on one foot dragging and moaning, while our epidermis assumes all the colors of a sick chameleon. It is a very painful predicament, mortifying to one's sense of dignity, and hurtful to one's eternal salvation because of the expletives one is sometimes led to blurt out.

And then think of the complication of hose-supports, suspenders, collars and ties, and all the rest of it. Besides, you have probably forgotten to put buttons in a clean shirt the night before, and you have to stand there with palsied fingers babbling in imbecile rage while the studs roll gaily under the bureau. No wonder a man comes down to his breakfast on cold mornings with a seething rage that would make a Prussian hate-party look like a June day in the pigeon-loft.

Who started this ventilation racket, anyway? Our grandfathers had no use for it, Heaven knows. Personally we can recall our paternal grandparent, armed with a large, strong kitchen-knife, shoving gobs of cotton-batting into the cracks around the double-windows, in case a skinny little draught should be able to worm its way in somewhere. And yet the old gentleman was not cut off prematurely by some wasting disease. He celebrated, on the contrary, a very merry ninety-fourth birthday before he went aloft to poke cotton-batting cloudlets, no doubt, into the crevices in the pearly panes of heaven.

We have also known a lot of other vigorous old people who had about as much use for ventilation as they had for a velocipede. Of course, this sort of talk from us sounds very reactionary and benighted and all that, but we can't help recalling that people seemed to live longer and more comfortably in the good old stuffy days than they do now, when a man is a small body of chills entirely surrounded by draughts. Perhaps some brother or sister will rise up in meeting and explain this little matter to us.

Air, fresh air--everyone seems to be shouting for it as though they were Huns caught in a foundered submarine. But old-fashioned business men used to do their work in hermetically sealed offices containing a wood-stove that made the varnish smoke on the furniture. If anyone opened the door wide enough to let in a draught the size of a lead-pencil, they swore at him. And as for opening the windows--only over their dead bodies, that's all! Besides, they were usually nailed down till the next spring.

But your modern business man's ideal seems to be an office that is about as weather-proof as a squirrel-cage. We called on a man the other day, and he was sitting between two wide-open windows with a gale blowing through them that nearly shot us back down the stairs again.

"Great, isn't it?" the Arctic idiot chortled. "Nothing like good fresh air! Keeps up your efficiency, you know, puts pep into you."

We said that obviously a man would have to keep moving if he wanted to save himself from freezing to death in that office. But where did his customers get off? It might be all right for him to freeze out a poor devil of a journalist like ourself, but how about freezing out a pork-packer or a bank-president? Not that we have any painful objection to seeing them frozen, God Wot--we have been frozen out of banks too often ourself.

"Oh, a man's customers come in off the street," he said breezily, "and they're usually wearing their street-clothes, so they're all right."

We took the tip. We buttoned our overcoat, turned up our collar, pulled our hat well down on our head, drew on our gloves, hunched up our back, and were able to talk to him for three minutes about as comfortably as though we were sitting on the top ledge of a sky-scraper in a blizzard. If there's anything we hate, it is a draught in the ear. The only draught we don't object to is the sort that one gets out of a keg, and naturally one doesn't get it in the ear--not unless the party has been going on a long time.

Take our own office. The window swings on a central pivot. The beauty of this system is that you can get more air this way in a shorter time than by any other expedient short of removing the side wall. But you can't get just a little air. Either you don't get any at all, or you get a tornado that lifts you out of your seat by the back-hair.

Of course, the system has one advantage--you can aim the draught. By setting the window at the correct angle, you can switch an aerial Niagara into the next office, from which it comes back slightly warmed up and as a rule highly flavored with cigarette smoke and profanity. This vicarious ventilation, so to speak, has its advantages, but it is apt to lead to reprisals--and not always in kind. Some son of a gun, for instance, slipped into our office this afternoon and stole all our matches. We know they weren't blown away, for they were in a drawer.

While we feel keenly on this subject of ventilation and believe that the thing is being greatly overdone, we don't wish to write ourself down as entirely opposed to fresh air. Some concessions must be made to the popular hygiene of the day. All that we ask for is reasonable moderation. We don't mind a nice little draught slipping into the room from time to time, so long as it comes in quietly and unnoticeably. What we hate is the sort of draught that leaps at the back of our neck and shoves an icy mitt down our collar.

Personally, we look forward to the time--will the reader please excuse us for a moment? The chap in the office next door has just opened his pivot window again, and has blown our hat, ten pages of this manuscript, a dollar bill, and seventeen cents' worth of postage stamps down the corridor. We are going in to speak to him about it.

(We are taking a paper-weight with us).

*City Chickens*

For a long time we have wanted to write about urban poultry; but we have been too nervous to start. It may seem to the reader that we are carrying our natural delicacy too far and are becoming almost prudish, but the fact remains that we were afraid to write about city chickens for fear of being misunderstood.

You see the word "chicken" has acquired ramifications of meaning which have nothing whatever to do with Plymouth Rocks, or Silver Wyandottes, or Buff Cochins, or any of the other standard breeds of hen. It occurred to us, therefore, that if we were to start an article about keeping chickens and dressing chickens and that sort of thing, readers of a precipitous turn of mind might jump to indecorous conclusions.

We hasten to assure the reader that we don't mean that kind of "chicken" at all. In the first place, we don't know anything about them. We are too virtuous--also too poor. It is true that occasionally, when forced by our professional duties to investigate the night-life of great cities, we have seen poultry of this sort gaily cavorting about and--but we are growing prolix. Let it suffice to state that this article is written about the sort of chicken that goes garbed in feathers--hen feathers, we mean, not ostrich plumes.

It is really extraordinary how many people in town keep chickens. The love of things rural seems to die hard in the urban breast. Unable to go out in the early dawn and chew straws while he gazes placidly at his hay field or his hog lot, the city man keeps hens.

First of all he purchases a whole library of hen literature. He discovers that there are about seven hundred breeds, and that each one is ideal for his purposes. Finally he buys four hens and a rooster which can trace back their ancestry through two hundred generations or more of aristocratic hendom. No common pullets for the city man who is going in for poultry--nothing but the real blue bloods at about forty dollars apiece.

He has previously built a strictly up-to-date hen-house--steam heat, hot and cold water, nursery, tiled bathroom, maid's quarters, and all the rest. If he is a very kind-hearted man, he may even put in a gramophone and hang comic pictures on the walls. They say it is very important that hens should be kept in a cheerful state of mind. Personally, we have always had our doubts about a chicken having any mind at all. But that's what the books say, and who are we that we should venture to dispute with a book?

Of course, these chickens don't lay. Purse-proud and aristocratic chickens of this sort never do. They have no incentive. Why should they go to the trouble of laying eggs and having a family when they can get everything a hen's heart desires without it? Besides, the late hours they keep tend to a low birth-rate.

The Downer, however, gets it into his poor numb noodle that the food isn't right. He starts experimenting, and once you start experimenting with hen-feed you are headed for bankruptcy and the bug-buggy. The only thing that saves you is that the chickens die in time--chickens that are fed everything from canary seed to lobster and champagne are apt to die young.

Is the owner discouraged?--usually, no. Ten to one he goes out and buys another half dozen members of the poultry peerage. The only difference is that this time he gets a different family, Brown Leghorns instead of Black Minorcas, for instance. But the result is always the same.

Occasionally, of course, a hen will forget herself and the social exigencies of city life and will lay an egg. Now and then they are even known to have a chicken--in extreme cases, two or three. But families of this unfashionable size are extremely rare. At a moderate estimate--allowing only a reasonable interest on capital invested, the house, hens, food, etc.--the eggs cost three dollars and a half each, and the baby chickens six and a quarter. But every time one arrives the proud owner goes about for days telling all his friends what a convenience and economy it is to grow your own eggs and spring chickens right there on the premises.

There is something pathetic about the way the moral character of chickens deteriorates in town. We have often wondered, in fact, why the parsons do not draw stern ethical lessons for their sermons from the way decent, well-behaved country chickens take to evil courses in large cities.

Time and time again we have seen innocent and energetic young roosters from the farm come into our neighborhood--rather a respectable neighborhood, too, as neighborhoods go--nice, young roosters of good habits, who always got up at the proper time in the morning and went to bed early o'nights and crowed with fidelity and discretion.

And what happened? Why, those roosters wouldn't be exposed to the pernicious influence of city life for more than a month before they would be staying up all night, crowing at the electric lights, and keeping the hens up, too. What becomes of family life under these conditions? What sort of future is there before a hennery where the rooster sleeps all day and the hens sit around and hold mothers' meetings without an egg or a chick in the place?

There is a rooster in our block just now, who has gone absolutely to the demnition bow-wows. We first knew him as a kindly young cockerel from one of the small provincial towns, good humored, honest, and orderly. But you ought to see him now--especially you ought to hear him. The brute crows his head off every time in the night that an automobile goes by; and he spends his afternoons sitting on the side fence watching the girls in the tight skirts--with the nastiest leer in his eye! We often hear the hens calling to him; but what does he care about his family responsibilities?--not a kluck!

The neighbors are all talking about that rooster. They are also shying things at him whenever he gets within range. This brings up another unpleasant feature of keeping hens in town. The neighbors are very apt to be cross about it. They never seem able to take the same idyllic view of chickens that the owner does--very narrow-minded people, neighbors, as a rule.

Even the best-behaved fowl are likely to fly over the fence occasionally into a neighbor's yard and dig worms out of the gravel walk or make impromptu salad of his geraniums and young onions. And you have no idea how annoyed the neighbor gets over these little outbreaks of playfulness. Think, too, of the eggs that must result from it. Just imagine, friend reader, an egg with a geranium shell and a flavor of young onion!--or heliotrope and carrot tops!--or burdock and tomato can! The possibilities are unlimited.

This reminds us of a man we knew once who lived back of a brewery. We didn't seek out his acquaintance and make ourself a friend of his just because he lived back of a brewery--it happened that way, that's all. We couldn't very well cut a man just because he lived back of a brewery, could we?

He also kept chickens. We didn't let this interfere with our friendship either. But he had certainly the gosh-darndest time with his chickens of anyone we ever knew. There were about fifty of them--four roosters--and they had a nice, roomy hen-house with separate beds and great big perches to sit around and talk on, every comfort in fact.

But did those chickens stay at home and lay eggs and rear large families and attend to the other duties of their station in life? No, they did not. They took to drink. We can hear the reader snort in disgust as he reads this--if he does. The reader no doubt thinks we are lying. Not knowing the sterling honesty of our nature, the reader doubts our word. But fortunately we have court records to back us up, for our friend sued the brewery for damages.