Part 2

"David, are you there? Mr. Edwards says it's Liberty Hyde Bailey's Cyclopædia of Horticulture. And you are to hurry, hurry! What is that? You don't know where it is? Well, look it up in the catalogue.... Oh, ask Miss Anderson to come back.... Is that you, Miss Anderson? Will you look it up, please? Yes, the scientific name for sunflowers. In Freedom Bailey's Cyclopædia of Agriculture, or any dictionary.... Did you find it? Yes? What? Spell it. Oh, _Helianthus_. Thank you so much! Good-by! And don't forget to send 'The Chaperone' home by Mr. Edwards to-morrow night. Thank you for keeping me a copy. Good-by...."

She came back to the veranda.

"I've got it at last, Sam. It's _Helianthus_. Where's Mrs. Bunkum? Oh, I left her in the study. Just wait a minute, now.... Yes, here it is, Helianthus, sure enough. How silly! Why doesn't she call 'em sunflowers? There, page 189. This is what Mrs. Bunkum says: 'The Helianthus Grandiflora, or common sunflower, is one of the most attractive and satisfactory of the perennials. Nothing is so suitable to place against a wall, or to employ to cover a shed or any other unattractive feature of the landscape. The stalks grow sometimes as high as eight to ten feet and bloom from July to September. It is well not to plant Delphiniums too near the Helianthus, as the shade from the former is too intense and it would not do to risk spoiling the lovely blossoms of the Delphinium. The latter ... why!" broke out Jane, "she goes on about Delphiniums now, and doesn't tell any more about sunflowers!"

"Do you mean to say," I asked--and there was a hard, steely ring in my voice, "do you mean to say that Mrs. Bunkum does not tell how deep I am to plant these cussed seeds?"

Jane was about to laugh or to cry--I am not sure which.

"Not a word more than what I read," she answered.

"Jane," I said solemnly and firmly, "go into the house. What is going to happen is not a fit sight for your eyes. Praise be, that book is mine, and not the library's, and I can deal with it justly. Give it here. And if you have any affection for Martha Matilda Bunkum, kiss her good-by. I do not know how deep these seeds go, but I know how deep she goes." And I began to dig a suitable hole.

* * * * *

I rejoined my wife at dinner after a bath and certain life-saving remedies.

"Milton uttered curses on him who destroyed a good book, but what do you think will come up in ground fertilized by Mrs. Bunkum?" I asked.

Jane giggled.

"I do not know," she said, "but if you erect a tombstone to her, I can suggest an epitaph."

"What is it?" I questioned.

"The Gardeners Guyed," said Jane.

VANISHING FAVORITES

VANISHING FAVORITES

It is nearly twelve months since anyone has lamented the disappearance of our old favorite characters of fiction. While these expressions of sorrow are undoubtedly sincere, they are seldom practical. No one, for instance, has ever suggested any method for the perpetuation of the heroes and villains of the old plays and romances. No one has urged that when the government subsidizes authors, and pensions poets, a sum shall be set aside for such writers as will agree to stick to the old-fashioned characters. Yet it would prove effective.

Of its desirability nothing need be said.

It is no answer to those who regret the passing of their old friends to say that they can still be found in the old books. That is like sending to a museum to view dried bones, some person who yearns to behold the ichthyosaurus splashing among the waves, or the pterodactyl soaring overhead. Indeed, the cases are similar for more than one reason. How greatly would the joy of life increase if we only had a few extinct animals left! The African hunter returns with an assortment of hippopotamuses, elephants, and jubjub birds. It would be more delightful if he could also fetch the mighty glyptodon, the terrible dinotherium, and the stately bandersnatch.

There are few of the old characters of fiction more generally missed than the retired colonel, home from India. He was usually rather portly in figure, though sometimes tall and thin. Always his face was the color of a boiled lobster, and his white moustache and eyebrows bristled furiously. For forty years he had lived exclusively on curries, chutney, and brandy and soda, so his liver was not all it should be.

His temper had not sweetened. He was what you might call irritable.

During forty years he had been lord and master over a regiment of soldiers, and a village of natives, and he had the habit of command.

His favorite remark was: "Br-r-r-r!!"

That is as near as it can be reproduced in print, but from the manner in which his lips rolled when he delivered it, and the explosive force with which it ended, you could see that he had learned it from a Bengal tiger. His was an imposing presence, but his speaking part was not large. In fact, his only contributions to social intercourse were the exclamation which has been quoted, and one other.

This sounded like "Yah!" but it was delivered with a rasping snarl which must be heard to be appreciated. Such was his manner toward his equals; toward servants and underlings he was not so agreeable. On the whole, there was reason to think that he was somehow related to the celebrated personage who "eats 'em alive," or to that other individual called Gritchfang, who "guzzled hot blood, and blew up with a bang."

The colonel was a genial and interesting old "party," and we lament his disappearance.

There was a turtle-dove to coo, however, in the same stories where the colonel roared. This was the dying maiden. She has not altogether left us--her final struggles are protracted. Her dissolution is expected at almost any moment now.

Her specialty was being wan.

Come what might, at any hour of the day or night, under all circumstances, she was very, very wan. You could never catch her forgetting it. She reminded you of Bunthorne's injunction to the twenty lovesick maidens--she made you think of faint lilies.

Usually she lay on a couch in the drawing-room, but she could, with assistance, make her way to the window to wave her handkerchief to Cousin Harry departing to the war. She was in love with Cousin Harry, but knew that he cared most for proud, red-cheeked Sister Gladys. So she suffered in silence, and when Cousin Harry forged a few checks, she bought them up, and arranged a happy marriage between Harry and Gladys--who was in love with someone else.

This was so that she could be a martyr. She loved being a martyr, and was willing to make everyone else intensely uncomfortable in order to accomplish her object. She was very gentle and sweet, and even the Colonel would cease to bellow and snort in her presence.

The really learned heroine has gone for good. She is as rare as the megatherium. Her successors--the women who can discuss a little politics, or who know something about literature--are only collateral descendants. There is some doubt about even that degree of kinship. They are not the real things.

Our old friend had stockings of cerulean blue--though she would have died had she shown half an inch of one of them. Her idea of courtship was to get the hero in a woodland bower and then say something like this:

"Perhaps you have never realized, Mr. Montmorency, how profoundly the philosophy of the Rosicrucians has affected modern thought in its ultimate conception of ontology. The epistemological sciences exhibit the effect of Thales' dictum concerning the fourth state of material cosmogony."

And Mr. Montmorency liked it, too. He had a reply all ready. He wondered if it really was Thales so much as Empedocles or Ctesias. She showed him that his suspicions were groundless. Thales was the man.

He gave up all idea of holding her hand, and listened to a fifteen-minute discourse on the Peripatetics.

After this kind of heroine, is it any wonder that we object to the bridge-playing ladies with a passion for alcohol, who are served to us by the novelist of to-day?

The learned heroine of the old books talked as no one can talk now, except, possibly, a Radcliffe girl with a blue book in front of her, the clock pointing to a quarter of twelve, and a realization that a failure to get B minus in the exam. will make it impossible for her to secure a degree in three years.

The saintly children of the old fiction are perhaps the offspring of the learned heroine and Mr. Montmorency. Certainly such a marriage would result in children of no commonplace type. These, however, tend not so much to scholarship as to good behavior. They would get 98 in all their studies, but 100 plus in deportment.

They are too good to be true. They have enough piety to fit out a convocation of bishops, with a great deal left over. The little girls among them are addicted to the death-bed habit. Only they carry the matter further than the invalid heroine.

They actually die.

The one thing worth living for, in their estimation, is to gather a group of weeping relatives and the minister about their beds on a beautiful morning in June, and then pass serenely away, uttering sentiments of such lofty morality that even the minister feels abashed. The pet lamb, the hoop, the golden curls and the pantalettes, which had been their accessories during seven years in the mortal vale, are cheerfully left behind for the joy of this solemn moment.

There ought to be no dispute over the statement that one other old-fashioned fictitious character is badly missed.

This is the family ghost.

The modern substitute for the real thing is like offering a seat in a trolley car to someone who has been used to a sedan chair. The modern ghost is a ready-made product of a psychological laboratory, and you know that his Bertillon measurements are filed away in a card-catalogue somewhere.

The old ghost used to groan and clank chains, and leave gouts of blood (gouts always--never drops) all over the place.

Or, if it were a lady ghost, she sighed sweetly and slipped out of your bedroom window to the moonlit balcony.

You could get along with ghosts like either of them. You knew what they were up to.

But the ghost of contemporary fiction is as obscure as Henry James. He is a kind of disembodied idea; he never groans, nor clanks chains; and you cannot be sure whether he is a ghost, or a psychological suggestion, or a slight attack of malarial fever. In nothing is the degeneracy and effeminacy of our literature more apparent than in its anæmic ghosts. Hashimura Togo says that "when a Negro janitor sees a ghost, he are a superstition; but when a college professor sees one, he are a scientific phenomenon." When that point has been reached with real ghosts, what can be expected of the fictitious ones?

Along with the family ghost disappeared the faithful old family servant. He was usually a man, and he looked like E. S. Willard as Cyrus Blenkarn. He dressed in snuff-colored clothes, and he bent over, swaying from side to side like a polar-bear in a cage. He rubbed his hands. But he was very devoted to the young mistress.

Lor' bless yer, Sir, he knew her mother, he did, when she was only that high. Carried her in his arms when she was a little babby. But he is afraid something is going wrong with the old place. He doesn't like the looks of things, nohow.

With the superhuman instinct granted to servants, but denied to their superiors, he has become suspicious of the villain on sight. It is lucky that no one believes the old servant, or they would pitch out the villain then and there, and the story would come to an end at Chapter II.

The utter chaos into which villains have fallen has been a cause for regretful comment for years past. Long ago it was pointed out that villains no longer employ direct and honorable methods like murder and assault. The sum of their criminal activities is a stock-market operation that ruins the hero.

Things have gone from bad to worse.

Now you cannot tell which is the villain and which the hero. The old, simple days when the villain, as Mr. J. K. Jerome said, was immediately recognized by the fact that he smoked a cigarette, have long since passed away. Now, the villain and hero in Chapter I. have usually changed places two or three times by the end of the book.

Let no one think that this complaint is made because we regret losing our admiration for the hero. We never had any. He was always such a chuckle-headed ninny that you longed to throw rocks at him from the start.

The lamentable thing is to see the villain falling steadily away from the paths of vice and crime, and taking up with one virtuous practice after another.

Meanwhile, the hero is making feeble efforts at villainy, which result, of course, in complete failure. You cannot learn to be a villain at Chapter XXIV. It is too late. Villains, like poets, are born, not made, and in the older books the faithful servant could tell you that the villain was bad from the cradle. Hereditary influence and unremitting attention to business are as necessary in the villain trade as in any other.

There is one other phase of the making of villains which deserves consideration. That is, their nationality.

Once you had only to know that the man who appeared at Chapter III., twirling his moustache and making polite speeches, was a French count or a Russian prince, to be sure that on him would fall the responsible post of chief villain during the rest of the story.

If the novel were written in America, an English lord could be added to the list. The titled foreigner, whatever he might be, was expected to try to elope with the heroine, for the sake of her money. The hero baffled him finally, and seized the opportunity, at the moment of bafflement, to deliver a few patriotic sentences on the general superiority of republican institutions.

This is all changed. We have had novels and plays with virtuous, even admirable, English lords. Once or twice members of the French nobility have appeared in another capacity than that of advance agent of wickedness. It is time to call a halt, or the first thing we know someone will write a book with a virtuous Russian prince in it.

The line must be drawn somewhere. The mission of Russia in English literature is to furnish tall, smooth, diabolical persons, devoted to vodka, absinthe, oppression of the peasantry, cultivation of a black beard, and general cussedness. We foresee that the novelists will soon have to draw upon Japan for their villains. Much ought to be made of a small, oily, smiling Oriental, who is nursing horrid plots beneath a courteous exterior.

At the time of the first performances of Mr. Moody's play "The Great Divide," it was pleasant to see that a sense of fitness in the nationality of villains had not entirely died out. It may be remembered that the first act represents an American man joining with a Mexican and a nondescript in an atrocious criminal enterprise. At least one newspaper had the sturdy patriotism to call the dramatist to account for insinuating that an American could possibly do such a thing.

"Furriners," perhaps, but Americans, never! Shame on you, Mr. Moody!

While so many of the chief characters of the old fiction have vanished, there is a chorus of minor ones who have also moved away.

Where, for instance, is the village simpleton? He was a useful personage, for he could be depended upon to make the necessary heroic sacrifice in the last chapter but one. When the church steeple burst into flames, or the dam broke and the flood descended on the town, or the secondary villain was tying the heroine's mother to the railroad track, the hero was holding the center of the stage and seeing that the heroine escaped in safety.

But who was that slight figure climbing aloft in the lurid glare of the burning belfry, or swimming across the raging torrent, or running up to the bridge waving a red lantern? Who, indeed, but poor, despised Benny Bilkins, the village idiot? He fell with a crash when the steeple came down, or disappeared forever in the angry, swirling waters, or was ground under the wheels of the locomotive--but then there was a grave for the heroine to strew violets upon, in the last chapter.

The miser, too, has utterly disappeared. In facial characteristics he resembled the faithful old family servant, except that he had deeper lines on his brow. He liked to get out a table, and sit over it with a bag of gold.

No banks for him.

He wanted his gold pieces near at hand, so that he could fetch them out at any hour, clink them together and gloat over them.

He was a clinker and a gloater--he cared for nothing else.

We do not have any misers now. Or, if they exist, they go away to a safety deposit vault, get their bonds and gloat over them. Half the fun is gone, you see. You can gloat over bonds as much as you like, but not a clink can you get out of them. That probably accounts for the disappearance of misers.

We earnestly request some novelist to bring about a resurrection of these characters. They would be welcome in the short stories, as well. During the past fifteen years American fiction has gone through two epochs--the Gadzooks school and the B'Gosh school.

It is now congealed in what may be called the Ten Below Zero School. Any constant reader of the magazines has to keep on his ulster, ear-tabs, mittens and gum-shoes, from one year's end to another. It never thaws. Loggers, miners, trappers, explorers--any kind of persons so long as they dwell in the frozen north--are what the magazine writer adores.

One of Kipling's characters says that there's never a law of God or man runs north of 53. The magazine editors seem to think there's never a thing worth writing of, lives south of 85. Will not some of them dig up one or two of the old characters we have been discussing, and see if they cannot send the thermometer up a few degrees?

We are tired of stamping our feet, blowing on our hands, and rubbing snow on our noses to keep them from falling off.

BY TELEPHONE

BY TELEPHONE

"On January 14th," so announced a circular issued last month by the Ezra Beesly Free Public Library of Baxter, "we shall install a telephone service at the library. Telephone your inquiries to the library, and they will be answered over the wire."

Now, January 14th was last Saturday, and this is undoubtedly the first account of the innovation at Baxter.

Miss Pansy Patterson, assistant reference librarian, took her seat at the telephone promptly at nine o'clock, ready to answer all questions. She had, near her, a small revolving bookcase containing an encyclopædia, a dictionary, the Statesman's Year Book, Who's Who in America, Mulhall's Dictionary of Statistics, The Old Librarian's Almanack, the Catalogue of the Boston Athenæum, Baedeker's guide book to the United States, Cruden's Concordance, and a few others of the most valuable reference books, in daily use among librarians.

Should this stock fail her she could send the stenographer, Miss Parkinson, on a hurry call to the reading-room, where Miss Bixby, the head reference librarian, would be able to draw on a larger collection of books to find the necessary information.

Mr. Amos Vanhoff, the new librarian of Baxter, stood over the telephone, rubbing his hands in pleasant anticipation of the workings of the new system which he had installed.

The bell rang almost immediately, and Miss Patterson took the receiver from its hook.

"Is this the library?"

"Yes."

"This is Mrs. Humphrey Mayo. I understand that you answer inquiries by telephone? Yes! Thank you. Have you any books about birds?"

"Oh, yes--a great many. Which--"

"Well; I am so much interested in a large bird that has been perching on a syringa bush on our front lawn for the last half hour. It is a very extraordinary-looking bird--I have never seen one like it. I cannot make it out clearly through the opera glass, and I do not dare to go nearer than the piazza for fear of startling it. I only discovered it as I was eating breakfast, and I do not know how long it has been there. None of the bird books I own seem to tell anything about such a bird. Now, if I should describe it to you do you think you could look it up in some of your books?"

"Why, I think so."

"Well, it's a very large bird--like an eagle or a large hawk. And it is nearly all black; but its feathers are very much ruffled up. It has a collar or ruff around its neck, and on its head there is a splash of bright crimson or scarlet. I think it must be some tropical bird that has lost its way. Perhaps it is hurt. Now, what do you suppose it is?"

"You see, I haven't any bird books right at hand--I'll send in to the reading-room. Will you hold the line, please?"

Miss Patterson turned to the stenographer and repeated Mrs. Mayo's description of the strange bird.

"Will you please ask Miss Bixby to look it up, and let me know as soon as possible?"

During the interval that followed, the operator at central asked three times: "Did you get them?" and three times Mrs. Mayo and Miss Patterson chanted in unison: "Yes; hold the line, please!"

Finally the messenger returned, remarking timidly: "He says it's a crow."

"A crow!" exclaimed Miss Patterson.

"A crow!" echoed Mrs. Mayo, at the other end of the wire, "oh, that is impossible. I know _crows_ when I see them. Why, this has a ruff, and a magnificent red coloring about its head. Oh, it's no crow!"

"Whom did you see in there?" inquired Miss Patterson. "Miss Bixby?"

"No," replied the young and timid stenographer, "it was that young man--I don't know his name."

She had entered the library service only the week before.

"Oh, Edgar! He doesn't know anything about anything. Miss Bixby must have left the room for a moment, and I suppose he had brought in a book for a reader. He is only a page--you mustn't ask him any questions. Do go back and see if Miss Bixby isn't there now, and ask her."

A long wait ensued, and as Mrs. Mayo's next-door neighbor insisted on using the telephone to order her dinner from the marketmen, the line had to be abandoned. In ten or fifteen minutes, however, the assistant reference librarian was once more in communication with Mrs. Mayo.

"We think the bird might possibly be a California grebe--but we cannot say for sure. It is either that or else Hawkins's giant kingfisher--unless it has a tuft back of each ear. If it has the tufts, it may be the white-legged hoopoo. But Mr. Reginald Kookle is in the library, and we have asked him about it. You know of Mr. Kookle, of course?"

"What, the author of 'Winged Warblers of Waltham' and 'Common or Garden Birds'?"

"Yes; and of 'Birds I Have Seen Between Temple Place and Boylston Street' and 'The Chickadee and His Children.'"

"Yes, indeed--I know his books very well. I own several of them. What does he think?"

"He is not sure. But Miss Bixby described this bird to him, and he is very much interested. He has started for your house already, because he wants to see the bird."

"Oh, that will be perfectly lovely. Thank you so much. It will be fine to have Mr. Kookle's opinion. Good-by."

"Good-by."

* * * * *

And the conference was ended. It may not be out of place to relate that Mr. Kookle, the eminent bird author, arrived at Mrs. Mayo's a few minutes later. As he heard that the mysterious stranger was on the front lawn, he approached the house carefully from the rear, and climbed over the back fence. He walked around the piazza to the front door, where Mrs. Mayo awaited him.

Mr. Kookle was dressed in his famous brown suit, worn in order that he might be in perfect harmony with the color of dead grass, and hence, as nearly as possible, unseen on the snowless, winter landscape. He had his field glasses already leveled on the syringa bush when Mrs. Mayo greeted him. She carried an opera glass.

"Right there--do you see, Mr. Kookle?"

"Yes, I see him all right."