Penguin Persons & Peppermints Part 9

The Metropolitan tower in Madison Square is less intimate. It has its moods, but they are the moods of the mountain. It has dwarfed the graceful, Spanish tower of the Madison Square Garden, without a doubt, and taken the proud Diana down a peg. But there are compensations in its mightiness. Have you ever seen it on a foggy day going up out of sight into the driving vapors? Have you stood in ancient Gramercy Park--still a bit of the old, domestic New York of the '70's--and seen it booming up over the red brick dwellings, white and confident into the sun? Have you ever come down through Madison Square late at night, when the relic of a moon was rising behind the tower, and the ghostly shaft stood up tremendous against the pale, racing cloud-rack? Have you seen it with the last pink glow of sunset upon it, and upon the western wall of the Flatiron Building, and upon nothing else, all lower buildings being in shadows of obscuring twilight? That is one of its delicate mountain moods, when it seems to lift above our earth-bound vision and look over those western cloud ranges into the Land Beyond the Sunset.

Have you seen it, too, down Madison Avenue in the mysterious twilight hour of blue and gold when all New York is beautiful? The street lamps have come on; the dark figures of home-going pedestrians hurry past you; there are lamps in the windows of houses. A filmy blue veil of twilight obscures the distances, so that they are soft, alluring. The tower is pale, almost ethereal, at the end of the vista. Its great clock, p.r.i.c.ked out with golden lamps, seems scarce a third of the way up its side. The white walls rise on, and on, with here and there a spot of gold, and taper into nothing. They are lost in the gloom of coming night. But still they must go on, for far aloft you see the lantern glowing like a star, hung between earth and heaven. In this twilight hour of blue and gold the tower is the mighty guardian spirit of the scene, sending down sonorous word of the hours as they pa.s.s, and lifting our eyes, like its steady lantern, toward the watch-towers of Eternity. Must we be forever reminded that those glowing window squares up its flanks denote lawyers toiling late at their briefs, or mining stock promoters planning a new cast of the net? Must we be forever told that this is not a spire in praise of G.o.d but a monument in praise of Mammon? Aspiration is in its lines, beauty in its sky-borne shaft of blue and gold, wonder in its shrouded summit.

"They builded better than they knew-- The conscious stone to beauty grew."

It is enough. Let us wonder and be glad.

There are many odd views of the tower to be had for a little searching, spots where its peak appears in unexpected places, or with unusual suggestion. There is just one point in Union Square, for example, about halfway round "dead man's curve," where you see the tapering pyramid and the golden lantern overtopping the high buildings between. You do not see it again, if you are walking up Broadway, till you are close to Madison Square. Then, if you lift your eyes, you are suddenly aware of it looming far aloft over the cornice-line to your right, shredding the mists on a stormy day, or by night lifting its lantern up with the stars. There is always an added impressiveness about a tower when we cannot see the base. The sheer drop of its sides is left to our imagination, and the human imagination may generally be trusted to embroider fact. For that reason alone, the view of the tower from a certain point on East Thirty-first Street, between Madison and Fourth Avenues, would be worth the searching out. But it has another and unique charm. If you will walk along Thirtieth Street toward Fourth Avenue you will see, tucked in between larger and more modern buildings on the south side, a little two-story-and-a-half wooden cottage, set back a few feet behind an iron fence. It must have stood there many years, for the wooden age in New York was long, long ago. It is a quaint little dwelling, with quaint pseudo-Gothic ornamentations, and until recently was used as an antique shop. A large weather-stained Venus stood upon the front porch, ironically beside a spinning-wheel! Now the house is untenanted, so that you lift your eyes the sooner to look above and beyond it. It occupies, of course, a slit between higher buildings. Through that slit, as you stand on the opposite curb, you look over a few spindly black chimney-stacks in the foreground directly to the Metropolitan Tower, booming up suddenly and unexpectedly. You see only that for a moment, because of its t.i.tanic size and white impressiveness. Then you notice something outlined against it, a lower tower, much more slender, a mere tracery of delicate shafts and belfries, and crowning it, her bow forever poised, the lovely limbed Diana. Whence either of these towers come, you see not. They merely spring up into the vision over the roof of the little wooden house, the darker one outlined against the other for comparison. Between and around them steam plumes from unseen buildings drift like clouds. Diana turns a little, and points her shaft into the wind anew. The might of the new tower is mightier for this close comparison. Yet the other tower, too, does not suffer, its femininity is the more alluring. But lift your eyes as you walk through this commonplace cross-street of New York, and you may see as picturesque a vista, over the quaint wooden cottage, as any city, anywhere, affords--forty stories looking down on two and a half, and between them, in intermediate flight, St. Gaudens' bronze Diana.

Snow in the city! We in New York think of bespattered boots, of horses falling down, of dirty piles, more black than white, lining the streets like igloos till the tip-carts come and carry them off. "The frolic architecture" of the snow is a thing of memory, not of present fact. Like Whittier, we recall the hooded well-sweep or fantastic pump, and the great drifts by the pasture wall. Yet, once again, it is the seeing eye we lack, nor do we need even to enter the Park to discover the snow at its artistic handiwork. Let Sixty-fifth Street enter the Park for you, from the east, and do you stand upon Fifth Avenue and note the conversion from ugliness to beauty of a paved road, dipping into a dugway between dirty stone walls. The soiled pavement is hidden now, each rough stone on the bounding walls is softly outlined with white, not far into the Park a graceful stone foot-bridge spans the sunken street, supporting a second and more graceful arch of snow, and the street curves alluringly into the trees which rise beyond, a gray wall of misty shadow, the eye is satisfied with a clean, well-composed, strongly lined picture, and the imagination almost deluded into a belief of its rusticity.

I remember once walking down Broadway late at night, after an evening at some tiresome play and supper at some yet more tiresome and tawdry restaurant. I had been having what is popularly supposed to be a "good time," and I was bored. There had been a recent deep fall of snow. The night was clear and cold. Below Herald Square I met comparatively few pedestrians, and those few were not of the sort to dispel my despondent mood.

"Back home," I thought, "the moon should be s.h.i.+ning on the white, clean hills, and underneath my boots the snow-crust would squeak.

Perhaps a screech-owl would whistle his plaintive call in the ghostly orchard. How beautiful there the night would be! But here--" and I flung out my arm instinctively toward the walls which hemmed me in.

But as I drew near Madison Square, and lifted my eyes to the soaring s.h.i.+p's-prow of the Flatiron Building, I noted suddenly that its upper stories were bathed in a pale, golden glow; and coming full into the square, I saw the moon, riding small and high beyond the white tower.

The next strip of canon street shut it out once more, but at Union Square it was waiting to greet me, and as I entered the slit of Broadway to the south and drew near Eleventh street, I was aware of the snow-covered northward pitch of Grace Church roof gleaming in its light, a great rectangle of pale radiance at the bend of the street.

Above the roof the Gothic spire stood up serenely. There were no pa.s.sers at the moment, not even a trolley-car. The greatest traffic artery in town was hushed as death. The high buildings about were dark and shadowy. At the angle commanding the vista in either direction the church slept in the moonlight.

"Deep on the convent roof the snows Are sparking to the moon."

Tennyson's lines came to me instinctively, for here in the heart of town was their very picture and their simple magic. A little shamefaced for my sceptic blindness, I pa.s.sed on toward home.

Somebody, probably Emerson, said that we bring from Europe only what we take to it. But need one go to Europe to demonstrate the principle?

We in New York, who are often our city's harshest critics, find pretty much what we look for. We do not look for beauty, and we do not find it. Then, too, man is no less conventional about beauty than about other things. If he believes that the beauty of a city lies in a level cornice-line, converging vistas, malls of trees, "civic centres," of what use to tell him that there may be a beauty as well of non-conformity, when the magic veil of twilight wraps the city round, and twinkling lamps climb unbelievable heights and all the town is a mighty nocturne in blue and gold? We would not be thought to say that New York is always beautiful, or that a great deal of it is not much of the time ugly beyond hope. But there is not a street of it from end to end but has some point of pictorial charm, whence one may see a span of the Brooklyn Bridge leaping over the tenements, or the scholastic Gothic spire of the City College chapel crowning the rocks at the close of the vista, or just a rosy sunset over the Hoboken hills. And there are parks and squares of almost constant charm, though it be a charm not of the old world, but the new, of the uprearing steel city of the twentieth century. And finally there are certain hours when kindly Nature takes a hand at coloring our drab mortar piles and softening out distances and making our forests of masonry no less wonderful to look upon than her own forests of timber.

Such an hour is the blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet evening when the pavements s.h.i.+ne with molten gold and the electric signs along upper Broadway, like King Arthur's dragoned helmet, make "all the night a steam of fire," and round the tall tower of the Times Building the vapour clouds drift, now concealing, now revealing some beam of light from a window high aloft. After all, it is no great credit to any of us to find the ugliness in New York. The ugliness is rather obvious. To find the beauty is a worthier task, and might make us more keen to cherish and to expand it. It is there for the seeing eye.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

_Spring in the Garden_

No daffodils "take the winds of March with beauty" in our Berks.h.i.+re gardens. What daffodils we have in that month of alternate slush and blizzard bloom in pots, indoors. But one sign of spring the gardens holds no less plain to read, even if some people may not regard it as so poetic--over across the late snow, close to the hotbed frames, a great pile of fresh stable manure is steaming like a miniature volcano. To the true gardener, that sight is thrilling, nay, lyric! I have always found that the measure of a man's (and more especially a woman's) garden love was to be found in his (or her) att.i.tude toward the manure pile. For that reason I put the manure pile in the first paragraph of my praise of gardens in the spring.

That yellowish-brown, steaming volcano above the slushy snow of March promises so much! I will not offend sensitive garden owners who hire others to do their dirty work, by singing the joy of turning it over with a fork, once, twice, perhaps three times, till it is "working"

evenly all through. Yet there is such joy, accentuated on the second day by the fact that the thermometer has taken a sudden jump upwards, the snow is melting fast, and in the shrubs and evergreen hedge the song-sparrows are singing, and the robins. Last year, I remember, I paused with the steaming pile half turned, first to roll up my sleeves and feel the warm sun on my arms--most delicious of early spring sensations--and then to listen to the love-call of a chickadee, over and over the three notes, one long and two short a whole tone lower. I answered him, he replied, and we played our little game for two or three minutes, till he came close and detected the fraud. Then a bluebird flashed through the orchard, a jay screamed, as I bent to my toil again. Beside me were the hotbed frames, the gla.s.ses newly washed, the winter bedding of leaves removed, and behind them last year's contents rotted into rich loam. Another day or two, and they would be prepared for seeding--if I only could bring myself to work hard enough until then!

How much hope goes into a hotbed in late March, or early April! How much warmth the friendly manure down under the soil sends up by night to germinate the seeds, though the weather go back to winter outside--as it invariably does in our mountains! Last year, for example, we had snow on the ninth of April, and again on the twenty-third and twenty-ninth, while the year before, on the ninth, six inches fell. In the lowland regions gardening is easier, perhaps, but yet there is a certain joy in this fickle spring weather of ours,--the joy of going out in the morning across a white garden and sweeping the snow from hotbed mats, lifting the moist, steaming gla.s.s, and catching from within, strong against your face, the pungent warmth and aroma of the heated soil and the delicate fragrance of young seedlings. How fast the seeds come--some of them! Others come so slowly that the amateur gardener is in despair, and angrily decides to try a new seed house next year. The vegetable frames are sown in rows--celery, tomatoes, cauliflowers, lettuce, radishes, peppers, coming up in tiny green ribbons, the radishes racing ahead. The flower frames, however, are sown in squares, each about a foot across, and each labeled and marked off with a thin strip of wood. These are the early plantings of the annuals, for we cannot sow out-of-doors till the first or even the second week in May in our climate. Sometimes, indeed, we do not dare to sow even in the frames till well into April.

The asters are usually up first, racing the weeds. The little squares make, in a week or so, a green checker-board, each promising its quota of color to the garden, and very soon the early cosmos, thinned to the strongest plants, has shot up like a miniature forest, towering over the lowlier seedlings, sometimes b.u.mping its head against the gla.s.s before it can be transplanted to the open ground in May. But most prolific, most promising, and most bothersome, are the squares labeled "antirrhinum," coral red, salmon pink, white, dark maroon, and so on; tiny seeds scattered on the ground and sprinkled with a little sand, they come up by the hundred, and each seedling has to go into a pot before it goes into the ground.

There is work for an April day! I sit on a board by the hotbed, cross-legged like a Turk, while the sun is warm on my neck and I feel my arms tanning, and removing a ma.s.s of the seedlings on a flat mason's trowel, I lift each strong plant between thumb and finger, its long, delicate white root dangling like a needle, and pot it in a small paper pot. When two score pots are ready, I set them in a cold-frame, sprinkle them, stretch the kink out of my back, listen to the wood-thrush a moment (he came on the fourteenth and is evidently planning to nest in our pines), and then return to my job. Patience is required to pot four or five hundred snapdragons; but patience is required, after all, in most things that are rightly performed. I think as I work of the glory around my sundial in July, I arrange and rearrange the colors in my mind--and presently the job is done.

But the steaming manure pile is not the only sign of spring, nor the hotbeds the only things to be attended to. If they only were, how much easier gardening would be--and how much less exciting! There is always work to be done in the orchard, for instance, some pruning and sc.r.a.ping. I always go into the orchard on the first really warm, spring-like March day, with a common hoe, and sc.r.a.pe a little, not so much for the good of the trees as for the good of my soul. The real sc.r.a.ping for the scale spray was, of course, done earlier. There is a curious, faintly putrid smell to old or bruised apple wood, which is stirred by my sc.r.a.ping, and that smell sweeps over me a wave of memories, memories of childhood in a great yellow house that stood back from the road almost in its orchard, and boasted a cupola with panes of colored gla.s.s which made the familiar landscape strange; memories of youth in that same house, too, dim memories "of sweet, forgotten, wistful things." My early spring afternoons in the orchard are very precious to me now, and when the weather permits I always try to burn the rubbish and dead prunings on Good Friday, the incense of the apple wood floating across the brown garden like a prayer, the precious ashes sinking down to enrich the soil.

The bees, too, are always a welcome sign of the returning season, hardly less than the birds, though the advent of the white-throated sparrow (who delayed till April twenty-first last year) is always a great event. He is first heard most often before breakfast, in an apple tree close to the sleeping-porch, his flute-like triplets sweetly penetrating my dreams and bringing me gladly out of bed--something he alone can do, by the way, and not even he after the first morning! But the bees come long before. The earliest record I have is March thirty-first, but there must be dates before that which I have neglected to put down. Some house plant, a hyacinth possibly, is used as bait, and when the ground is thawing out beneath a warm spring sun we put the plant on the southern veranda and watch. Day after day nothing happens, then suddenly, some noon, it has scarcely been set on the ground when its blossoms stir, and it is murmurous with bees. Then we know that spring indeed has come, and we begin to rake the lawns, wherever the frost is out, wheeling great crate loads of leaves and rubbish upon the garden, and filling our neighbors'

houses with pungent smoke.

There is a certain spot between the thumb and first finger which neither axe nor golf-club nor saw handle seems to callous. The spring raking finds it out, and gleefully starts to raise a blister. My hands are perpetually those of a day-laborer, yet I expect that blister every spring. Indeed, I am rather disappointed now if I don't get it, I feel as if I weren't doing my share of work. The work is worth the blister. I know of few sensations more delightful than that of seeing the lawn emerging green and clean beneath your rake, the damp mould baring itself under the shrubbery, the paths, freshly edged, nicely scarrowed with tooth marks; then of feeling the tug of the barrow handles in your shoulder sockets; and finally, as the sun is sending long shadows over the ground, of standing beside the rubbish pile with your rake as a poker and hearing the red flames crackle and roar through the heap, while great puffs of beautiful brown smoke go rolling away across the garden and the warmth is good to your tired body. Clearing up is such a delight, indeed, that I cannot now comprehend why I so intensely disliked to do it when I was half my present age. Perhaps it was because at that time clearing up was put to me in the light of a duty, not a pleasure.

There is alas, too often a tempering of sadness in the joy of taking the covers off the garden. One removes them, especially after a cold open winter, with much the same anxious excitement that one opens a long-delayed letter from a dear friend who has been in danger. What signs of life will the peonies show under their four inches of rotted manure, and the j.a.panese irises by the pool, and the beds of Darwins, so confidently relied upon to ring the sundial in late May and early June, before the succeeding annuals are ready? How will the hollyhocks, so stately in midsummer all down the garden wall, have withstood the alternate thaws and freezes which characterized our abominable January and February? Then there are those two long rows of foxgloves and Canterbury bells, across the rear of the vegetable garden, where they were set in the fall to make strong plants before being put in their permanent places--or rather their season's places, for these lovely flowers are perversely biennials, and at least seven times every spring I vow I will never bother with them again, and then make an even larger sowing when their stately stalks and sky-blue bells are abloom in summer! Tenderly you lift the pine boughs from them on a balmy April day (it was not until almost mid-April last year), when snow still lingers, perhaps, in dirty patches on the north side of the evergreens. Will they show frozen, flabby, withered leaves, or will their centers be bright with new promise? It is a moment to try the soul of the gardener, and no joy is quite like that of finding them all alive, nor any sorrow like that of finding them dead. At first I used to give up gardening forever when the perennials and biennials were winter-killed, just as a beginner at golf gives up the game forever each time he makes a vile score. Then I began to compromise on a garden of annuals. Now I have learned philosophy--and also better methods of winter protection. Likewise, I have learned that a good many of the perennials which were stone-dead when the covers were removed have a trick of coming to life under the kiss of May, and struggling up to some sort of bloom, even if heroically spindly like lean soldiers after a hard campaign. The hollyhocks, especially, have a way of seeding themselves undetected, and presenting you in spring with a whole unsuspected family of children, some of whom wander far from the parent stem and suddenly begin to shoot up in the most unexpected places. An exquisite yellow hollyhock last summer sprouted unnoted beneath our dinning-room window, and we were not aware of it till one July morning when it poked up above the sill. A few days later, when we came down to breakfast, there it was abloom, nodding in at the open window.

Another spring excitement in the garden is the pea planting, both the sweet peas and what our country folk sometimes call "eatin' peas." No rivalry is so keen as that between pea-growers. My neighbors and I struggle for supremacy in sweet peas at the flower show in July, and great glory goes to him who gets the first mess of green peas on his table. We have tried sweet-pea sowing in the fall, and it does not work. So now I prepare a trench in October, partially fill it with manure, and cover it with leaves, which I remove at the first hint of warm weather in March. The earth-piles on either side thaw out quickly, and I get an early sowing, putting in as many varieties as I can afford (my wife says twice as many as I can afford), jealously guarding the secret of their number. The vegetable peas are planted later, usually about the first or second day of April, as soon as the top soil of the garden can be worked with a fork, and long before the plowing. We put in first a row of Daniel O'Rourke's, not because they are good for much, but because they will beat any other variety we have discovered by two days at least. Then we put in a row of a better standard early variety. How we watch those rows for the first sprouts!

How we coddle and cultivate them! How eagerly we inspect our neighbors' rows, trying to appear nonchalant! And doubtless how silly this sounds to anyone who is not a gardener. Last summer we got our first mess of peas on June twenty-first, and after eating a spoonful, we rushed to the telephone, and were about to ring, when somebody called us. "h.e.l.lo," we said into the transmitter. A voice on the other end of the wire, curiously choked and munchy, cried, "We are eating our first peas! My mouth's full of 'em now!"

"That's nothing," we answered, "we've got our first mouthful all swallowed."

"Well, anyhow," said our disappointed neighbor, "I called up first!

Good-bye."

How is that for a neck-and-neck finish at the tape?

As April waxes into May, the garden beds are a perpetual adventure in the expected, each morning bringing some new revelation of old friends come back, and as you dig deep and prepare the beds for the annuals, or spade manure around the perennials, or set your last year's plantings of hollyhocks, larkspur, foxgloves and campanulas into their places, you move tenderly amid the aspiring red stalks of the peonies, the Jason's crop of green iris spears, the leaves of tulips and narcissuses and daffodils, the fresh green of tiny sweet William plants cl.u.s.tered 'round the mother plant like a brood of chicks around the hen. You must be at setting them into borders, too, or putting the surplus into flats and then telephoning your less fortunate friends.

One of the joys of a garden is in giving away your extra plants and seedlings.

One morning the asparagus bed, already brown again after the April showers have driven the salt into the ground, is p.r.i.c.ked with short tips. That is a luscious sight! Inch by inch they push up, and thick and fast they come at last, and more and more and more. My diary shows me that we ate our first bunch last year on May ninth. On that day, also, I learn from the same source, the daffodils were out, the Darwin tulips were budding, and we spent the afternoon burning caterpillars'

nests in the orchard--one spring crop which is never welcome, and never winter-killed. At this date, too, we are hard at work spraying, and sowing the annuals out-of-doors in the seed beds, and planting corn (the potatoes are all in by now), immediately following the plowing, which was delayed till the first of May by a belated snowstorm. Winter with us is like a clumsy person who tries over and over to make his exit from a room but does not know how to accomplish it. It is a busy time, for no sooner are the annuals planted, and the vegetables, than some of the seedlings from the hotbeds have to be set out (such as early cosmos), and the perennial beds already have begun to bloom, and require cultivation and admiration, and the flowers in the wild garden--hepaticas and trilliums and bloodroot and violets--are crying to be noticed, and, confound it all, here is the lawn getting rank under the influence of its spring dressing, and demands to be mowed! Yes, and we forget to get the mower sharpened before we put it away in the fall.

"May fifteen"--it is my diary for last year--"apple blossoms showing pink, and the rhubarb leaves peeping over the tops of their barrels this morning, like Ali Baba and the forty thieves."

Well, well; straight, juicy red stalks the length of a barrel, fit for a pie and the market! It is our second commercial product, the asparagus slightly preceding it. The garden is getting into shape now, indeed; the wheel-hoe is traveling up and down the green rows; the hotbed gla.s.ses are entirely removed by day; and the early cauliflower plants are put into the open ground at the first promise of a shower.

The annuals are up in the seed beds; the pool has been cleaned and filled, the goldfish are once more swimming in it, the Cape Cod water-lily, brought from its winter quarters in the dark cellar, has begun to make a leaf, and we have begun to hope that maybe _this_ year it will also make a blossom, for we are nothing in mid-May if not optimistic.

The earlier Darwins are already in bloom. The German irises follow rapidly. June comes, and we work amid the splendors of the j.a.panese irises and the flame-line of Oriental poppies, setting the annuals into their beds, from the tender, droopy schyzanthus plants to the various asters and the now st.u.r.dy snapdragons. The color scheme had been carefully planned last winter, and is as cheerfully disregarded now, as some new inspiration strikes us, such as a border of purple asters against salvia, with white dahlias behind--a strip of daring fall color which would delight the soul of Gari Melcher, which delighted me--and which my wife said was horrible.

So spring comes and goes in the garden, busy and beautiful, ceaseless work and ceaseless wonder. But there is a moment in its pa.s.sage, as yet unmentioned, which I have kept for the close because to me it is the subtle climax of the resurrection season. It usually comes in April for us, though sometimes earlier. The time is evening, always evening, just after supper, when a frail memory of sunset still lingers in the west and the air is warm. I go out hatless upon the veranda, thinking of other things, and suddenly I am aware of the song of the frogs! There are laughing voices in the street, the tinkle of a far-off piano, the pleasant sounds of village life come outdoors with the return of spring; and buoying up, permeating these other sounds comes the ceaseless, shrill chorus of the frogs, seemingly from out of the air and distance, beating in waves on the ear. Why this first frog chorus so thrills me I cannot explain, nor what dim memories it wakes.

But the peace of it steals over all my senses, and I walk down into the dusk and seclusion of my garden, amid the sweet odors of new earth and growing things, where the song comes up to me from the distant meadow making the garden-close sweeter still, the air yet more warm and fragrant, the promise of spring more magical. The garden then is very intimate and dear, it brings me into closer touch with the awakening earth about me, and all the years I dwelt a prisoner in cities are but as the shadow of a dream.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

_The Bubble, Reputation_

A great dramatist is authority for the statement that--

The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.

That is no doubt in a measure true; yet it would be grossly unfair to blame personally certain great ones of the past for the evil that has lived after them and borne their names. For instance, it may be doubted whether Louis XIV of France was all that he should have been.

His private life would hardly have escaped censure in Upper Montclair, N. J., or West Newton, Ma.s.s., and his public acts were not always calculated to promote social justice and universal brotherhood. But to blame him for all the gilt furniture which has ever since stood around the walls of hotel ballrooms and borne his name is a libel even on that lax and luxurious monarch. Yet such is his fate. You who are familiar with history, I who know next to nothing about it, are alike in this--when we hear the words _Louis XIV_ we do not think of a great monarch with a powdered wig and a powdered mistress, of magnificent fountains and courtiers and ladies dancing the gavotte, of a brilliant court and striking epoch. Not at all. We think, both of us, of a gilt chair with a brocaded seat (slightly worn), and maybe a sofa to match.

If you say that you don't, I must politely but firmly--well, differ with you.