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WILLIAM MAXWELL SCOTT

For over twenty-five years we have been yoked to the same plough, and if we have kept the furrow straight, it is because we have pulled together.

PURELY PERSONAL

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

It was inevitable, after the success of "The Amenities of Book-Collecting," that its author should attempt to repeat that success, and You, kind or, it may be, suspicious reader, shall fill up that blank. Whatever your verdict may be, I shall accept it unhesitatingly; for one never knows, one's self, whether a piece of work, or sundry pieces, upon which one has been engaged for a long time, have merit or not. Our little quips and quiddities, once spontaneous, after having been written in pencil on odd scraps of paper, and typed by one's secretary in her leisure moments, look rather feeble when the galley proof comes in, and positively silly on the printed page. This is a risk we who print books must run. Nothing venture, nothing have.

Long ago, before years and tobacco had destroyed a voice naturally defective, I was singing cockney songs, to my own delight but to the qualified enjoyment of my audience, when someone turning to me remarked: "Why, I had no idea that you sang!" To which Felix Schelling, not then enjoying an international reputation as a scholar, rejoined slyly: "I am not sure that he does." And so it may prove to be with my writing. I have never been able to free my mind of the truth of that remark of Gray's: "Any fool may write a valuable book by chance, if he will only

tell us what he heard and saw, with veracity." Trollope is said to have damaged his reputation by his confession as to the way in which he wrote; at the risk of utterly destroying mine, I want to say that any style I may have acquired is the result of writing advertisements of electrical apparatus for many years. When one is selling a page of writing, one receives, I suppose, as much as five, or even twenty-five dollars a page. When one is buying a page of advertising, one pays anywhere from one hundred to five thousand dollars a page! The discriminating reader will discover upon which page the most time is spent. Those who write with ease, to show their breeding, forget the last line of the couplet,—usually attributed to Byron, that " easy writing's damned hard reading."

When one is the victim of a practical joke, one tries to forget it; so, when several universities tagged me and gave me the legal right to append certain letters to my name, I said to myself: "Here is a fine opportunity for you to make a fool of yourself; disappoint your friends by not embracing it." And so it is that I was soon able to break my friends of the habit of giving me a title, all except a certain head waiter and my barber, who seemed to feel that the size of their tips depended upon the loudness or frequency with which they called me "Doctor."

Only yesterday it happened that, while I was sitting in the reading-room of my club, a page entered and called out, "Dr. Newton!" I went on with my newspaper, and he spoke again: "Dr. A. Edward

Newton!" He would be denied no longer, and, looking at him guiltily, I was told I was wanted on the telephone. Crossing the room, I experienced sundry difficulties. I thought I knew who was calling me my friend Hawley McLanahan, the architect, the merits of whose Scotch make one reluctant to break with him; but this must be stopped at any cost. Entering the telephone booth, I took up the receiver, and without any preliminaries I requested him to go to the devil, and promptly.

Reader! have you ever heard a lady go into an apoplexy? Well, that is the sound I heard from the other end of the wire. Of course I administered what relief I could, and prostrated myself before her - a difficult thing to do in a telephone booth; and finally, she being somewhat restored, I asked to what I owed the pleasure of this call.

Why," replied the lady, "I hoped you would consent to make a few remarks at a 'Current Events' luncheon we are having for the benefit of the starving in China. Christopher Morley had promised to come, but he has met with an accident.” 1

"Why don't you get Tom Daly?" I inquired; "he 's worth a dozen of us."

"He's in New England lecturing," was the reply. "I see," I said, "I'm the last chance. I can't possibly tell a lady to go to the devil a second time. I'll come; and your Current Eventers will wish that they were starving with the Chinese."

And so it proved.

1 Mr. Morley wishes it known that his hoof is broken, not cloven.