newspapers, of the absence of favorite trousers and coat while undergoing pressing, take away the insouciance of it. But on the rare occasions when you have no excuse, and when it, is pardonably unavoidable and extenuated, it is fun.

And has mankind taken the hint of nature in splashing water upon itself? Not in the least. In the intended way water was impelled against the body with no effort on the part of the body except its presence. Now we get the water and impel the body into it. It is a lengthy and lazy process that gives one the feeling of having done something worth while, which is quite out of keeping with the purely routine spirit of the thing.

Take the Roman bath, about as exciting a pastime as playing in a fountain with the spray out of order. Take the English system, now happily on the wane, of striking postures, peculiarly Chabas in character, in an enlarged shirred-egg dish, and praying that there is not a plastered ceiling in the room below. Take that extravagant Americanism, the porcelain tub. In its maximum splendor its architecture resembles most the marble sarcophaguses of the Early Christians, seen strewn about the basilicas of Rome, and greatly admired by archaeologists, but purely as tombs.

Here and there a shower-bath has crept wistfully into a private house, but usually as a minor accessory to the sarcophagus. A tall white-clothed thing startles you in the dark from its semblance to a wraith emerging from the porcelain tomb. And a bath in it gives one the cheering and sticky sensation of having taken a shower in a shroud. It presents a possibility, but not a pleasure.

No, the home of the true shower-bath is the country club. Reduced to its lowest terms, a country club is a golf

course, a tennis court, a bar, and a shower-bath. And you can omit the tennis court before eliminating the shower-bath. After that deuce set of tennis, those extra three holes of golf to decide the drinks, it is late; dinner is waiting, perhaps the wife, and a long way into town. Cleanliness, coolness, and celerity are needed, and we find them in the tubulous personality of the shower.

We who have made the rounds of country clubs, including those with Indian names, have learned to distinguish the different models, — the kind that droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, the kind that pelts you at variable angles from the front, and the kind that attacks with vehemence from all sides. But to get the best results one must know the idiosyncrasies of one's particular machine. A transient operator at a dozen clubs during the summer finds that success in showers is not uniform. At a country club it is quite as necessary to be a good mixer in a shower, as it is on the golf course, or in the bar.

To know by instinct the hot-water throttle is the study of a lifetime; we have never been able to sense it ourselves when not marked, and sometimes even if marked. And once in a modern bath in eternal if torrid Rome, we would have given much to know that 'calda' did not mean cold as we phonetically decided it should. We have often wondered, in this connection, notwithstanding the expense, if a shower-chauffeur would not prove a popular installment at country clubs. For not once in a hundred times can one experience a well-spaced gamut from cleansing hot to invigorating cold that leaves nothing to be desired.

Besides the individual influence there is a broader sociological importance to a shower-bath. It develops many things in the average man. First

of all, self-confidence. It takes much personal reliance to step nonchalantly into a shower with your roll-top-desk and one-day-a-week-tennis development, just as a last year's football player emerges in muscular radiance from it. And what restraint and verbal repression it fosters as you yourself come out and find that the same young athlete has ensnared the last towel!

But, of all things, voice-culture is what it assuredly stimulates best. He sings in a shower-bath who never sang before. Some are more melodious in warm water than in cold, but all are universally vocal. Mute inglorious Scottis are not mute in shower-baths, and many a noiseless tenor under the persuasive influence of a stream of water out-phonographs a graphophone. And in this way we often arrive at the true inner man. The professor of Greek in the high school ecstatically sings the latest ragtime success; the golf champion of last year warbles, from memory, a leitmotiv from Tristan und Isolde. Repertoires are endless as the water splashes and as diverse as the men themselves.

And thus we have the shower-bath. In it sparkles the light of the century, efficiency; the maximum of results, the minimum of effort. It approaches the acme of speed and effect. And the day will come when the porcelain tub will be relegated to companionship with the other archæological curiosities, including its archetype, the Roman sarcophagus. 'A cleanly race,' will comment the historian-to-come in considering this phase of our life, but considered in our light of universal showers, we wonder at the unnecessary work they made of it.'

LITTLEKIN AND KEATS

LITTLEKIN, aged two and a half years, was standing by my knee looking at

pictures in a little cloth book, and we came to the Three Blind Mice.' The scene was a sprightly one, representing the farmer's wife, scared almost out of her wits, running away with such a stride as ought to have taken her quite off the page in a single wink of Littlekin's long dark eyelashes. The three mice pursued, scampering in fearsome proximity to the wife's red-stockinged ankles. Littlekin gazed, rapt, while I repeated the classic lines. She caught the idea; pursuit, nerve-racking pursuit. 'Dey are wunning after dat lady. See dem wun!' She gave a little gasping laugh full of joyous suspense. Then a new idea swept over her face, and, acting upon it, a little forefinger delicately extended itself toward the page-toward the mice. For if they could chase the lady, why not Littlekin's finger? A pause of rapturous and fearful expectancy - 'De mice will wun after baby's finger- dey will bite my finger Eee! Eee! Dey will bite it! Eee! Dey will! Dey will! Don't let dem bite my finger! Eee!'

The finger was plucked back hastily, a brand snatched from the burning; again it approached — little moth-finger seeking the flame; again it was withdrawn, somewhat less quickly. The hazel-brown eyes, deep-set, intent, observed the mice steadily, as though to draw out the very heart of their secret. Then my hand was seized, and my finger drawn toward the Three: 'Make dem wun, mudda, make dem wun after baby's finger!' I urged them on with finger and voice, but Littlekin, wholly dissatisfied with the results, pushed my hand back and studied the picture afresh.

'Dey won't bite my finger because dey are going after de lady. Dey are going to bite dose' (pointing to the wife's red-stockinged ankles). Another pause, and finally, with a certain soft yet reproachful vehemence, she broke

ticed my writing, or I'd have been hopelessly embarrassed.

I finished it at home in the country. Locked in my room, I wrote feverishly, day after day, perched on a chair-arm before the high secretary my grandmother left me. It was generally twilight at that desk, for the trees came so near my windows that the shutters always caught in the branches when you tried to open or close them. You had to push very hard. One narrow, tall drawer of the secretary my grandmother used to keep full of gold. I too would fill it with gold, as soon as my play succeeded.

The most recent dramatist of my acquaintance was Shakespeare. So after much thought I used him for stage directions, feeling that Eschylus and Aristophanes did not furnish trustworthy models.

When it was finished, I went down to her's office, and laboriously picked ↑ on a typewriter.

famous actress and her more husband came to New York. m the play.

days a telegram arrived. was charming, and could hem.

hrilling day's journey h one's trunk full of ne's heart full of

Well, I had n't any, except the nursery theatre. I told her about Mother Goose and Molière. I had a dim feeling that fluent falsehood might have served me here, but one needs experience in that too.

Enthralled, I sat and watched her meddle with the perfection of her face before a mirror, while her maid changed the slippers on her elastic little feet, and she went on questioning me in a caressing voice.

Born and reared in Scotland, was n't I? she asked.

I said I had never been in Scotland. She turned at that and declared a doubt.

'My husband is a Scot, and he says you must be one.'

Though elated by this, I could not leave her under a misapprehension. I firmly disclaimed Scotland.

Her engaging countenance gradually clouding with worry.

was

Producing plays was a very risky business, she explained. Their last two had been failures. They could n't afford another fiasco. This looked delightful to them, but it did end tragically, and they were distrustful of their own judgment. If only it did n't end so sadly! But it did. I was n't old enough to be interested in cheerful endings.

The iridescent dream was fading. She asked me to come next day to see her husband. She offered me a box, from which that night I witnessed the latest failure.

I came and met the husband, who, he also, was shocked by the hair-ribbon. Quite obviously, a playwright should be a blasé elderly man with a farce under his arm.

'I don't want you to play it if you think it would be a failure,' I assured hem haughtily.

It was very discouraging, but since atic world did not seem to

out, 'Wun! Mice! Wun! Catch dose! Catch dem, mice! Go on! GO ON!' Nothing happened, and the book was flung to the far corner of the room.

--

What did she make me think of Littlekin, with her vehemence and her intolerance of the poor, mute symbol? Ah yes- by contrast-of Keats, of Keats and his Grecian urn with its 'leaf-fringed legend.'

What men or gods are these? What maidens loath?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? No pipes and timbrels here, indeed, and the farmer's wife is neither a man, nor a god, nor a maiden loath. Yet there is the mad pursuit, the struggle to escape; and as for the wild ecstasy, it was Littlekin's for a moment, before she fell a prey to her impatience.

Clearly, Littlekin is no Keats. If she could look upon that urn of his, would she discover compensations in its eternal suspense? She would not. I think that, after that long, deep look of hers, she would say to the pipers, 'Pipe louder! Louder!' To the heifer, garlanded for the sacrifice, she would say, 'Go on, cow! Go on!' And to the lover 'winning near the goal,' she would say, 'Wun, boy, wun! Catch de lady!' Yes, I feel sure she would, untutored, inartistic Littlekin that she is! Did Keats himself, I wonder, at two and a half, like his mice to keep their 'fair attitude,' or would he have preferred them to run? Is this a matter of age, of training, or of temperament? Or is the Zeitgeist, speaking through Littlekin, hinting of the time, soon to come, when the 'movies' shall be in every household, and even the child's picture-book be no longer tamely static? But no, now that I bethink me, age and the Zeitgeist must be counted out; for Lessing lived more than a century before the 'movies' (more's the pity! fancy what philosophic-æsthetic

nuts they would have made for him to crack!), and he was, I feel sure, a good deal older than Littlekin when he decided that, since the Laocoon could not have more action, it should have had less. Like Littlekin, he felt that it was unfortunate to choose a subject in its moment of extreme unrest. Like Littlekin, he was teased by frozen action. It rests Keats. It annoys Lessing and Littlekin.

Here is a puzzle for the student of æsthetics. Littlekin stands with Lessing, and they make, for obvious reasons, a strong team. Will any care to stand with Keats? I confess myself in difficulties.

THE ENCHANTED PENNY

YOUTH is our enchanted penny, that we spend for a cake of long life. You had n't the courage to trade it for anything you really wanted.

You have been so busy leading a successful life, that you have forgotten to notice that your successful life has been led.

Is n't it true? Your hair is thin, and you move like a forty-two centimetre gun, but you remarked fatuously the other day, 'I'm just as young as I ever was.'

Oh no, you're not! If young people were n't too polite, they'd soon undeceive you. Remember the yawning débutante next you last evening. She said that what ailed her was too many dances. But it was you.

Youth was undoubtedly the nicest thing you ever had, but you have n't it any longer. You are outside.

Poor, middle-aged Shakespeare deluded himself like you.

My glass cannot persuade me I am old,
So long as youth and thou are of one date.

He had only genius, while his sweetheart had youth; and having it, justly