ditty of the drawing-room. They
have a spicy and rememberable flavour. They speak to the imagination and
point the way to treasure-trove.

There is a touch of dignity in them, too, for all they are so free and
easy--the dignity of independence, the native spirit of one who takes
for granted that his mode of living has a right to make its own forms of
speech. I admire a man who does not hesitate to salute the world in the
dialect of his calling.

How salty and stimulating, for example, is the sailorman's hail of "Ship
ahoy!" It is like a breeze laden with briny odours and a pleasant dash
of spray. The miners in some parts of Germany have a good greeting for
their dusky trade. They cry to one who is going down the shaft, "Gluck
auf!" All the perils of an underground adventure and all the joys
of seeing the sun again are compressed into a word. Even the trivial
salutation which the telephone has lately created and claimed for its
peculiar use--"Hello, hello"--seems to me to have a kind of fitness
and fascination. It is like a thoroughbred bulldog, ugly enough to be
attractive. There is a lively, concentrated, electric air about it. It
makes courtesy wait upon dispatch, and reminds us that we live in an age
when it is necessary to be wide awake.

I have often wished that every human employment might evolve its own
appropriate greeting. Some of them would be queer, no doubt; but
at least they would be an improvement on the wearisome iteration of
"Good-evening" and "Good-morning," and the monotonous inquiry, "How
do you do?"--a question so meaningless that it seldom tarries for an
answer. Under the new and more natural system of etiquette, when you
passed the time of day with a man you would know his business, and the
salutations of the market-place would be full of interest.

As for my chosen pursuit of angling (which I follow with diligence when
not interrupted by less important concerns), I rejoice with every true
fisherman that it has a greeting all its own and of a most honourable
antiquity. There is no written record of its origin. But it is quite
certain that since the days after the Flood, when Deucalion

"Did first this art invent
Of angling, and his people taught the same,"

two honest and good-natured anglers have never met each other by the way
without crying out, "What luck?"

Here, indeed, is an epitome of the gentle art. Here is the spirit of
it embodied in a word and paying its respects