young chap and make him play a
round of golf on week-day afternoons, but not often. That's the
difference between our clubs and yours. We have clubs, but we don't use
them. We wouldn't think of spending time there if we could spend it at
business. Nothing is lonelier on week days than our golf club, and one
of the chief duties of the caretaker at the Commercial Club is to dust
off the reading table. We have our clubs, and that is the main object.
We know that they are there, and that we could enjoy them if we wanted
to. Perhaps we do want to. But it's a hard art to learn. And, oh, how
patiently and earnestly DeLancey is trying to teach us! If it were any
one but he, we might learn faster. But he sort of figures as a horrible
example. It's like a battered and yellowed wreck advocating cigarettes,
or a bald-headed barber pushing his own hair tonic.

Gibb Ogle, the other member of our leisure class, is a very different
kind of a bird. His art is more sublime than DeLancey's because he has
no one to support him. He has worked down to his present state from
nothing at all. He is a self-unmade man. With no resources, not even a
loving wife with a wash tub, he lives a life of perfect ease and
idleness. He doesn't even have to hunt for means of killing time, as
DeLancey does. Time with him dies a natural death. He is not implicated
in the sad event in any way. All he does is to watch its demise. He
watches whole hours pass away while leaning against the door-frame of
the Delmonico Hotel. Chet Frazier and Sim Bone got into an argument one
day, and to settle it they went over and took Gibb away from the
building. It didn't fall, and Sim won. Gibb has watched several thousand
hours expire while propping up the Q. B. & C. depot. He is the chief
spectator at every fire, runaway, dog fight and public event. He is a
movable landmark, as permanent as the Republican flagpole in the city
park. I have never yet gone down-town in the morning without seeing Gibb
on the street. And very seldom have I gone home at night, even in the
howling blizzards of winter, without passing Gibb leaning against the
warm bright show window of the last open place of business, and waiting
with placid greediness for one final event of some kind to transpire
before going to his well-earned repose.

Beside Gibb's leisure, DeLancey's is poor amateurish stuff. Gibb's total
income during the year would hardly exceed twenty-five dollars, and it
doesn't do him much