whom I recently sat at
dinner, inquired of me on the passing of the fish, whether I had ever
properly considered the cow, which she esteemed a most mischievous animal.
One of them had mooed at her as she crossed a pasture and she had hastily
climbed a fence. I get a good many suggestions first and last. I was once
taken to a Turkish bath for no other reason--as I was afterwards told--than
that it might supply me with a topic. Odd books have been put in my way.
A basket of school readers was once lodged with me, with a request that I
direct my attention to the absurd selection of the poems. I have been urged
to go against car conductors and customs men. On one occasion I received a
paper of tombstone inscriptions, with a note of direction how others might
be found in a neighboring churchyard if I were curious. A lady in whose
company I camped last summer has asked me to give a chapter to it. We were
abroad upon a lake in the full moon--we were lost upon a mountain--twice a
canoe upset--there were the usual jests about cooking. These things might
have filled a few pages agreeably, yet so far they have given me only a
paragraph.

But I am not disposed toward any of these subjects, least of all the cat,
upon which I look--despite the coldness of her nature--as a harmless and
comforting appendage of the hearth-rug. I would no more prey upon her
morals than I would the morals of the andirons. I choose, rather, to slip
to another angle of the question and say a few words about cowards, among
whom I have already confessed that I number myself.

In this year of battles, when physical courage sits so high, the reader--if
he is swept off in the general opinion--will expect under such a title
something caustic. He will think that I am about to loose against all
cowards a plague of frogs and locusts as if old Egypt had come again. But
cowardice is its own punishment. It needs no frog to nip it. Even the
sharp-toothed locust--for in the days that bordered so close upon the
mastodon, the locust could hardly have fallen to the tender greenling we
know today--even the locust that once spoiled the Egyptians could not now
add to the grief of a coward.

And yet--really I hesitate. I blush. My attack will be too intimate; for I
have confessed that I am not the very button on the cap of bravery. I have
indeed stiffened myself to ride a horse, a mightier feat than driving him
because of the tallness of the monster and his uneasy movement, as