_you_ would like." Sometimes these impressionable souls
almost seem to make a sort of reputation for their fetish.

I HEAR that B----- directed to have himself buried on the edge of the
pond where his duckstand was located, in order that flocks of migrating
birds might fly over his grave every autumn. He did not have to die, to
become a dead shot. A comrade once said of him: "Yes, B----- is a great
sportsman. He has peppered everything from grouse in North Dakota to his
best friend in the Maine woods."

WHEN the novelist introduces a bore into his novel he must not let him
bore the reader. The fellow must be made amusing, which he would not
be in real life. In nine cases out of ten an exact reproduction of
real life would prove tedious. Facts are not necessarily valuable,
and frequently they add nothing to fiction. The art of the realistic
novelist sometimes seems akin to that of the Chinese tailor who
perpetuated the old patch on the new trousers. True art selects and
paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.

THE last meeting I had with Lowell was in the north room of his house at
Elmwood, the sleeping-room I had occupied during a two years' tenancy
of the place in his absence abroad. He was lying half propped up in
bed, convalescing from one of the severe attacks that were ultimately to
prove fatal. Near the bed was a chair on which stood a marine picture
in aquarelle--a stretch of calm sea, a bit of rocky shore in the
foreground, if I remember, and a vessel at anchor. The afternoon
sunlight, falling through the window, cast a bloom over the picture,
which was turned toward Lowell. From time to time, as he spoke, his eyes
rested thoughtfully on the water-color. A friend, he said, had just
sent it to him. It seemed to me then, and the fancy has often haunted me
since, that that ship, in the golden haze, with topsails loosened, was
waiting to bear his spirit away.

CIVILIZATION is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades. If
somebody has already said that, I forgive him the mortification he
causes me. At the beginning of the twentieth century barbarism can throw
off its gentle disguise, and burn a man at the stake as complacently as
in the Middle Ages.

WHAT is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the
purist in the next. On the other hand, expressions that once were not
considered inelegant are looked at askance in the period following. The
word "brass" was formerly an accepted