e late Major Pond, the well-known director of a lecture
bureau, an old client of his remarked: "He was a most capable manager,
but it always made me a little sore to have him deduct twenty-five
per cent. commission." "Pond's Extract," murmured one of the gentlemen
present.

EACH of our great towns has its "Little Italy," with shops where nothing
is spoken but Italian and streets in which the alien pedestrian had
better not linger after nightfall. The chief industry of these exotic
communities seems to be spaghetti and stilettos. What with our Little
Italys and Chinatowns, and the like, an American need not cross the
ocean in order to visit foreign lands and enjoy the benefits of older
civilizations.

POETS are made as well as born, the proverb notwithstanding. They are
made possible by the general love of poetry and the consequent imperious
demand for it. When this is nonexistent, poets become mute, the
atmosphere stifles them. There would have been no Shakespeare had there
been no Elizabethan audience. That was an age when, as Emerson finely
puts it,

Men became
Poets, for the air was fame.

THE stolid gentleman in livery who has his carriage-stand at the corner
opposite my house is constantly touching on the extremes of human
experience, with probably not the remotest perception of the fact.
Now he takes a pair of lovers out for an airing, and now he drives the
absconding bank-teller to the railway-station. Excepting as question
of distance, the man has positively no choice between a theatre and a
graveyard. I met him this morning dashing up to the portals of Trinity
Church with a bridal party, and this afternoon, as I was crossing
Cambridge Bridge, I saw him creeping along next to the hearse, on his
way to Mount Auburn. The wedding afforded him no pleasure, and the
funeral gave him no grief; yet he was a factor in both. It is his odd
destiny to be wholly detached from the vital part of his own acts. If
the carriage itself could speak! The autobiography of a public hack
written without reservation would be dramatic reading.

IN this blotted memorandum-book are a score or two of suggestions for
essays, sketches, and poems, which I have not written, and never shall
write. The instant I jot down an idea the desire to utilize it leaves
me, and I turn away to do something unpremeditated. The shabby volume
has become a sort of Potter's Field where I bury my literary intentions,
good and bad, without any bel