en very much interested by your notion--if it was
yours, which is not altogether probable--and we have been turning its
light upon our own experience, in what we should not so much call
self-celebration as self-exploitation. One uses one's self as the stuff
for knowledge of others, or for the solution of any given problem. There
is no other way of getting at the answers to the questions."

"And what is your conclusion as to my notion, if it is mine?" the
veteran observer asked, with superiority.

"That there is nothing in it. The fact is that the tastes are never so
tolerant, so liberal, so generous, so supple as they are at that time of
life when they begin, according to your notion, to stiffen, to harden,
to contract. We have in this very period formed a new taste--or taken a
new lease of an old one--for reading history, which had been dormant all
through our first and second youth. We expect to see the time when we
shall read the Elizabethan dramatists with avidity. We may not
improbably find a delight in statistics; there must be a hidden charm in
them. We may even form a relish for the vagaries of pseudo-psychology----"

At this point we perceived the veteran observer had vanished and that we
were talking to ourselves.

IV

THE PRACTICES AND PRECEPTS OF VAUDEVILLE

A Friend of the Easy Chair came in the other day after a frost from the
magazine editor which had nipped a tender manuscript in its bloom, and
was received with the easy hospitality we are able to show the rejected
from a function involving neither power nor responsibility.

"Ah!" we breathed, sadly, at the sight of the wilted offering in the
hands of our friend. "What is it he won't take _now_?"

"Wait till I get my second wind," the victim of unrequited literature
answered, dropping into the Easy Chair, from which the occupant had
risen; and he sighed, pensively, "I felt so sure I had got him this
time." He closed his eyes, and leaned his head back against the
uncomfortably carven top of the Easy Chair. It was perhaps his failure
to find rest in it that restored him to animation. "It is a little
thing," he murmured, "on the decline of the vaudeville."

"The decline of the vaudeville?" we repeated, wrinkling our forehead in
grave misgiving. Then, for want of something better, we asked, "Do you
think that is a very dignified subject for the magazine?"

"Why, bless my soul!" the rejected one cried, starting somewhat
violently forward, "