The creak of the floor,
My horrors and fears enhance;
And I wake with a scream
As I hear in my dream
The shrieks of my maiden aunts!"

Now it is a very dreadful thing to suggest that those highly respectable
pseudo-spinsters, the Sister Arts, supposedly cozily immune in their
polygamous chastity (for every suitor for favor is popularly expected to
be wedded to his particular art)--I repeat, it is very dreadful to
suggest that these impeccable old ladies are in danger of being talked
to death.

But the talkers are talking and Art Nouveau rockers are rocking, and the
trousers of the prophet are patched with stained glass, and it is a day
of dinkiness and of thumbs.

Let us find comfort in the ancient proverb: "Art talked to death shall
rise again." Let us also recollect that "Dinky is as dinky does"; that
"All is not Shaw that Bernards"; that "Better Yeates than Clever"; that
words are so inexpensive that there is no moral crime in robbing Henry
to pay James.

Firmly believing all this, abjuring all atom-pickers, slab furniture,
and woodchuck literature--save only the immortal verse:

"And there the wooden-chuck doth tread;
While from the oak trees' tops
The red, red squirrel on thy head
The frequent acorn drops."

Abjuring, as I say, dinkiness in all its forms, we may still hope that
those cleanly and respectable spinsters, the Sister Arts, will continue
throughout the ages, rocking and drinking tea unterrified by the
million-tongued clamor in the back yard and below stairs, where thumb
and forefinger continue the question demanded by intellectual
exhaustion: "L'arr! Kesker say l'arr?"

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

CONTENTS

PAGE
I 1
II 12
III 21
IV 32
V 41
VI 48
VII 52
VIII 62
IX 73
X 85
XI 92
XII 100
XIII 104
XIV 111
XV 119
XVI 133
XVII 138

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

"The little things," he continued,
delicately perforating the atmosphere
as though selecting a diatom.
_Frontispiece_
From a drawing