efficiency, and with efficiency rapidly becoming
compulsory everywhere, that colourful class of ancient lineage, the
bums, is quickly becoming _persona non grata_ to our civilisation, and
will soon be extinct. To the next generation, in all probability, the
word bum will be but an empty name. I doubt whether it would be a
feasible plan for Dr. Hornaday to undertake to preserve a small number
of this species in the Bronx Park. The bum nature, I fear, would
languish in captivity. The creature would likely lose its health, and,
worse, its spirits. It is a nomad, a child of nature. It takes no
thought for the morrow, as our modern prophets teach us to do. I
remember well an excellent bum (I mean excellently conforming to type),
one Bain, who, growing restive under restraint, lost a position which
he happened to have. I asked him what he was going to do now. There
was something sublime about that being. He had faith that the Lord
would provide. His simple reply was: "Well, the ravens fed Elijah."

Stuffed bums in the American Museum of Natural History would not be any
good. Any good, that is, as objects of study. Our children will
require to know, to see the past steadily and see it whole, the
_habits_ of bums, their manners and customs. So, as I say, my work
would be invaluable. The wastrel (as they say in England) has, of
course, been celebrated in the literature of the past from time
immemorial. I can't at the moment put my finger on any, but I have no
doubt there are bums in the pages of Homer, That Persian philosopher
who found paradise enow with a jug of wine and a book of verse beneath
a bough, Falstaff, Richard Swiveller, how they flock to the mind, they
of the care-free kidney! They are in the Books of the great Hebrew
literature. There was he that took his journey into a far country.
"Gil Blas" and all the early picaresque novels on into the pages of
"The Romany Rye" swarm with them. But what is wanting, what will be
needed, is a richly informed picture of the last of the race, those
now, like the Indian and the buffalo, fast passing away. There is only
one way in which such a book could be, or should be written.

"Peace be with the soul of that charitable and Courteous Author who
introduced the ingenious way of miscellaneous writing," wrote Lord
Shaftsbury in the opening paragraph of his "Miscellaneous Reflections."
Peace be with the souls of all those who, for the delight of the
anointed, hav