R.L.S. in Edinburgh, as we waited for Leerie
to come by and light the lamps. Oh, pipes of youth, that can never come
again!

When George Fox was a young man, sorely troubled by visions of the
devil, a preacher told him to smoke tobacco and sing hymns.

Not such bad advice.

HAY FEBRIFUGE

Our village is remarkable. It contains the greatest publisher in the
world, the most notable department store baron (and inventor of that new
form of literary essay, the department store ad.), the most fragrant gas
tanks in the Department of the East, the greatest number of cinders per
eye of any arondissement served by the R---- railway, and the most
bitterly afflicted hay fever sufferer on this sneezing sphere. Also the
editor of the most widely circulated magazine in the world, and the
author of one of the best selling books that ever was written.

Not bad for one village.

Your first thought is Northampton, Mass., but you are wrong. That is
where Gerald Stanley Lee lives. For a stamped, addressed envelope I will
give you the name of our village, and instructions for avoiding it. It
is bounded on the north by goldenrod, on the south by ragweed, on the
east by asthma and the pollen of anemophylous plants.

It is bounded on the west by a gray stone facsimile of Windsor Castle,
confirmed with butlers, buttresses, bastions, ramparts, repartees,
feudal tenures, moats, drawbridges, posterns, pasterns, chevaux de
frise, machicolated battlements, donjons, loopholes, machine-gun
emplacements, caltrops, portcullises, glacis, and all the other travaux
de fantaisie that make life worth living for retired manufacturers. The
general effect is emetic in the extreme. Hard by the castle is a
spurious and richly gabled stable in the general style of the chateau de
Chantilly. One brief strip of lawn constitutes a gulf of five hundred
years in architecture, and restrains Runnymede from Versailles.

Our village is famous for beautiful gardens. At five o'clock merchants
and gens de lettres return home from office and tannery, remove the
cinders, and commune with vervain and bergamot. The countryside is as
lovely as Devonshire, equipped with sky, trees, rolling terrain, stewed
terrapin, golf meads, nut sundaes, beagles, spare tires, and other
props. But we are equally infamous for hideous houses, of the Chester A.
Arthur era. Every prospect pleases, and man alone is vile.

There is a large, expensive school for flappers, on a hill; and a