father to sickness, and brother to old age' (as Thomas Dekker bitterly called it; and well would your great-grandfather have agreed with him), when 'the first word that a wench speaks on your coming into a room in the morning is "Prithee send for some faggots.' It is bad enough when (to adapt Dekker's sixteenth-century phraseology) the first word that a wench speaks on your coming into a room in the morning is, 'Prithee send for a plumber' but how seldom it happens! And because we can send for a plumber, our attitude toward winter is joyfully changed for the better: lovely autumn is no longer regarded as melancholy because winter is coming, nor backward spring esteemed beyond criticism because winter is over.

Those good old days, after the sun had entered Capricorn, were cold and inconvenient old days. Observe greatgrandfather: all his plumbing was a pump, which often froze beyond his simple skill in plumbery; and then he drew water from the well in a dear old oaken bucket (as we like to think of it), emptied it into other buckets, and carried it by hand, even as a man now carries the water loaned him by his generous neighbor, wherever the useful, unintoxicating fluid was needed. No invisible brook flowed through his house, and gushed obligingly at faucets, hot or cold according to great-grandfather's whim; no hot-water pipes suffused his dwelling with grateful warmth. These are our blessings and it is the plumber, with only a boy to help him, who contends manfully against the forces of nature, and keeps them going. For the life of the house depends nowadays on its healthy circulation of water; and when the house suffers from arterio-sclerosis, the plumber is the doctor, and the strange, impassive boy is the trained nurse.

Sometimes in an emergency he ar

rives without this little companion: I have myself, rising to the same occasion, taken the boy's place. I was a good boy. The plumber admitted it. 'Fill th' kettle again with hot water off th' stove,' said he, over his arched back as he peered shrewdly down a pipe to see how far away it was frozen, 'there's th' good boy.' Thus I know that the boy is not, as our minor humorists would have us believe, a mere flourish and gaudy appanage to the plumber's autocratically assumed grandeur. His strange, impassive manner is probably nothing more or less than concentrated attention; as if he said, with Hamlet, 'Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all foolish, fond regards, all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, that youth and observation copied there; and thy commandment all alone shall live within the book and volume of my brain, unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by Heaven!' Even in putting in a new washer, I should do better with a boy.

The most nervous and conscientious plumber, I tell you, must at intervals appear, to an observer unacquainted with the art and mystery of plumbery, to be proceeding in a leisurely and perhaps idle fashion. The most methodical and conscientious man, plumber or not, will occasionally forget something, and have to go back for it. The most self-respecting and conscientious minor humorist, after he has exhausted his witty invention making a joke on a plumber, will try to sell it for the highest possible price. And if I, for example, am a little proud of my ability, greater than the plumber's, to write an essay, how shall I accuse him of arrogance if he is a little proud of his ability, greater than mine, to accomplish the more necessary feat of thawing a frozen water-pipe? He has a heart.

When I was a plumber's boy myself, I walked with my boss to his office in

the village to get a tool. It was a Sunday afternoon: I remember that a rooster crowed afar off, and how his lonely clarion enhanced and made more gravely quiet the peace of the Sabbath. And the plumber said, 'I would n't have felt right, sitting at home by the fire reading the paper, when I knew you was in trouble and I could pull you out.' He had come, mark you, in his Sunday clothes; he had come in his best, not pausing even for his overalls, so that, in our distressed, waterless home, the lady of the house had herself encircled his honest waist with a gingham apron before he began plumbing. And in all the world there was nobody else whom we would have been so glad to see.

And so, bowing, with my left hand over what I take to be the region of a grateful heart, I extended him this praise of plumber. No plumber came over in the Mayflower; but think not, for that reason, that he is a parvenu. He is of ancient lineage this good fairy in overalls of our invisible brooks. The Romans knew him as the artifex plumbareus. Cæsar may have interrupted the revision of the Commentaries to send for him. He disappeared, with civilization and water-pipes, in the Dark Ages; he came back, with civilization and water-pipes, when the darkness lifted. Neglected by Art, disregarded by Romance, and unconsidered by the drama, these rich and entertaining expressions of life are as nothing when his presence is called for.

We may live without painters

Or writers or mummers,
But civilized man cannot

Live without plumbers.

He, too, should have his statue, not of bronze, marble, or granite, but of honest lead, with two figures - the Plumber, holding aloft his torch, and the Plumber's Boy, strange, impassive, and holding in his pendant hands a monkey wrench and the coil of flexible

tubing with which his master cunningly directs hot water into the hardened arteries of a suffering house. And on his pedestal I would carve the motto, — 'Did You Ever Know a Plumber Who Had Grown Rich?'

THE PANACEA

ABOUT the middle of last August we observed in our household that the war was becoming too much for us. At meal-time especially, around the smug compactness of a table set for four instead of six, the change was evident. An unwonted acerbity of tone crept into our discussions of food-saving; the headlines of the evening paper provoked comment and counter-comment, leading to extravagant statement on the part of the Youngest Member, and on the part of the Eldest One to exhibitions of stoicism more irritating still; a luckless caller, skirting the subject of atrocities, aroused behind her retreating back a Hymn of Hate.

It was after the Hymn of Hate that the Eldest One took serious thought and conveyed to us her conclusions.

'It's because we think about it all the time; we never get our minds off it. At this rate, you know, we'll be fit for asylums before the end comes. It's silly, too. Grown-up people!'

'What are you going to do about it?' the Youngest Member inquired tartly. Her accent was the inter-bellum accent of all of us.

'I'm going to change it. I'm going to provide a panacea.'

The Panacea appeared next day. The way of its taking is this.

At dinner, the Eldest One, as she spreads her napkin, speaks cheerfully. 'I see they've decided to locate the Exposition grounds along the north side of the bay.'

There is usually a pause after the initial lead. We are groping back

through the clutter of war in our minds. Exposition? - Oh, San Francisco Exposition, of course! Happy is that one who can place herself swiftly enough on this newly offered shoal and bank of time to respond with a comment on Federal aid or the blighted hopes of New Orleans. Happier still, she whose kinked memory recollects, as sometimes memories will, that the Exposition grounds were chosen the month we put in our new plumbing.

But though we halt at first, we grow surprisingly fluent as the dinner progresses. The shortage of labor in California, Mr. Bryan's grape-juice banquet, the pre-Exposition visit of Cousin Abbie from Pittsfield- before the meal is over, all of these have been dragged from sheltering brain-crevices and received with acclamation.

It is a rule of the game that one dinner may have but one time-setting; but sometimes, in choosing that setting, the Eldest One takes a mean advantage of her seniority.

'It's astonishing, the strength Mr. Blaine is developing,' she opens upon us. 'Now with the Illinois delegation going to him—'

We gaze at her reproachfully,

we

to whom Maine's Plumed Knight and Hannibal of Carthage are figures equally remote and shadowy, — and presently our six accusing eyes are too much for her complacency.

'But, on the other hand, if Mr. Harrison holds the South-' she concedes to our ignorance; and by the name puts our feet on earth once more. Benjamin Harrison Why, certainly! High tariff and 'grandfather clauses,' full sleeves and Tweed Ring scandals and the family's final moving from Vermont The material for conversation is in our hands again.

But it is such an excursion as this last which drives the Youngest Member to reprisals. When she pulls out her

chair the next night, she speaks hastily, stooping for her dropped napkin. I see he's got over.' 'I beg your pardon?'

'I said, I see he's brought his troops over the Rubicon. Now if he comes straight on to Rome —

The Youngest Member is a decade nearer to the Commentaries than are the rest of us. We stumble disgracefully. Was it Pompey who waded across that fateful river? Was n't there a Scipio somewhere concerned? And was it before the crossing or after it that there took place that famous partition of Gaul? Warily we try to make use of Gaul, fending off the Pompey-Scipio question for later decision. For the minute our minds are swept clean of later wars. Gas-attacks, food-shortage, the letter the postman did not bring

it is only for a minute that we lose sight of them; but the refreshment of that loss is like the trickle of water on parched tongues. Thanks to the Panacea, for this one hour of the day the present gives way to the comfortable past, and around our dinner-table talk and digestion can again go on together.

ON OF NAMES'

My wife was awaiting me at the breakfast-table. She was reading a magazine, and was evidently deriving great pleasure therefrom.

'Oh - but here is a delightful bit,' she cried, as I took my seat. I just love it! I must read it to you!'

And she began reading what proved to be a little essay, the title of which was, she announced, 'Of Names.'

""Who does not know the man who is in the habit of marring the stillness of summer days... by glibly reciting the name of every bird within reach of his opera-glasses, or his blood brother who makes night hideous by calling the roll of the stars?""

Thus the essay opened. 'Does your author advocate dropping the specific names of all birds and all stars?' I interrupted to ask.

'Ye-es, I think so,' she replied; 'why not? I think it would be much nicer.'

'You may, if you wish, in the case of stars; but when it's a question of birds, don't! Else you will, the next time you go to the poulterer's, order a fowl, with the chance of getting a duck or guinea, when you know I care only for chicken. Name your bird. Go on.'

My wife sniffed and continued to read. She had just finished the phrase, 'Cloak things with the stupor of a name,' when the door-bell rang.

'Go see who it is, Tom,' she said. 'I cannot see that it matters who it is,' I said, tasting my cereal. 'We know it is a person, a man or a woman, a boy or a girl let that suffice. What would the name of that person benefit us? And please don't cloak me with the stupor of a name - it is so useless.' The bell clanged again.

'Will you go and see what they want?' she demanded icily.

'Why, certainly!' I replied.

I went to the door, where I found Blimp, our next-door neighbor, who informed me that our dog had come into his yard and killed his Persian cat.

'It was our contiguous neighbor to the east,' I explained, as I sat down again. 'He says that our animal came into his yard and killed his animal.'

She glared at me, a glare that I pretended not to see, and framed a question on her lips. But she did n't ask it. She resumed her reading.

The cereal was excellent and I gave it my attention, but I caught the words, ""Intelligent men and women persist in saying, 'See that bobolink!' or Notice the Pleiades!' with a selfindulgent vanity just short of proprietary."

'Oh, I forgot to tell you,' I broke in

at this point, 'that I decided on the new car, and bought it yesterday.'

'You did? Which one did you get?' she asked excitedly, laying down her magazine; 'the Ulysses or the Achilles?'

'Don't tempt me to indulge my vanity,' I begged. 'I bought a new car yesterday, and I trust it will prove a good car. The meat is very tender this morning. Is there more of that article?'

There was and she read it, but the tenderness of the bacon so distracted me that I caught only the words, and they seemed to be the closing ones, ""the evening star flickers in the sky. Would it profit anything, I wonder, to know whether it is Jupiter or Venus?"''

"These tuberous vegetables don't bake so well as the last lot we had,' I remarked. "That doctrine - if it may be called a doctrine is a queer one. Pretty thin, I'd say.'

'Do you know what magazine I've been reading from?'

'No, I do not.'

"The Atlantic !'

'And pray, my dear, what does it profit me to know whether you have been reading to me from the Atlantic or the Mediterranean?' I asked.

My wife was hurt. I was sorry she was hurt. The conversation, during the remainder of the meal, was not a success. After she had left the table, I sneaked the magazine from the stand where she had laid it, searched for, found, and read 'Of Names.' It was delightful, just as my wife had said. I had finished it and was lighting my cigar when she called to me, 'Oh, Tom, come here and see the birds pecking the pieces of suet we hung out yesterday. There's a cardinal, two juncos, a blue jay, a dozen or more English sparrows, and one I don't know at all. Hurry, and see if you recognize it!"

I hurried, but on the way I indulged in one of my stock remarks: "The female mind is a funny proposition.'

I

We are accustomed in these days to hear many ancient things called new. New Thought, New Poetry, New Religion, are terms which, when stripped of their faddist connotation, can honestly claim a novelty of approach in regard to these three oldest of spiritual activities. By an analogous use of the word new, one may direct attention to the change in standards that is being wrought in everyday living by the present concentration upon death. No one can forget them, no one can get away from them—those boys dead upon the battlefields of Europe. There is not one of us who has not thought more about death within the last three years than in a whole lifetime before, and by their very intensity our thoughts are new. This preoccupation is a force too fresh to be easily formulated, while already it is so pervasive and so profound in its effect upon the motives and the standards which must both sustain a world in agony and rebuild it for the future, that the psychologist may well term this naked intimacy with facts formerly avoided, the New Death.

It is probably more by it's poignancy than by its numbers that death has shocked us into a novel realization of its importance. If the European har

VOL. 121-NO. 5

vest had reaped old men, however many, rather than young, the challenge for explanation would not have been so stinging. The only way in which death could exact from us its due consideration was to break our hearts with pity and baffle our brains with wastage. It may be that the enigma of the youth of the world destroyed is insoluble, but the New Death, this unprecedented readiness at last to look into the unseen, is the effort of popular thought to translate pity into motive, and bewildering waste into a reconstructed relationship to spiritual values.

Not alone by the youth of its victims has the war horrified us into a new adjustment to death, but even more by their type: the shining best are those most surely sacrificed. What is the meaning of the frenzy with which the universe blasts its benefactors before they have lived to bless it? And what is the significance of the strange, the well-nigh occult, reassurance without which we could not 'carry on' the ideals they have left us in the face of such utter prodigality of destruction? What is this grave which the world was coming in its heart and in its daily practices more and more to treat as final? When every one is asking the same question, may it not be that the answers, still hesitant, still experimental, may bring