urged to go against car conductors and customs men.  On one occasion I received a paper of tombstone inscriptions, with a note of direction how others might be found in a neighboring churchyard if I were curious.  A lady in whose company I camped last summer has asked me to give a chapter to it.  We were abroad upon a lake in the full moon—­we were lost upon a mountain—­twice a canoe upset—­there were the usual jests about cooking.  These things might have filled a few pages agreeably, yet so far they have given me only a paragraph.

But I am not disposed toward any of these subjects, least of all the cat, upon which I look—­despite the coldness of her nature—­as a harmless and comforting appendage of the hearth-rug.  I would no more prey upon her morals than I would the morals of the andirons.  I choose, rather, to slip to another angle of the question and say a few words about cowards, among whom I have already confessed that I number myself.

In this year of battles, when physical courage sits so high, the reader—­if he is swept off in the general opinion—­will expect under such a title something caustic.  He will think that I am about to loose against all cowards a plague of frogs and locusts as if old Egypt had come again.  But cowardice is its own punishment.  It needs no frog to nip it.  Even the sharp-toothed locust—­for in the days that bordered so close upon the mastodon, the locust could hardly have fallen to the tender greenling we know today—­even the locust that once spoiled the Egyptians could not now add to the grief of a coward.

And yet—­really I hesitate.  I blush.  My attack will be too intimate; for I have confessed that I am not the very button on the cap of bravery.  I have indeed stiffened myself to ride a horse, a mightier feat than driving him because of the tallness of the monster and his uneasy movement, as though his legs were not well socketed and might fall out on a change of gaits.  I have ridden on a camel in a side-show, but have found my only comfort in his hump.  I have stroked the elephant.  In a solemn hour of night I have gone downstairs to face a burglar.  But I do not run singing to these dangers.  While your really brave fellow is climbing a dizzy staircase to the moon—­I write in figure—­I would shake with fear upon a lower platform.

Perhaps you recall Mr. Tipp of the Elia essays.  “Tipp,” says his pleasant biographer, “never mounted the box of a stage-coach in his life; or leaned against the rails of a balcony; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet; or looked down a precipice; or let off a gun.”  I cannot follow Tipp, it may be, to his extreme tremors—­my hair will not rise to so close a likeness of the fretful porcupine—­yet in a measure we are in agreement.  We are, as it were, cousins, with the mark of our common family strong on both of us.