As to getting in a word edgeways with the men over the cigars—­perfectly impossible!  They’re worse than the women.  They were all buzzing round the infernal Englishman with questions about Flanders and the army at the front.  I tried in vain to get their attention for a minute to give them my impressions of the Belgian peasantry (during my visit there in 1885), but my host simply turned to me for a second and said, “Have some more port?” and was back again listening to the asinine Englishman.

And when we went upstairs to the drawing-room I found myself, to my disgust, side-tracked in a corner of the room with that supreme old jackass of a professor—­their uncle, I think, or something of the sort.  In all my life I never met a prosier man.  He bored me blue with long accounts of his visit to Serbia and his impressions of the Serbian peasantry in 1875.

I should have left early, but it would have been too noticeable.

The trouble with a woman like that is that she asks the wrong people to her parties.

BUT,

(V) HIS LITTLE SON

You haven’t seen him?  Why, that’s incredible.  You must have.  He goes past your house every day on his way to his kindergarten.  You must have seen him a thousand times.  And he’s a boy you couldn’t help noticing.  You’d pick that boy out among a hundred, right away.  “There’s a remarkable boy,” you’d say.  I notice people always turn and look at him on the street.  He’s just the image of me.  Everybody notices it at once.

How old?  He’s twelve.  Twelve and two weeks yesterday.  But he’s so bright you’d think he was fifteen.  And the things he says!  You’d laugh!  I’ve written a lot of them down in a book for fear of losing them.  Some day when you come up to the house I’ll read them to you.  Come some evening.  Come early so that we’ll have lots of time.  He said to me one day, “Dad” (he always calls me Dad), “what makes the sky blue?” Pretty thoughtful, eh, for a little fellow of twelve?  He’s always asking questions like that.  I wish I could remember half of them.

And I’m bringing him up right, I tell you.  I got him a little savings box a while ago, and have got him taught to put all his money in it, and not give any of it away, so that when he grows up he’ll be all right.

On his last birthday I put a five dollar gold piece into it for him and explained to him what five dollars meant, and what a lot you could do with it if you hung on to it.  You ought to have seen him listen.

“Dad,” he says, “I guess you’re the kindest man in the world, aren’t you?”

Come up some time and see him.

IX.  More than Twice-told Tales; or, Every Man his Own Hero

(I)

The familiar story told about himself by the Commercial Traveller who sold goods to the man who was regarded as impossible.