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The other evening we went to dinner with a gentleman whom it pleases our fancy to call the Caliph.

Now a Caliph, according to our notion, is a Haroun-al-Raschid kind of person; one who governs a large empire of hearts with a genial and whimsical sway; circulating secretly among his fellow-men, doing kindnesses often not even suspected by their beneficiaries.  He is the sort of person of whom the trained observer may think, when he hears an unexpected kindness-grenade exploding somewhere down the line, “I’ll bet that came from the Caliph’s dugout!” A Caliph’s heart is not surrounded by barbed wire entanglements or a strip of No Man’s Land.  Also, and rightly, he is stern to malefactors and fakers of all sorts.

It would have been sad if any one so un-Caliphlike as William Hohenzollern had got his eisenbahn through to Bagdad, the city sacred to the memory of a genial despot who spent his cabarabian nights in an excellent fashion.  That, however, has nothing to do with the story.

Mr. and Mrs. Caliph are people so delightful that they leave in one’s mind a warm afterglow of benevolent sociability.  They have an infinite interest and curiosity in the hubbub of human moods and crotchets that surrounds us all.  And when one leaves their doorsill one has a genial momentum of the spirit that carries one on rapidly and cheerfully.  One has an irresistible impulse to give something away, to stroke the noses of horses, to write a kind letter to the fuel administrator or do almost anything gentle and gratuitous.  The Caliphs of the world don’t know it, but that is the effect they produce on their subjects.

As we left, Mr. and Mrs. Caliph pressed upon us an apple.  One of those gorgeous apples that seem to grow wrapped up in tissue paper, and are displayed behind plate glass windows.  A huge apple, tinted with gold and crimson and pale yellow shading off to pink.  The kind of apple whose colors are overlaid with a curious mist until you polish it on your coat, when it gleams like a decanter of claret.  An apple so large and weighty that if it had dropped on Sir Isaac Newton it would have fractured his skull.  The kind of apple that would have made the garden of Eden safe for democracy, because it is so beautiful no one would have thought of eating it.

That was the kind of apple the Caliph gave us.

It was a cold night, and we walked down Chestnut street dangling that apple, rubbing it on our sleeve, throwing it up and down and catching it again.  We stopped at a cigar store to buy some pipe tobacco.  Still running on Caliph, by which we mean still beguiled by his geniality, we fell into talk with the tobacconist.  “That’s a fine apple you have there,” said he.  For an instant we thought of giving it to him, but then we reflected that a man whose days are spent surrounded by rich cigars and smokables is dangerously felicitous already, and a sudden joy might blast his blood vessels.