NATURE’S DARLING

Nature must love the Boob, because she is a good deal of a Boob herself.  How she has squandered herself upon mountain peaks that are useless except for the Alpenstock Trust; upon violets that can’t be eaten; upon giraffes whose backs slope too steeply to carry a pack!  Can it be that the Boob is Nature’s darling, that she intends him to outlive all the rest?

A BRIEF MAXIM

Be sure you’re a Boob, and then go ahead.

IN CONCLUSION

But never, dear Cynthia, confuse the Boob with the Poor Fish.  The Poor Fish, as an Emersonian thinker has observed, is the Boob gone wrong.  The Poor Fish is the cynical, sneering simpleton who, if he did see an angel, would think it was only some one dressed up for the movies.  The Poor Fish is Why Boobs Leave Home.

II.  SIMPLIFICATION

Dear Sir—­How can life be simplified?  In the office where I work the pressure of affairs is very exacting.  Often I do not have a moment to think over my own affairs before 4 p.m.  There are a great many matters that puzzle me, and I am afraid that if I go on working so hard the sweetest hours of my youth may pass before I have given them proper consideration.  It is very irassible.  Can you help me?

    CYNTHIA.

SALUTATION TO CYNTHIA

Cynthia, my child:  How are you?  It is very delightful to hear from you again.  During the recent months I have been very lonely indeed without your comradeship and counsel with regard to the great matters which were under consideration.

THINKING IT OVER

Well, Cynthia, when your inquiry reached me I propped my feet on the desk, got out the corncob pipe and thought things over.  How to simplify life?  How, indeed!  It is a subject that interests me strangely.  Of course, the easiest method is to let one’s ancestors do it for one.  If you have been lucky enough to choose a simple-minded, quiet-natured quartet of grandparents, frugal, thrifty and foresighted, who had the good sense to buy property in an improving neighborhood and keep their money compounding at a fair rate of interest, the problem is greatly clarified.  If they have hung on to the old farmstead, with its huckleberry pasture and cowbells tankling homeward at sunset and a bright brown brook cascading down over ledges of rock into a swimming hole, then again your problem has possible solutions.  Just go out to the farm, with a copy of Matthew Arnold’s “Scholar Gipsy” (you remember the poem, in which he praises the guy who had sense enough to leave town and live in the suburbs where the Bolsheviki wouldn’t bother him), and don’t leave any forwarding address with the postoffice.  But if, as I fear from an examination of your pink-scalloped notepaper with its exhalation of lilac essence, the vortex of modern jazz life has swept you in, the crisis is far more intricate.