“All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind....  The sight of human affairs deserves admiration and pity.  And he is not insensible who pays them the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile which is not a grin.”

That is the kind of tribute that Mr. McPee has paid to the Gooderich family in Casuals of the Sea.  Somewhere in that book he has uttered the immortal remark that “The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps cool.”  I think there is much of himself in that aphorism, and that the cool enthusiast, the benevolent marbleheart, has many fine things in store for us.

And there is one other sentence in Casuals of the Sea that lingers with me, and gives a just trace of the author’s mind.  It is worth remembering, and I leave it with you: 

“She considered a trouble was a trouble and to be treated as such, instead of snatching the knotted cord from the hand of God and dealing murderous blows.”

RHUBARB

We used to call him Rhubarb, by reason of his long russet beard, which we imagined trailing in the prescriptions as he compounded them, imparting a special potency.  He was a little German druggist—­Deutsche Apotheker—­and his real name was Friedrich Wilhelm Maximilian Schulz.

The village of Kings is tucked away in Long Island, in the Debatable Land where the generous boundary of New York City zigzags in a sporting way just to permit horse racing at Belmont Park.  It is the most rustic corner of the City.  To most New Yorkers it is as remote as Helgoland and as little known.  It has no movie theatre, no news-stand, no cigar store, no village atheist.  The railroad station, where one hundred and fifty trains a day do not stop, might well be mistaken for a Buddhist shrine, so steeped in discreet melancholy is it.  The Fire Department consists of an old hose wagon first used to extinguish fires kindled by the Republicans when Rutherford B. Hayes was elected.  In the weather-beaten Kings Lyceum “East Lynne” is still performed once a year.  People who find Quoguc and Cohasset too exciting, move to Kings to cool off.  The only way one can keep servants out there is by having the works of Harold Bell Wright in the kitchen for the cook to read.

Stout-hearted Mr. Schulz came to Kings long ago.  There is quite a little German colony there.  With a delicatessen store on one side of him and a man who played the flute on the other, he felt hardly at all expatriated.  The public house on the corner serves excellent Rheingold, and on winter evenings Friedrich and Minna would sit by the stove at the back of the drugstore with a jug of amber on the table and dream of Stuttgart.