ILLUSTRATIONS

They look him over as if he were a fresh air child being given a day’s outing.

The watcher walks around the table, giving each hand a careful scrutiny.

“’Round and ’round the tree I go”

“Atta boy, forty-nine:  Only one more to go!”

For three hours there is a great deal of screaming.

He was further aided by the breaks of the game.

Mrs. Deemster didn’t enter into the spirit of the thing at all.

“That’s right,” says the chairman.

“If you weren’t asleep what were you doing with your eyes closed?”

You would gladly change places with the most lawless of God’s creatures.

I am mortified to discover that the unpleasant looking man is none other than myself.

“I can remember you when you were that high”

She would turn away and bite her lip.

“Listen Ed!  This is how it goes!”

They intimate that I had better take my few pennies and run ’round the corner to some little haberdashery.

I thank them and walk in to the nearest dining-room table.

“Why didn’t you tell us that you were reading a paper on birth control?”

LOVE CONQUERS ALL

I.

THE BENCHLEY-WHITTIER CORRESPONDENCE

Old scandals concerning the private life of Lord Byron have been revived with the recent publication of a collection of his letters.  One of the big questions seems to be:  Did Byron send Mary Shelley’s letter to Mrs. R.B.  Hoppner?  Everyone seems greatly excited about it.

Lest future generations be thrown into turmoil over my correspondence after I am gone, I want right now to clear up the mystery which has puzzled literary circles for over thirty years.  I need hardly add that I refer to what is known as the “Benchley-Whittier Correspondence.”

The big question over which both my biographers and Whittier’s might possibly come to blows is this, as I understand it:  Did John Greenleaf Whittier ever receive the letters I wrote to him in the late Fall of 1890? If he did not, who did?  And under what circumstances were they written?

I was a very young man at the time, and Mr. Whittier was, naturally, very old.  There had been a meeting of the Save-Our-Song-Birds Club in old Dane Hall (now demolished) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Members had left their coats and hats in the check-room at the foot of the stairs (now demolished).

In passing out after a rather spirited meeting, during the course of which Mr. Whittier and Dr. Van Blarcom had opposed each other rather violently over the question of Baltimore orioles, the aged poet naturally was the first to be helped into his coat.  In the general mix-up (there was considerable good-natured fooling among the members as they left, relieved as they were from the strain of the meeting) Whittier was given my hat by mistake.  When I came to go, there was nothing left for me but a rather seedy gray derby with a black band, containing the initials “J.G.W.”  As the poet was visiting in Cambridge at the time I took opportunity next day to write the following letter to him: