* * * * *

Why, in the elder days bookcases with glass doors were owned only by people who filled them with ten volumes of a pictorial history of the Civil War (including some swell steel engravings), “Walks and Talks with John L. Stoddard” and “Daily Thoughts for Daily Needs,” done in robin’s-egg blue with a watered silk bookmark dangling out.  A set of Sir Walter Scott always helps fill out a bookcase with glass doors.  It looks well from the front and shows that you know good literature when you see it.  And you don’t have to keep opening and shutting the doors to get it out, for you never want to get it out.

[Illustration:  I thank them and walk into the nearest dining-room table.]

A bookcase with glass doors used to be a sign that somewhere in the room there was a crayon portrait of Father when he was a young man, with a real piece of glass stuck on the portrait to represent a diamond stud.

And now we are told that “every one buys bookcases with glass doors; we have no call for others.”  Soon we shall be told that the thing to do is to buy the false backs of bindings, such as they have in stage libraries, to string across behind the glass.  It will keep us from reading too much, and then, too, no one will want to borrow our books.

* * * * *

But one clerk told me the truth.  And I am just fearless enough to tell it here.  I know that it will kill my chances for the Presidency, but I cannot stop to think of that.

After advising me to have a carpenter build me the kind of bookcase I wanted, and after I had told him that I had my name in for a carpenter but wasn’t due to get him until late in the fall, as he was waiting for prices to go higher before taking the job on, the clerk said: 

“That’s it.  It’s the price.  You see the furniture manufacturers can make much more money out of a bookcase with glass doors than they can without.  When by hanging glass doors on a piece of furniture at but little more expense to themselves they can get a much bigger profit, what’s the sense in making them without glass doors?  They have just stopped making them, that’s all.”

So you see the American people are being practically forced into buying glass doors whether they want them or not.  Is that right?  Is it fair?  Where is our personal liberty going to?  What is becoming of our traditional American institutions?

I don’t know.

LI

TROUT-FISHING

I never knew very much about trout-fishing anyway, and I certainly had no inkling that a trout-fisher had to be so deceitful until I read “Trout-Fishing in Brooks,” by G. Garrow-Green.  The thing is appalling.  Evidently the sport is nothing but a constant series of compromises with one’s better nature, what with sneaking about pretending to be something that one is not, trying to fool the fish into thinking one thing when just the reverse is true, and in general behaving in an underhanded and tricky manner throughout the day.