I gasped.

Three thousand! And I had to consider when I bought a dozen. What could I not do with them? Three thousand! Why, I could mail that fast accumulating pile of MS. here, there and everywhere. Some at least would find a home; and another step or two the nearer my goal!

I wanted them; I still think of what I could do with them; and the sight still lingers. "Three thousand 2c. postage stamps!" Oh yes, I saw them go; and to me they are included in "nor anything that is his."

A Dissertation on Sour Grapes

WHEN we are willing to give a little of our thought to such a poor subject for an immortal soul as Money, we can but marvel that so many people are willing to forego being poor. Refer to St. Francis.

Troubles for lack of poverty begin in one's tender youth. When we are boys, and the other boys are battling with the three-foot drifts, knocking each other into the snow with yells of delight, how humiliating to be ignominiously wrapped in furs in grandfather's sleigh, and deposited at the school house door like a girl!

While crossing the Elbe in Dresden, have we not often wept over Saxony's princess who wistfully wailed: "Oh, if I could once, only just once, walk over the bridge alone, all alone!" The weariness of being waited upon entailed by being rich! Why must one's brightest criticisms come where they must wait until the butler has left the room, and by that time they are no longer à propos, and the chance to say them has gone? Yet misguided Johnson could say: "Riches exclude only one inconvenience, that is, poverty." Lincoln called wealth "a superfluity of the things one does not want.”

The Greeks regarded riches as a kind of inelegant excess. Mr. Stoughton Holborn speaking of the Greek gentleman says: "To have too much money was to show a lack of

decent restraint, and was on a par with too much dinner or too much drink or any other vulgar exhibition of lack of self-control." Euripides makes a character in Elektra assert,

Small aid is wealth

For daily gladness; once a man be done

With hunger, rich and poor are both as one.

Blessed be nothing! Think of the time saved in having no money to worry over. No need to be concerned with the ups and downs of the stock market, or to spend sleepless nights regretting some hasty investment. Our wealthy friend must exhaust his genius upon such things, while his poor brother, not having these distracting matters to consider, can bend his energies upon something more worth while. We lovers of our Lady Poverty are uplifted at hearing the voice of Jean Paul in his dreams amid the clash of dishpans in his mother's kitchen: "Wealth bears heavier on talent than poverty. Under gold-mountains and thrones, who knows how many a spiritual giant may lie crushed down and buried." Goethe says that nobody should be rich save only him who understands it.

Then again what an advantage it is to have no philanthropic responsibilities! We are spared having the good minister, the good doctor, the good deacon, come to us begging money for this, that and the other: for they all say cui bono? We may eat our dinner of boiled rice without entailment of indigestion caused by worry as to the ultimate destination of money we might have given. We may feel that we can draw our nightcaps over our heads and lay our heads upon the pillow without a tear for the man who has to go to bed without a nightcap.

Once upon a time the wife of a neighbor who had met with financial reverses came in with lugubrious face, and asked: "Have you not found it very hard to go down with the wheel of fortune?" The Light of the Household lifted a silver head with the merry answer: "I never was up!"

Our Lady Poverty's watchdog Pride is apt to be close at her heels. Olivia, poor soul, exclaims:

O world, how apt the poor are to be proud!

If one prefers to be rich, he has but to suit his wishes to his means, and then he can have what he wants, and what more can anyone ask. Carlyle calls attention to the fact that unity divided by nothing equals infinity (= ~) which is merely one of the paradoxes among which floats our little island of knowledge.

We are saved the inconsistency of our well-to-do friend who, every morning when he approaches his mail with its elephantiasis of applications from this society and that society for his money or his name, says to himself: "I no longer give anything or sign anything," and then makes out a check for some peculiarly poignant call.

He who is poor has the better chance for the aristocracy of individuality. We were about to say the individuality of aristocracy, but transposed the words thinking it made better sense, much as our brother on his western ranch served his pudding. When at home on a visit he borrowed from us the receipt for a pudding which had entrapped his fancy. He returned to his ranch, made the pudding with his own hands (Fred the cook happening to have one of his not infrequent moments of "blowing it in") and wrote that his gelatine pudding did not jell, while the sauce thoughtlessly did jell, so he transposed them, using the sauce for the pudding and the pudding for the sauce, and the boys rapturously pronounced the pudding "skookum." They never dreamed how near they had been to shipwreck.

But alas, poverty has fangs which she has bared and claws which she has unsheathed. Dickens understood this when he said: "When a man's affairs are at the lowest ebb, he has a strange temptation, which he does not resist, to indulge in oysters." On the day when the outlay for our

annual gown comes due, we invariably select, with disastrous results to either our purse or our aesthetic sense, among the dollar-a-yard fabrics on the counter, as the only material we want, the one which turns out to be priced at four dollars and a half a yard, and which has accidentally strayed to that counter.

By this time perhaps you have guessed the subtle purpose underlying this little disquisition. It is a very very moderate contribution to preparedness. It looks as if we were all soon to be hard up. Let us then cultivate all the philosophy that will help us make the best of it. If you want better help in the same direction, read Emil Souvestre's Un Philosophe sous les Toits, which somebody translated over fifty years ago, through a good but misleading pun, which it would be superfluous to explain to the likes of you, into The Attic Philosopher.

Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey. if we would eat it, in a good book. Ruskin.

With the threat of wheat famine before us, we turn ever more eagerly to the loaves in shelves. Mindful of this need, the Yale University Press has made preparation, offering the following from its fall "baking" with the conviction that they will be found to be both savory and full of substance.

THERE'S PIPPINS AND CHEESE TO COME

BY CHARLES S. BROOKS. With illustrations by Theodore Diedricksen, Jr. Those who have enjoyed "Journeys to Bagdad" will eagerly await the issue of the second volume of Mr. Brooks's whimsical essays.

Boards, 144 pages, 26 pen-and-ink sketches, $2.00 nd

A BOOK OF VERSE OF THE GREAT WAR Edited by W. REGINALD WHEELER. With

a Foreword by CHARLTON M. LEWIS.

The contributors include: Wilfred Wilson Gibson, Maurice Hewlett, Cecil Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Edgar Lee Masters, Alfred Noyes, and Rabindranath Tagore. (In preparation.)

THE HOSTAGE

By PAUL CLAUDEL. Translated under the direction of Pierre Chavannes.

This drama, the third of Claudel's works to appear in English, is one of his best known and perhaps most characteristic plays. $1.50 net. Uniform with "The East I Know" and "The Tidings Brought to Mary."

THE YALE SHAKE

SPEARE

Edited under the direction of the Department of English, Yale University.

Volumes issued this fall:

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

ROMEO AND JULIET

HAMLET

KING LEAR

HENRY IV, Part I

One of the Illustrations

College Text-Book Edition. 50 cents net per volume.

Library Edition. $1.00 net per volume.

from "There's Pippins
and Cheese to Come"

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