in the beginning. So it was tacitly decided that we three—Nathaniel, Washington, and I (the first two in red buckram, the latter in invisible yet palpable Freshman green)—should grow old together.

The fourth member of our little group, he who had introduced us, had dropped out. I neither saw nor heard from him again. It would seem that he worked like lightning, striking in the same place only once. Not so his firm, however. They struck me by mail each month with awful iteration.

But before a year had passed there descended upon me another emissary of intellectualism. This personage expounded to me the doctrine of the De Luxe. I learned that an edition of any author, no matter how reputable that author may be, was mere dross if published for the public at large. Only as a subscriber, possessing a numbered set of a limited edition, could one obtain the quintessence of literature. Fiat de lux. Let there be e-lite.

The fact that this prophet of almost-vellum exclusiveness was physically a fat and florid Irishman whom a wiser man than I might have mistaken for a saloon keeper in his Sunday clothes, did not hamper his spirit. Enthrallingly yet confidentially he discoursed on Selected Literature for the Serene Few. I could be one of those Serene Few.

I could. I did. I signed.

In his display room, to which this rotund spider lured me, I examined, enraptured, sets of all the leading de luxe writers. There was Pepys with pasted labels, Smollett and Fielding with special illustrations, twelve volumes of the World's Best Oratory, a bobtailed set of Stevenson, the inevitable Plutarch in fool morocco that was very like shellacked paper, and many more. But the magnum opus of them all was a green buckram affair in thirty tall tomes calling itself "The Bibliophile Library of Literature, Art and Rare Manuscripts". To emphasize the word Art in the title there was, as an adjunct, a three-foot portfolio of reproductions from paintings. Here was something that cast Hawthorne and Irving into the shade. It was world-wide, wonderful. (Later I came to know it as the "Hash"!)

As in a trance, I said yes to the "Bibliophile Library," to the Great Orations, to the much-shorter R. L. S. Later I took on a few more.

My finances grew groggy. Indeed, Europe's difficulties over paying her war indebtedness are as naught in comparison. Then at last the miracle happened: the book concern mislaid their record of my indiscretions—and all scowls ceased.

For three years. Then rediscovery. Collectors, collectors, collectors—not the sort that A. Edward Newton writes about. They came faster than I could insult them. Litigation. Cash compromise. Formal return of books.

Such is the story of "My Life With Great Authors; or, The Horrors of Dunning Street".

But I shall not allow it to "take its place among the successful biographies and intimate journals of the season". Distinctly not. It is for the élite alone. It is to be published on sugar-cured oilskin, the edition to be limited to two numbered copies—one for me and one for the ashcan.

PORTABLE PIGEONHOLES

Aside from a few unimportant physical distinctions, the chief difference between man and woman is that his pockets are in his clothes, whereas her solitary one dangles fitfully from her hand. Man is girded about with these little repositories for the safekeeping of his belongings; while woman, less interested in conservation than in cosmetics, holds her booty ever accessible, so as to be able at any moment to dispose of $3.98 or powder her nose. The ding of her husband's cash register and the click of her dangle bag mark the systole and diastole of married life.

Man delights in multiplicity of pockets. He must have clusters of them, layers of them, pockets within pockets. Otherwise his search for anything he has hidden on his person would be uninterestingly simple. Fancy, for example, the monotony of traveling, if, at the call "All tickets, please!" there were but a single pocket to excavate. And how difficult it would be, when riding on a street car, for one to put up an appearance of searching madly for his purse while he allowed his companion to pay the fare.

The instinct for stowing away things in pockets, manifested in childhood by a proneness for smuggling home from parties such contraband as strawberry tarts and layer-cake with soft icing, continues throughout life. But as one grows older the reason for these caches is less and less obvious. The delectable but adhesive loot in the boy's pocket is soon separated (as much as possible) from the lining, and devoured in rapture; but the dry accumulations of the middle-aged man, such as useless ticket stubs, old newspaper clippings, business cards thrust upon him by salesmen or accepted absentmindedly when handed to him on the street, unposted letters which he promised three days ago to drop into the first mail box—all these lie buried and forgotten until resurrected on suit-pressing day. He secretes them with the infatuation of a dog interring bones. Only, unlike the sagacious hound, instead of getting rid of them by this process, he merely turns them into encumbrances.

A pocket that has long suffered from congestion will sometimes take matters into its own hands and empty itself. Without bothering to give any warning of its intention, it acquires a hole in one corner and then quietly disposes of its contents. In this way small but useful change departs, in company with your latch-key, via your trouser leg. And your unfortunate fountain pen, let down suddenly as though by the springing of a trapdoor, falls clear to the bottom of the inside of your waist coat, where it lies prostrate, gasping out its last spurt of ink.

There is a treacherous kind of pocket, inhabiting a vertical slit in the side of an overcoat, that simulates openness when it is actually closed; so that the unwary owner, imagining himself to be putting a thing into a safe nook, is really poking it through a hole and dropping it upon the ground.

The average tailor has an unpleasant sense of humor. He allows you fifteen pockets, and then proceeds to fit your suit so closely that not a single one of them can be used. Unless you take the precaution of stuffing each pocket with cotton batting when he tries the suit on you, he will systematically take in all seams and buttons, in such a way that a post-card inserted in the breast-pocket would be sufficient wadding to throw the entire coat out of shape. (Perhaps he goes on the assumption that when you have paid his bill you won't have anything left to put there.) Every pocket is a latent distortion—put something into it and you have a swelling, a tumor. Utilize your hip pocket as an oasis and you have a bustle.

These cares and tribulations are, as we stated at the beginning of this treatise, the lot of man alone. For woman, while accepting the responsibility of the vote, has thus far avoided the responsibility of the pocket—preferring to let her husband be a walking warehouse for two. It is her method of maintaining him in subjection. If she, too, were bepocketed, she could not keep him on the jump picking up things she has dropped and trotting back for things she has left behind. Nor, if she were not in the habit of making him dutifully