”I AM sorry to observe,” said the Idiot, as he sat down at the breakfast-table yesterday morning, “that the good old customs of my youthful days are dying out by slow degrees, and the celebrations that once filled my childish soul with glee are no longer a part of the pleasures of the young. Actually, Mr. Whitechoker, I got through the whole day yesterday without sitting on a single pin or smashing my toes against a brickbat hid beneath a hat. What on earth can be coming over the boys of the land that they no longer avail themselves of the privileges of the fool-tide?”

“Fool-tide’s good,” said Mr. Brief. “Where did you get that?”

“Oh, I pried it out of my gray-matter ’way back in the last century,” said the Idiot. “It grew out of a simple little prank I played one April 1st upon an uncle of mine. I bored a hole in the middle of a pine log and filled it with powder. We had it that night on the hearth, and a moment later there wasn’t any hearth. In talking the matter over later with my father and mother and the old gentleman, in order to turn the discussion into more genial channels, I asked why, if the Yule-log was appropriate for the Yule-tide, the Fool-log wasn’t appropriate for the Fool-tide.”

“I hope you got the answer you deserved,” said the Bibliomaniac.

“I did,” sighed the Idiot. “I got all there was coming to me – slippers, trunk-strap, hair-brush, and plain hand; but it was worth it. All the glories of Vesuvius, Etna, Popocatepetl, and Pelée rolled into one could never thereafter induce in me anything approaching that joyous sensation that I derived from the spectacle of that fool-log and that happy hearth soaring up through the chimney together, hand in hand, and taking with them such portions of the flues, andirons, and other articles of fireplace vertu as cared to join them in their upward flight.”

“You must have been a holy terror as a boy,” said the Doctor. “I should not have cared to live on your block.”

“Oh, I wasn’t so bad,” observed the Idiot. “I never was vicious or malicious in what I did. If I poured vitriol into the coffee-pot at breakfast my father and mother knew that I didn’t do it to give pain to anybody. If I hid under my maiden aunt’s bed and barked like a bull-dog after she had retired, dear old Tabitha knew that it was all done in a spirit of pleasantry. When I glued my grandfather’s new teeth together with stratina, that splendid old man was perfectly aware that I had no grudge I was trying thus to repay; and certainly the French teacher at school, when he sat down on an iron bear-trap I had set for him in his chair, never entertained the notion that there was the slightest animosity in my act.”

“By jingo!” cried the Bibliomaniac. “I’d have spanked you good and hard if I’d been your mother.”

“Don’t you fret – she did it; that is, she did up to the time I was ten years old, and then she had such a shock she gave up corporeal punishment altogether,” said the Idiot.

“Had a shock, eh?” smiled the Lawyer. “Nearly killed you, I suppose, giving you what you deserved?”

“No,” said the Idiot. “Spanked me with a hair-brush without having removed a couple of Excelsior torpedoes from my pistol-pocket. On the second whack I appeared to explode. Poor woman! She didn’t know I was loaded, and from that time on she was as afraid of me as most other women are of a gun.”

“I’d have turned you over to your father,” said the Bibliomaniac, indignantly.

“She did,” said the Idiot, sadly. “I never used explosives again. In later years I took up the milder April-fool diversions, such as filling the mucilage-pot with ink and the ink-pot with mucilage; mixing the granulated sugar with white sand; putting powdered brick into the red-pepper pot; inserting kerosene-oil into the sweet-oil bottle, and little things like that. I squandered a whole dollar one April-fool’s-day sending telegrams to my uncles and aunts, telling them to come and dine with us that night; and they all came, too, although my father and mother were dining out that evening, and – oh dear, April-fool’s-day is not what it used to be. The boys and girls of the present generation are little old men and women with no pranks left in them. Why, I don’t believe that nine out of ten boys, who are about to enter college this spring, could rig up a successful tick-tack on a window to save their lives; and the joy of carrying a piece of twine across the sidewalk from a front-door knob to a lamp-post, hat-high, and then sitting back in the seclusion of a convenient area and watching the plug-hats of the people go down before it – that is a joy that seems to be wholly untasted of the present generation of infantile dignitaries that we call the youth of the land. What is the matter with ’em, do you suppose?”

“I guess we’re getting civilized,” said Mr. Brief. “That seems to me to be the most likely explanation of this deplorable situation, as you appear to think it. For my part, I’m glad if what you say is true. Of all rotten things in the world the practical jokes of April-fool’s-day bear away the palm. There was a time, ten years ago, when I hardly dared eat anything on the first of April. I was afraid to find my coffee made of ink, my muffin stuffed with cotton, cod-liver oil in my salad-dressing, and mayonnaise in my cream-puffs. Such tricks are the tricks of barbarians, and I shall rejoice when April 1st as a day of special privilege for idiots and savages has been removed from the calendar.”

“I am afraid,” said Mr. Whitechoker, “that I, too, must join the ranks of those who rejoice if the old-time customs of the day are now honored more in the breach than in the observance. Ever since that unhappy Sunday morning some years ago when somebody substituted a breakfast bill-of-fare for the card containing the notes for my sermon, I have mistrusted the humor of the April-fool joke. Instead of my text, as I glanced at what I supposed was my note-card, my eyes fell upon the statement that fruit taken from the table would be charged for; instead of my firstly, secondly, thirdly, and fourthly, my eyes were confronted by Fish, Eggs, Hot Bread, and To Order. And, finally, in place of the key-line of my peroration, what should obtrude itself upon my vision but that coarse and vulgar legend: Corkage, one dollar. I never found out who did it, and, as a Christian man, I hope I never shall, for I should much deprecate the spirit of animosity with which I should inevitably regard the person who had so offended.”

“I’ll bet you preached a bully good sermon, allee samee,” said the Idiot.

“Well,” smiled Mr. Whitechoker, “the congregation did seem to think that it held more fire than usual; but I can assure you, my young friend, it was more the fire of external wrath than of an inward spiritual grace.”

“Well,” said the Bibliomaniac, “we ought to be thankful the old tricks are going out. As Mr. Brief suggests, we are beginning to be civilized – ”

“I don’t think it’s civilization,” said the Idiot. “I think the kids are just discouraged, that’s all. They’re clever, these youngsters, but when it comes to putting up games, they’re not in it with their far more foxy fathers. What’s the use of playing April-fool jokes on your daddy, when your daddy is playing April-fool jokes on the public all the year round? That’s the way they reason. No son of George W. Midas, the financier, is going to get any satisfaction out of handing his father a loaded cigar, when he knows that the old man is handling that sort of thing every day in his business as a promoter of the United States Hot Air Company. What fun is there in giving your sister a caramel filled with tabasco-sauce when you can watch your father selling eleven dollars’ worth of Amalgamated Licorice stock to the dear public for forty-seven fifty? The gum-drop filled with cotton loses its charm when you contrast it with Consolidated Radium containing one part of radium and ninety-nine parts of water. Who cares to hide a clay brick under a hat for somebody to kick, when there are concerns in palatial offices all over town selling gold bricks to a public that doesn’t seem to have any kick left in it? I tell you it has discouraged the kid to see to what scientific heights the April-fool industry has been developed, and as a result he has abandoned the field. He knows he can’t compete.”

“That’s all right as an explanation of the youngster whose parent is engaged in that sort of business,” said the Doctor. “But there are others.”

“True,” said the Idiot. “The others stay out of it out of sheer pity. When they are tempted to sew up the legs of their daddy’s trousers in order to fitly celebrate the day, or to fill his collar-box with collars five sizes too small for him, they say, ‘No. Let us refrain. The governor has had trouble enough with his International Yukon Anticipated Brass shares this year. He’s had all the fooling he can stand. We will give the old gentleman a rest!’ Fact is, come to look at it, the decadence of April 1st as a day of foolery for the young is no mystery, after all. The youngsters are not more civilized than we used to be, but they have had the intelligence to perceive the exact truth of the situation.”

“Which is?” asked Mr. Brief.

“That the ancient art of practical joking has become a business. April-fool’s-day has been incorporated by the leading financiers of the age, and is doing a profitable trade all over the world all the year round. Private enterprise is simply unable to compete.”

“I am rather surprised, nevertheless,” said Mr. Brief, “that you yourself have abandoned the field. You are just the sort of person who would keep on in that kind of thing, despite the discouragements.”

“Oh, I haven’t abandoned the field,” said the Idiot. “I did play an April-fool joke last Friday.”

“What was that?” asked Mr. Whitechoker, interested.

“I told Mrs. Pedagog that I would pay my bill to-morrow,” replied the Idiot, as he rose from the table and left the room.

VIII
SPRING AND ITS POETRY

”WELL, Mr. Idiot,” said Mrs. Pedagog, genially, as the Idiot entered the breakfast-room, “what can I do for you this fine spring morning? Will you have tea or coffee?”

“I think I’d like a cup of boiled iron, with two lumps of quinine and a spoonful of condensed nerve-milk in it,” replied the Idiot, wearily. “Somehow or other I have managed to mislay my spine this morning. Ethereal mildness has taken the place of my backbone.”

“Those tired feelings, eh?” said Mr. Brief.

“Yeppy,” replied the Idiot. “Regular thing with me. Every year along about the middle of April I have to fasten a poker on my back with straps, in order to stand up straight; and as for my knees – well, I never know where they are in the merry, merry spring-time. I’m quite sure that if I didn’t wear brass caps on them my legs would bend backward. I wonder if this neighborhood is malarious.”

“Not in the slightest degree,” observed the Doctor. “This is the healthiest neighborhood in town. The trouble with you is that you have a swampy mind, and it is the miasmatic oozings of your intellect that reduce you to the condition of physical flabbiness of which you complain. You might swallow the United States Steel Trust, and it wouldn’t help you a bit, and ten thousand bottles of nerve-milk, or any other tonic known to science, would be powerless to reach the seat of your disorder. What you need to stiffen you up is a pair of those armored trousers the Crusaders used to wear in the days of chivalry, to bolster up your legs, and a strait-jacket to keep your back up.”

“Thank you, kindly,” said the Idiot. “If you’ll give me a prescription, which I can have made up at your tailor’s, I’ll have it filled, unless you’ll add to my ever-increasing obligation to you by lending me your own strait-jacket. I promise to keep it straight and to return it the moment you feel one of your fits coming on.”

The Doctor’s response was merely a scornful gesture, and the Idiot went on:

“It’s always seemed a very queer thing to me that this season of the year should be so popular with everybody,” he said. “To me it’s the mushiest of times. Mushy bones; mushy poetry; mush for breakfast, fried, stewed, and boiled. The roads are mushy; lovers thaw out and get mushier than ever.

“In the spring the blasts of winter all are stilled in solemn hush.
In the spring the young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of mush.
In the spring – ”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself to trifle with so beautiful a poem,” interrupted the Bibliomaniac, indignantly.

“Who’s trifling with a beautiful poem?” demanded the Idiot.

“You are – ‘Locksley Hall’ – and you know it,” retorted the Bibliomaniac.

“Locksley nothing,” said the Idiot. “What I was reciting is not from ‘Locksley Hall’ at all. It’s a little thing of my own that I wrote six years ago called ‘Spring Unsprung.’ It may not contain much delicate sentiment, but it’s got more solid information in it of a valuable kind than you’ll find in ten ‘Locksley Halls’ or a dozen Etiquette Columns in the Lady’s Away From Home Magazine. It has saved a lot of people from pneumonia and other disorders of early spring, I am quite certain, and the only person I ever heard criticise it unfavorably was a doctor I know who said it spoiled his business.”

“I should admire to hear it,” said the Poet. “Can’t you let us have it?”

“Certainly,” replied the Idiot. “It goes on like this:

“In the spring I’ll take you driving, take you driving, Maudy dear,
But I beg of you be careful at this season of the year.
It is true the birds are singing, singing sweetly all their notes,
But you’ll later find them wearing canton-flannel ’round their throats.
It is true the lark doth warble, ‘Spring is here,’ with bird-like fire,
‘All is warmth and all is genial,’ but I fear the lark’s a liar.
All is warmth for fifteen minutes, that is true; but wait awhile,
And you’ll find that April’s weather has not ever changed its style;
And beware of April’s weather, it is pleasant for a spell,
But, like little Johnny’s future, you can’t always sometimes tell.
Often modest little violets, peeping up from out their beds
In the balmy morn by night-time have bad colds within their heads;
And the buttercup and daisy twinkling gayly on the lawn,
Sing by night a different story from their carollings at dawn;
And the blossoms of the morning, hailing spring with joyous frenzy,
When the twilight falls upon them often droop with influenzy.
So, dear Maudy, when we’re driving, put your linen duster on,
And your lovely Easter bonnet, if you wish to, you may don;
But be careful to have with you sundry garments warm and thick:
Woollen gloves, a muff, and ear-tabs, from the ice-box get the pick;
There’s no telling what may happen ere we’ve driven twenty miles,
April flirts with chill December, and is full of other wiles.
Bring your parasol, O Maudy – it is good for tête-à-têtes;
At the same time you would better also bring your hockey skates.
There’s no telling from the noon-tide, with the sun a-shining bright,
Just what kind of winter weather we’ll be up against by night.”

“Referring to the advice,” said Mr. Brief, “that’s good. I don’t think much of the poetry.”

“There was a lot more of it,” said the Idiot, “but it escapes me at the moment. Four lines I do remember, however:

“Pin no faith to weather prophets – all their prophecies are fakes,
Roulette-wheels are plain and simple to the notions April takes.
Keep your children in the nursery – never mind it if they pout —
And, above all, do not let your furnace take an evening out.”

“Well,” said the Poet, “if you’re going to the poets for advice, I presume your rhymes are all right. But I don’t think it is the mission of the poet to teach people common-sense.”

“That’s the trouble with the whole tribe of poets,” said the Idiot. “They think they are licensed to do and say all sorts of things that other people can’t do and say. In a way I agree with you that a poem shouldn’t necessarily be a treatise on etiquette or a sequence of health hints, but it should avoid misleading its readers. Take that fellow who wrote

“‘Sweet primrose time! When thou art here
I go by grassy ledges
Of long lane-side, and pasture mead,
And moss-entangled hedges.’

That’s very lovely, and, as far as it goes, it is all right. There’s no harm in doing what the poet so delicately suggests, but I think there should have been other stanzas for the protection of the reader like this:

“But have a care, oh, readers fair,
To take your mackintoshes,
And on your feet be sure to wear
A pair of stanch galoshes.

“Nor should you fail when seeking out
The primrose, golden yeller,
To have at hand somewhere about
A competent umbrella.

Thousands of people are inspired by lines like the original to go gallivanting all over the country in primrose time, to return at dewy eve with all the incipient symptoms of pneumonia. Then there’s the case of Wordsworth. He was one of the loveliest of the Nature poets, but he’s eternally advising people to go out in the early spring and lie on the grass somewhere, listening to cuckoos doing their cooking, watching the daffodils at their daily dill, and hearing the crocus cuss; and some sentimental reader out in New Jersey thinks that if Wordsworth could do that sort of thing, and live to be eighty years old, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t do the same thing. What’s the result? He lies on the grass for two hours and suffers from rheumatism for the next ten years.”

“Tut!” said the Poet. “I am surprised at you. You can’t blame Wordsworth because some New Jerseyman makes a jackass of himself.”

“In a way all writers should be responsible for the effect of what they write on their readers,” said the Idiot. “When a poet of Wordsworth’s eminence, directly or indirectly, advises people to go out and lie on the grass in early spring, he owes it to his public to caution them that in some localities it is not a good thing to do. A rhymed foot-note —

“This habit, by-the-way, is good
In climes south of the Mersey;
But, I would have it understood,
It’s risky in New Jersey —

would fulfil all the requirements of the special individual to whom I have referred, and would have shown that the poet himself was ever mindful of the welfare of his readers.”

The Poet was apparently unconvinced, so the Idiot continued:

“Mind you, old man, I think all this poetry is beautiful,” he said; “but you poets are too prone to confine your attention to the pleasant aspects of the season. Here, for instance, is a poet who asks

‘What are the dearest treasures of spring?’

and then goes on to name the cheapest as an answer to his question. The primrose, the daffodil, the rosy haze that veils the forest bare, the sparkle of the myriad-dimpled sea, a kissing-match between the sunbeams and the rain-drops, reluctant hopes, the twitter of swallows on the wing, and all that sort of thing. You’d think spring was an iridescent dream of ecstatic things; but of the tired feeling that comes over you, the spine of jelly, the wabbling knee, the chills and fever that come from sniffing ‘the scented breath of dewy April’s eve,’ the doctor’s bills, and such like things are never mentioned. It isn’t fair. It’s all right to tell about the other things, but don’t forget the drawbacks. If I were writing that poem I’d have at least two stanzas like this:

“And other dearest treasures of spring
Are daily draughts of withering, blithering squills,
To cure my aching bones of darksome chills;
And at the door my loved physician’s ring;

“The tender sneezes of the early day;
The sudden drop of Mr. Mercury;
The veering winds from S. to N. by E. —
And hunting flats to move to in the May.

You see, that makes not only a more comprehensive picture, but does not mislead anybody into the belief the spring is all velvet, which it isn’t by any means.”

“Oh, bosh!” cried the Poet, very much nettled, as he rose from the table. “I suppose if you had your way you’d have all poetry submitted first to a censor, the way they do with plays in London.”

“No, I wouldn’t have a censor; he’d only increase taxes unnecessarily,” said the Idiot, folding up his napkin, and also rising to leave. “I’d just let the Board of Health pass on them; it isn’t a question of morals so much as of sanitation.”