sacrifice our money, our health and at last our
minds, would kill hope and ambition.

In a few weeks I believe I should also get a preying on my mind. That is
about the last thing I would think of preying on, but a man must eat
something.

Before closing this brief and incomplete account as a guest at Ludlow
Street Jail I ought, in justice to my family, to say, perhaps, that I
came down this morning to see a friend of mine who is here because he
refuses to pay alimony to his recreant and morbidly sociable wife. He
says he is quite content to stay here, so long as his wife is on the
outside. He is writing a small ready-reference book on his side of the
great problem, "Is Marriage a Failure?"

With this I shake him by the hand and in a moment the big iron
storm-door clangs behind me, the big lock clicks in its hoarse, black
throat and I welcome even the air of Ludlow street so long as the blue
sky is above it.

OLD POLKA DOT'S DAUGHTER

II

I once decided to visit an acquaintance who had named his country place
"The Elms." I went partly to punish him because his invitation was so
evidently hollow and insincere.

He had "The Elms" worked on his clothes, and embossed on his stationery
and blown in his glass, and it pained him to eat his food from table
linen that didn't have "The Elms" emblazoned on it. He told me to come
and surprise him any time, and shoot in his preserves, and stay until
business compelled me to return to town again. He had no doubt heard
that I never surprise any one, and never go away from home very much,
and so thought it would be safe. Therefore I went. I went just to teach
him a valuable lesson. When I go to visit a man for a week, he is
certainly thenceforth going to be a better man, or else punishment is of
no avail and the chastening rod entirely useless in his case.

"The Elms" was a misnomer. It should have been called "The Shagbark" or
"The Doodle Bug's Lair." It was supposed to mean a wide sweep of meadow,
a vine covered lodge, a broad velvet lawn, and a carriage way, where the
drowsy locust, in the sensuous shadow of magnanimous elms, gnawed a file
at intervals through the day, while back of all this the mossy and
gray-whiskered front and corrugated brow of the venerable architectural
pile stood off and admired itself in the deep and glassy pool at its
base.

In the first place none of the yeomanry for eight miles around knew that
he called his old malarial tank "The Elm