title of the book. At that moment I was reading:

One morning after a beautiful snowfall I sent a letter to a friend's
house about something I wished to say, but said nothing at all about
the snow. And in his reply he wrote: "How can I listen to a man so base
that his pen in writing did not make the least reference to the snow!
Your honorable way of expressing yourself I exceedingly regret." How
amusing was this answer!

The shoeshiner was now asking me whether anything was wrong with the
polish he had put on my boots, so I thought it best to leave.

In the earlier pages of Kenko's book there are a number of allusions to
the agreeableness of intercourse with friends, so I went into a nearby
restaurant to telephone to a man whom I wished to know better. He said
that he would be happy to meet me at ten minutes after twelve. That left
over half an hour. I felt an immediate necessity to tell some one about
Kenko, so I made my way to Mr. Nichols's delightful bookshop (which has
an open fire) on Thirty-third Street. I showed the book to Mr. Nichols,
and we had a pleasant talk, in the course of which she showed me the
five facsimile volumes of Dickens's Christmas books, which he had
issued. In particular, he read aloud to me the magnificent description
of the boiling kettle in the first "Chirp" of "The Cricket on the
Hearth," and pointed out to me how Dickens fell into rhyme in describing
the song of the kettle. This passage Mr. Nichols read to me, standing
in front of his fire, in a very musical and sympathetic tone of voice
which pleased me exceedingly. I was strongly tempted to buy the five
little books, and wished I had known of them before Christmas. With a
brutal effort at last I pulled out my watch, and found it was a quarter
after twelve.

I met my friend at his office, and we walked up Fourth Avenue in a flush
of sunshine. From Twenty-fourth to Forty-second Street we discussed the
habits of English poets visiting this country. At the club we got onto
Bolshevism, and he told me how a bookseller on Lexington Avenue, whose
shop is frequented by very outspoken radicals, had told him that one of
these had said, "The time is coming, and not far away, when the gutters
in front of your shop will run with blood as they did in Petrograd." I
thought of some recent bomb outrages in Philadelphia and did not laugh.
With such current problems before us, I felt a little embarrassed about
turning the talk back to so many centuries