his essay dips its Plimsoll-mark full under. It is
freighted with far more than a dozen pages might be expected to carry
safely. So quietly, so quaintly told, what a wealth of humanity is in
it! Am I wrong in thinking that those fellow-artists who know the thrill
of a great thing greatly done will catch breath when they read this, of
the minor obits in the press--

We go into the feature headed "Died," a department similar to that
on the literary page headed "Books Received." ... We are set in
small type, with lines following the name line indented. It is
difficult for me to tell with certainty from the printed page, but I
think we are set without leads.

In such passages, where the easy sporting-tweed fabric of Mr. Holliday's
merry and liberal style fits his theme as snugly as the burr its nut,
one feels tempted to cry joyously (as he says in some other connection),
"it seems as if it were a book you had written yourself in a dream."
And follow him, for sheer fun, in the "Going a Journey" essay. Granted
that it would never have been written but for Hazlitt and Stevenson and
Belloc. Yet it is fresh distilled, it has its own sparkle. Beginning
with an even pace, how it falls into a swinging stride, drugs you with
hilltops and blue air! Crisp, metrical, with a steady drum of feet, it
lifts, purges and sustains. "This is the religious side" of reading an
essay!

Mr. Holliday, then, gives us in generous measure the "certain jolly
humors" which R.L.S. says we voyage to find. He throws off flashes of
imaginative felicity--as where he says of canes, "They are the light to
blind men." Where he describes Mr. Oliver Herford "listing to starboard,
like a postman." Where he says of the English who use colloquially
phrases known to us only in great literature--"There are primroses in
their speech." And where he begins his "Memoirs of a Manuscript," "I was
born in Indiana."

We are now ready to let fall our third memorandum:

Third Memo--Behind his colloquial, easygoing (apparently careless)
utterance, Mr. Holliday conceals a high quality of literary art.

CHAPTER V

(FURTHER OSCILLATIONS OF OUR HERO)

Mr. Holliday was driven home from England and Police Constable
Buckington by the war, which broke out while he was living in Chelsea.
My chronology is a bit mixed here; just what he was doing from autumn,
1914, to February, 1916, I don't know. Was it then that he held the fish
reporter job? Come to