uld be more absurd than to send to a friend in a city
apartment a rhyme such as this:

As round the Christmas fire you sit
And hear the bells with frosty chime,
Think, friendship that long love has knit
Grows sweeter still at Christmas time!

If that is sent to the janitor or the elevator boy we have no cavil, for
these gentlemen do actually see a fire and hear bells ring; but the
apartment tenant hears naught but the hissing of the steam in the
radiator, and counts himself lucky to hear that. Why not be honest and
say to him:

I hope the janitor has shipped
You steam, to keep the cold away;
And if the hallboys have been tipped,
Then joy be thine on Christmas Day!

We had not meant to introduce this jocular note into our meditation, for
we are honestly aggrieved that so many of the Christmas cards hark back
to an old tradition that is gone, and never attempt to express any of
the romance of to-day. You may protest that Christmas is the oldest
thing in the world, which is true; yet it is also new every year, and
never newer than now.

ON UNANSWERING LETTERS

[Illustration]

There are a great many people who really believe in answering letters
the day they are received, just as there are people who go to the movies
at 9 o'clock in the morning; but these people are stunted and queer.

It is a great mistake. Such crass and breathless promptness takes away a
great deal of the pleasure of correspondence.

The psychological didoes involved in receiving letters and making up
one's mind to answer them are very complex. If the tangled process could
be clearly analyzed and its component involutions isolated for
inspection we might reach a clearer comprehension of that curious bag of
tricks, the efficient Masculine Mind.

Take Bill F., for instance, a man so delightful that even to
contemplate his existence puts us in good humor and makes us think well
of a world that can exhibit an individual equally comely in mind, body
and estate. Every now and then we get a letter from Bill, and
immediately we pass into a kind of trance, in which our mind rapidly
enunciates the ideas, thoughts, surmises and contradictions that we
would like to write to him in reply. We think what fun it would be to
sit right down and churn the ink-well, spreading speculation and
cynicism over a number of sheets of foolscap to be wafted Billward.

Sternly we repress the impulse for we know that the shock to Bill of