ars close upon the racket that no sweetest sound be lost, is a
deep question and not to be lightly answered. In the sound there is
promise of the days to come when circuses will be loosed upon the land and
elephants will go padding by--with eyes looking around for peanuts. Why
this biggest of all beasts, this creature that looms above you like a
crustaceous dinosaur--to use long words without squinting too closely on
their meaning--why this behemoth with the swishing trunk, should eat
peanuts, contemptible peanuts, lies so deep in nature that the mind turns
dizzy. It is small stuff to feed valor on--a penny's worth of food in such
a mighty hulk. Whatever the lion eats may turn to lion, but the elephant
strains the proverb. He might swallow you instead, breeches, hat and
suspenders--if you be of the older school of dress before the belt came
in--and not so much as cough upon the buttons. And there will be red and
yellow wagons, boarded up seductively, as though they could show you, if
they would, snakes and hyenas. May be it is best, you think--such things
lying in the seeds of time--to lay aside a dime from the budget of the
week, for one can never be sure against the carelessness of parents, and
their jaded appetites.

[Illustration]

But the hurdy-gurdy is the call to sterner business also. I know an old
lady who, at the first tinkle from the street, will take off her glasses
with a finality as though she were never to use them again for the light
pleasure of reading, but intended to fill the remainder of her days with
deeper purpose. There is a piece of two-legged villainy in her employ by
the name of William, and even before the changing of the tune, she will
have him rolling up the rugs for the spring cleaning. There is a sour
rhythm in the fellow and he will beat a pretty syncopation on them if the
hurdy-gurdy will but stick to marching time. It is said that he once broke
the fabric of a Kermanshah in his zeal at some crescendo of the _Robert E.
Lee_. But he was lost upon the valse and struck languidly and out of time.

But maybe, Reader, in your youth you have heated a penny above a lamp, and
with treacherous smile you have come before an open window. And when the
son of Italy has grinned and beckoned for your bounty--the penny being
just short of a molten state--you have thrown it to him. He stoops, he
feels.... You have learned by this how much more blessed it is to give
than to receive. Or, to dig deep in the