ter than to sit round after a heavy lunch with half a dozen heavy
friends, smoking heavy cigars. I am well aware that that is wicked. I
merely confess the fact. I do not palliate it.

Nor is food all, nor drink, nor work, nor open air. There has spread
abroad along with the so-called physical efficiency a perfect passion
for _information_. Somehow if a man's stomach is empty and his head
clear as a bell, and if he won't drink and won't smoke, he reaches out
for information. He wants facts. He reads the newspapers all though,
instead of only reading the headings. He clamours for articles filled
with statistics about illiteracy and alien immigration and the number of
battleships in the Japanese navy.

I know quite a lot of men who have actually bought the new
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_. What is more, they _read_ the thing. They
sit in their apartments at night with a glass of water at their elbow
reading the encyclopaedia. They say that it is literally filled with
facts. Other men spend their time reading the Statistical Abstract of
the United States (they say the figures in it are great) and the Acts
of Congress, and the list of Presidents since Washington (or was it
Washington?).

Spending their evenings thus, and topping it off with a cold baked
apple, and sleeping out in the snow, they go to work in the morning,
so they tell me, with a positive sense of exhilaration. I have no doubt
that they do. But, for me, I confess that once and for all I am out of
it. I am left behind.

Add to it all such rising dangers as total prohibition, and the female
franchise, the daylight saving, and eugenic marriage, together with
proportional representation, the initiative and the referendum, and the
duty of the citizen to take an intelligent interest in politics--and I
admit that I shall not be sorry to go away from here.

But before I _do_ go, I have one hope. I understand that down in Hayti
things are very different. Bull fights, cock fights, dog fights, are
openly permitted. Business never begins till eleven in the morning.
Everybody sleeps after lunch, and the bars remain open all night.
Marriage is but a casual relation. In fact, the general condition of
morality, so they tell me, is lower in Hayti than it has been anywhere
since the time of Nero. Me for Hayti.

XIII. The Old, Old Story of How Five Men Went Fishing

This is a plain account of a fishing party. It is not a story. There
is no plot. Nothing happens in it