s of humanity. For the most part they are to be
found in the peaceful environs of a university or on some mountain top a
Sabbath day's journey from the hum of civilization, where they eschew
nearly everything which the every-day mortal finds requisite to comfort
and convenience, unless it be whiskey and water. I have sometimes
fancied that more real philosophers than we are aware of are partial on
the sly to whiskey and water. But that is neither here nor there; for,
as I have already stated, I am not a real philosopher.

I have altogether too many faults to be one, and should constantly be
flying in the face of my own theories. Barring the aforesaid weakness
for whiskey and water, it is fair to assume that the average real
philosopher lives up to his own lights and by them; whereas I, at least
according to Josephine, am liable to be frightfully inconsistent. She
has never forgotten my profanity on the occasion when we discovered after
dinner that the soot had come down in the drawing-room and was over
everything in spite of the fact that the chimney had been swept three
weeks before. Now, if there is one thing which I abhor and am
perpetually inveighing against as vulgar and futile, it is unbridled
language. Josephine must have heard me say fifty times if she has heard
me one that the man who fouls his tongue with an oath is a senseless oaf.
And yet I am bound to admit that when I discovered what had happened I
swore deliberately and roundly like the veriest trooper. In order to
appreciate the situation exactly I should add that it has long been a
mooted point between Josephine and me whether chimneys require to be
swept at all. My darling insists that the sweep shall overhaul the house
annually, while I cling, with what she is pleased to call masculine
fatuity, to the theory that soot, like sleeping dogs, should be let alone.

Have you ever entered a drawing-room just after a healthy, thorough fall
of soot? If so, you will appreciate what is meant by its
all-pervasiveness. The remotest articles of furniture are rife with
infinitesimal smut, much as they were rife with the remains of the lady
in Kipling's story after the jealous orang-outang had done with her. And
yet granting that the provocation was dire, a philosopher, a real
philosopher, would have acted very differently. A philosopher of the
grandest type would have reasoned that what was done was done, and that
there was no more use in crying over fa