s stuck. It had but one
handle,--a ring in the middle. First one side would come out too far,
and you would knock it back and pull again. Then the other side would
come out too far, and you would knock that back. Then both sides, by
diabolical agreement, would suddenly work as on greased ways, and you
stood with an astonishingly shallow drawer dangling from your finger,
its long-accumulated contents spread on the floor. The shock usually
sent down two derbies and a bonnet to add to the confusion. When you
had gathered up the litter and stuffed it back, wondering how so small
a space ever held so much, the still harder task confronted you of
putting the drawer in its grooves again. Sometimes you succeeded; more
often you left it "for mother to do"--that depended on your temper and
the time of your train. The drawer was a charnel-house of gloves and
mittens and veils. When you cut your finger you were sent to it to get
a "cot", and it had a peculiar smell of its own, the smell of the
hat-tree drawer. A whiff of old gloves still brings that odor back to
me, out of childhood, stirring memories of little garments worn long
ago, of a great blue cape that was a pride to my father's heart and a
wound to my mother's pride,--but most of all of lost temper and
incipient profanity caused by the baulky drawer.

My friend's recollections but supplemented and reinforced my own. We
called to mind other hat-trees in houses where we had visited, and one
and all they were alike perverse, ridiculous, ill-adapted for their
mission in life. We thought of various substitutes for the hat-tree,
such as a pole with pegs in it, which tips over when the preponderance
of weight is hung on one side; the cluster of pegs on a frame
suspended from the wall like a picture, while a painted drain-pipe
courts umbrellas in a corner; a long, low table (only possible in a
palatial hall) on which the garments are placed by the butler in
assorted piles, so that you feel like asking him for a check; the
settle, often disastrous to hats. We found none of them satisfactory,
though they eliminate the perils of the drawer.

Only the wooden pegs which were driven in a horizontal row into the
board walls of grandfather's back entry ever approximated the ideal.
But such a reversion to primitive principles would now be considered
out of the question, even in my farm house--by the farmer's wife, at
least. The problem of a satisfactory hat-tree, which baffled the
genius