e,--four of them, full
of sand. On a third side of the room stood the basin and water-taps,
and beside them a large black-walnut cabinet, full of shelves. The
shelves were full of mugs, and on every mug was a name, in gilt
letters, generally Old English. Those mugs were a town directory of
our leading citizens. My father's mug was on the next to the top
shelf, third from the end on the right. The sight of it used to
thrill me, and at twelve I began surreptitiously to feel my chin, to
see if there were any hope of my achieving a mug in the
not-too-distant future.

Above the chairs, the basin, the cabinet, hung pictures. Several of
those pictures I have never seen since, but the other day in New York
I came upon one of them in a print-shop on Fourth Avenue, and was
restrained from buying it only by the, to me, prohibitive price. I've
been ashamed ever since, too, that I allowed it to be prohibitive. I
feel traitorous to a memory. It was a lurid lithograph of a burning
building upon which brave firemen in red shirts were pouring copious
streams of water, while other brave firemen worked the pump-handles of
the engine. The flames were leaping out in orange tongues from every
window of the doomed structure (which was a fine business block three
stories high), but you felt sure that the heroes would save all
adjoining property, in spite of the evident high wind. Another picture
in Clarkie's shop showed these same firemen (at least, they, too, wore
red shirts) hauling their engine out of its abode; and still another
displayed them hauling it back again. On this latter occasion it was
coated with ice, and I used to wonder if all these pictures depicted
the same fire, because the trees were in full leaf in the others.
There also hung on the walls a truly superb engraving of the loss of
the Arctic. Her bow (or was it her stern?) was high in air, and
figures were dropping off it into the sea, like nuts from a shaken
hickory. This was a very terrible picture, and one turned with relief
to Maude S. standing before a bright green hedge and looking every
inch a gentle champion, or the stuffed pickerel, twenty-four inches
long, framed under glass, with his weight--a ponderous figure--printed
on the frame.

Clarkie Parker was in reality a barber by avocation. The art he loved
was angling. Patience with a rod and line, the slow contemplation of
rivers, was in his blood, and in his fingers. It took him a long time
to cut your hair, eve