the giant
city. Only the little bag remains. Shall I blow it up and "bust" it?
That act, with a final pop, will bring back a flash of my childhood.
Here goes....

It didn't pop nicely at all. It exploded in a kind of a spudgy
collapse, with very little noise. Ah, well, you cannot eat your
peppermints and have them too--nor the bag! But it has been very
pleasant to eat them, to wake up with a whiff and a nibble the memory
of those vanished days, those voices and peaceful paths of life very
far from here and now. It may be true that we mount on our dead selves
to higher things, but it is well to hold little Memorial Days now and
then, and on the graves of our dead, especially of those who died
young in the flower of innocence, to leave a peppermint, as the
soldiers leave on the grave of Miss Emily a print flag and a basket of
geraniums. A cemetery need not be a mournful place. Maids were wooed
and won in _our_ cemetery, and the high school pupils ate their
lunches out of collapsable tin boxes every noon on the tomb of Major
Barton, he of Revolutionary fame, who horse-whipped the British
captive when he refused to eat beans. Noble New Englander! And perhaps
my own peppermint feasts are not so much memorial banquet, after all,
as ceremonial rites in honor of my native land. For I cannot think of
this great city of New York as my home, I cannot fit into the rushing,
roaring cogs and grooves of its machinery without a protest, without a
hope that some day I may hear the wheels no longer roar at their cruel
revolutions. Thus my peppermints speak to me of home, of quiet, of
certain green places and a lilac hedge; there is about them the taste
and odor of the ideal. They are for the future as well as for the
past. Perhaps in some subtle way they do after all have potency for
beauty. I fancy that some day I too shall stow away bags of them amid
my worthless precious junk, and when prying hands disturb the dust the
nostrils of a youngster now unborn will be greeted by a frail yet
pungent aroma. I can only trust that he will know well what it is.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

Since the book is a collection of essays printed at different magazines
and at different times, varied spelling has been preserved. Obvious
typographic errors have been corrected. See the list below for details.

Issues fixed:

page 15--typo fixed: changed 'conciousness' to 'consciousness'
page 16--