ent would be difficult and
travelling in the Subway quite impossible. The newspaper is the only
institution since the world began that succeeds in being all things to
all men for the moderate sum of one cent a day. The only universal
things that come cheaper, the professor told me, are birth and death.

IX

A FLEDGLING

A sophomore's soul is not the simple thing that most people imagine. I
am thinking now of my nephew Philip and of our last meeting. This time,
he was more than usually welcome. I was lonely. The family had just left
town for the summer and the house was fearfully empty. I sat there,
smoking a cigarette amid the first traces of domestic uncleanliness,
when I heard him on the stairs. The dear boy had not changed. Dropping
his heavy suitcase anyways, he seized my hand within his own huge paw
and squeezed it till the tears came to my eyes. His voice was a young
roar. He threw his hat upon the table, thereby scattering a large number
of papers about the room, and then sat down upon my own hat, which was
lying on the armchair, on top of several July magazines. I had put my
hat down on the chair instead of hanging it up, as I should have done,
because the family was away and I was alone in the house.

Might he smoke? He was busy with his bull-dog pipe and my tobacco jar
before I could say yes. He explained that he was sorry, but he found he
could neither read, write, nor think nowadays without his pipe. He
admitted that he was the slave of a noxious habit, but it was too late,
and he might as well get all the solace he could out of a pretty bad
situation. But, as I look at Philip, I cannot help feeling that his fine
colour and the sparkle in his blue eyes and his full count of nineteen
years make the situation far less desperate than he portrays it. Philip
is not a handsome lad, but he will be a year from now. At present he is
mostly hands and feet, and his face shows a marked nasal development.
Before Philip has completed his junior year, the rest of his features
will have reasserted themselves, and the harmony of lineament which was
his when he was an infant, as his mother never tires of regretfully
recalling, will be restored. Until that time Philip must be content to
carry the suggestion of an attractive and eager young bird of prey.

Philip lights pipe after pipe as he dilates on his experiences since
last I saw him. The moralising instinct is very weak in me. I cannot
find it in my heart to c