ection and comment. Strangely
enough, viewed in this way, these persons no longer seem so
contemptible or pernicious or devilish as they once did. At this point
your factotum rubs your eye-glasses bright with the handkerchief he
always carries about for slate-cleaning purposes, and lo! you even
begin to discover good points about the chaps, hitherto unsuspected.

Then there are always your million-and-one favorite melodies which
nobody but that all-around musical amateur, the Auto-Comrade, can so
exquisitely whistle, hum, strum, fiddle, blat, or roar. There is also
a universe full of new ones for him to improvise. And he is the
jolliest sort of fellow musician, because, when you play or sing a
duet with him, you can combine with the exciting give-and-take and
reciprocal stimulation of the duet, the god-like autocracy of the
solo, its opportunity for wide, uninterrupted, uncoerced
self-expression. Sometimes, however, in the first flush of escape with
him to the wilds, you are fain to clap your hand over his mouth in
order the better to taste the essentially folk-less savor of solitude.
For music is a curiously social art, and Browning was more than half
right when he said, "Who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at
once."

Perhaps you can find your entertainer a small lump of clay or
modeling-wax to thumb into bad caricatures of those you love and good
ones of those you hate, until increasing facility impels him to try
and model not a Tanagra figurine, for that would be unlike his
original fancy, but a Hoboken figurine, say, or a sketch for some
Elgin (Illinois) marbles.

If you care anything for poetry and can find him a stub of pencil and
an unoccupied cuff, he will be most completely in his element; for if
there is any one occupation more closely identified with him than
another, it is that of poet. And though all Auto-Comrades are not
poets, all poets are Auto-Comrades. Every poem which has ever thrilled
this world or another has been written by the Auto-Comrade of some
so-called poet. This is one reason why the so-called poets think so
much of their great companions. "Allons! after the great companions!"
cried old Walt to his fellow poets. If he had not overtaken, and held
fast to, his, we should never have heard the "Leaves of Grass"
whispering "one or two indicative words for the future." The bards
have always obeyed this call. And they have known how to value their
Auto-Comrades, too. See, for example, w