arer our
necessary total of 1100. But we scorn, even when writing against
time, to take petty advantages. Let us be brief, crisp, packed with
thought. Let it stand as drench, while you admire our proud
conscience.)

Eleven hundred words--what a lot could be said in 1100 words! We
stood at the front door of the baggage car (there is an odd irony in
this: the leading editorial writer, one of the most implacable of
our taskmasters, is spending the summer at Sea Cliff, and he gets
the last empty seat left in the smoker. So we, getting on at
Salamis, have to stand in the baggage car) watching the engine rock
and roar along the rails, while the rain sheeted the level green
fields. It is very agreeable to ride on a train in the rain. We have
never known just why, but it conduces to thought. The clear trickles
of water are drawn slantwise across the window panes, and one
watches, absently, the curious behaviour of the drops. They hang
bulging and pendulous, in one spot for some seconds. Then, as they
swell, suddenly they break loose and zigzag swiftly down the pane,
following the slippery pathway that previous drops have made. It is
like a little puzzle game where you manoeuvre a weighted capsule
among pegs toward a narrow opening. "Pigs in clover," they sometimes
call it, but who knows why? The conduct of raindrops on a
smoking-car window is capricious and odd, but we must pass on. That
topic alone would serve for several hundred words, but we will not
be opportunist.

We stood at the front door of the baggage car, and in a pleasant
haze of the faculties we thought of a number of things. We thought
of some books we had seen up on East Fifty-ninth Street, in that
admirable row of old bookshops, particularly Mowry Saben's volume of
essays, "The Spirit of Life," which we are going back to buy one of
these days; so please let it alone. We then got out a small
note-book in which we keep memoranda of books we intend to read and
pored over it zealously. Just for fun, we will tell you three of
the titles we have noted there:

"The Voyage of the Hoppergrass," by E.L. Pearson.
"People and Problems," by Fabian Franklin.
"Broken Stowage," by David W. Bone.

But most of all we thought, in a vague sentimental way, about that
pleasant Long Island country through which the engine was haling and
hallooing all those carloads of audacious commuters.

Only the other day we heard a wise man say that he did not care for
Long