Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 211
There being still a good hour or so of daylight left, I dug a cistern four feet wide and twenty feet deep. I was looking round for something more to dig by moonlight, but Beryl put her foot down (on my head while I was in the drain) and forbade me to work any more for fear I might be fatigued.
Next morning we were able to begin our building in good earnest. On our way we stopped at the fifteen-cent store for necessary supplies, and bought one hammer, fifteen cents; a saw, fifteen cents; half a gallon of nails, fifteen cents; a crane, fifteen cents; a derrick for hoisting, fifteen cents; and a needle and thread, for sewing on the roof, fifteen cents.
As an advice to young builders, I may say that I doubt if we were quite wise in all our purchases. The fifteen-cent derrick is too light for the work, and the extra expenditure for the heavier kind (the twenty-five-cent crane) would have been justified. The difference in cost is only (approximately) ten cents, and the efficiency of the big crane is far greater.
On arriving at our ground we were delighted to find that our masonry was well set and the walls firm and solid, while the catalpa trees were well above the ground and growing rapidly. We set to work at once to build in earnest.
We had already decided to utilize for our bungalow the waste material which lay on our lot. I drew Beryl’s attention to the fact that if a proper use were made of the material wasted in building there would be no need to buy any material at all. “The elimination of waste,” I explained, “by the utilization of all by-products before they have time to go by, is the central principle of modern industrial organization.”
But observing that Beryl had ceased to listen to me, I drew on my carpenter’s apron which I had made out of a piece of tar-paper, and set to work. My first care was to gather up all the loose lumber that lay upon and around our ground site, and saw it up into neatly squared pieces about twenty feet long. Out of these I made the joints, the studding, the partitions, rafters, and so on, which formed the frame of the house.
Putting up the house took practically the whole morning. Beryl, who had slipped on a potato bag over her dress, assisted me by holding up the side of the house while I nailed on the top.
By the end of the afternoon we had completed the sides of our house, which we made out of old newspaper soaked in glue and rolled flat. The next day we put on the roof, which was made of tin cans cut open and pounded flat.
For our hardwood floors, mantels, etc., we were fortunate in finding a pile of hardwood on a neighboring lot which had apparently been overlooked, and which we carried over proudly to our bungalow after dark. That same night we carried over jubilantly some rustic furniture which we had found, quite neglected, lying in a nearby cottage, the lock of which oddly enough, was opened quite easily with the key of Beryl’s suitcase.
The rest of our furniture — plain tables, dressers, etc. — I was able to make from ordinary pine lumber which I obtained by knocking down a board fence upon an adjacent lot. In short, the reader is able to picture our bungalow after a week of labor, complete in every respect and only awaiting our occupation on the next day.
Seated that evening in our boarding house, with Beryl coiled around me, I calculated the entire cost of our enterprise — including ground site, lumber, derricks, cranes, glue, string, tin-tacks and other materials — as four dollars and ninety cents.
In return for it we had a pretty seven-roomed house, artistic in every respect, with living-room, bed-rooms, a boudoir, a den, a snuggery, a doggery — in short, the bungalow of which so many young people have dreamed.
Seated together that evening, Beryl and I were full of plans for the future. We both have a passionate love of animals and, like all country-bred people, a longing for the life of a farm. So we had long since decided to keep poultry. We planned to begin in a small way, and had brought home that evening from the fifteen-cent store a day-old chicken, such as are now so widely sold.
We put him in a basket beside the radiator in a little flannel coat that Beryl had made for him, and we fed him with a warm mash made of breakfast food and gravel. Our printed directions that we got with him told us that a fowl eats two ounces of grain per day and on that should lay five eggs in a week. I was easily able to prove to Beryl by a little plain arithmetic that if we fed this fellow 4 ounces a day he would lay 10 eggs in a week, or at 8 ounces per day he would lay 29 eggs in a week.
Beryl, who was seized at once with a characteristic fit of enthusiasm, suggested that we stick 16 ounces a day into him and begin right now. I had to remind her laughingly that at 8 ounces a day the fellow would probably be working up to a capacity, and carrying what we call in business his peak load. “The essential factor in modern business,” I told her, “is to load yourself up to the peak and stay there.”
In short, there was no end to our rosy dreams. In our fancy we saw ourselves in our bungalow, surrounded by hens, bees, cows and dogs, with hogs and goats nestling against our feet. Unfortunately our dreams were destined to be shattered. Up to this point our experience with building our bungalow had followed along after all the best models, and had even eclipsed them. But from now on we met a series of disasters of which we had had no warning. It is a pity that I cannot leave our story at this point.
On arriving at our bungalow next day we found notices posted up forbidding all trespassers, and two sour-looking men in possession. We learned that our title to the ground site was worthless, as the man from whom we had bought it had been apparently a mere passer-by. It appeared also that a neighboring contractor was making serious difficulties about our use of his material. It was divulged further that we had been mistaken in thinking that we had taken our rustic furniture from an empty cottage. There were people living in it, but they happened to be asleep when Beryl moved the furniture.
As for our hen — there is no doubt that keeping fowls is enormously profitable. It must be so, when one considers the millions of eggs consumed every day. But it demands an unremitting attention and above all — memory. If you own a hen you must never forget it — you must keep on saying to yourself— “How is my hen?” This was our trouble. Beryl and I were so preoccupied with our accumulated disaster, that we left our one-day-old chick behind the radiator and never thought of him for three weeks. He was then gone. We prefer to think he flew away.
The Everlasting Angler
The fishing season is now well under way. Will soon be with us. For lovers of fishing this remark is true all the year round. It has seemed to me that it might be of use to set down a few of the more familiar fish stories that are needed by any one wanting to qualify as an angler. There is no copyright on these stories, since Methuselah first told them, and anybody who wishes may learn them by heart and make free use of them.
I will begin with the simplest and best known. Everybody who goes fishing has heard it, and told it a thousand times. It is called:
I
The Story of the Fish That Was Lost
The circumstances under which the story is best told are these. The fisherman returns after his day’s outing with his two friends whom he has taken out for the day, to his summer cottage. They carry with them their rods, their landing net and the paraphernalia of their profession. The fisherman carries also on a string a dirty looking collection of little fish, called by courtesy the “Catch.” None of these little fish really measures more than about seven and a half inches long and four inches round the chest. The fisherman’s wife and his wife’s sister and the young lady who is staying with them come running to meet the fishing party, giving cries of admiration as they get a sight of the catch. In reality they would refuse to buy those fish from a butcher at a cent and a half a pound. But they fall into ecstasies and they cry, “Oh aren’t they beauties! Look at this big one!” The “big one” is about eight inches long. It looked good when they caught it but it has been shrinking ever since and it looks now as if it had died of consumption. Then it is that the fisherman says, in a voice in which regret is mingled with animation:
“Yes, but say, you ought to have seen the one that we lost. We had hardly let down our lines—”
It may be interjected here that all fishermen ought to realize that the moment of danger is just when you let down your line. That is the moment when the fish will put up all kinds of games on you, such as rushing at you in a compact mass so fast that you can’t take them in, or selecting the largest of their number to snatch away one of your rods.
“We had hardly let down our lines,” says the fishermen— “when Tom got a perfect monster. That fish would have weighed five pounds — wouldn’t it, Tom—”
“Easily,” says Tom.
“Well, Tom started to haul him in and he yelled to Ted and me to get the landing net ready and we had him right up to the boat,” “Right up to the very boat,” repeat Tom and Edward sadly. “When the damn line broke and biff! away he went. Say! he must have been two feet long, easily two feet!”
“Did you see him?” asks the young lady who is staying with them. This of course she has no right to ask. It’s not a fair question. Among people who go fishing it is ruled out. You may ask if a fish pulled hard, and how much it weighed but you must not ask whether anybody saw the fish. “We could see where he was,” says Tom.
Then they go on up to the house carrying the “string” or “catch” and all three saying at intervals— “Say! if we had only landed that big fellow!”
By the time this anecdote has ripened for winter use, the fish will have been drawn actually into the boat (thus settling all questions of seeing it) and will there have knocked Edward senseless, and then leaped over the gunwale.
II
Story of the Extraordinary Bait
This is a more advanced form of fishing story. It is told by fishermen for fishermen. It is the sort of thing they relate to one another when fishing out of a motor boat on a lake, when there has been a slight pause in their activity and when the fish for a little while — say for two hours, have stopped biting. So the fishermen talk and discuss the ways and means of their craft. Somebody says that grasshoppers make good bait: and somebody else asks whether any of them have ever tried Lake Erie soft shell crabs as bait, and then one — whoever is lucky enough to get in first — tells the good old bait story.
“The queerest bait I ever saw used,” he says, shifting his pipe to the other side of his mouth, “was one day when I was fishing up in one of the lakes back in Maine. We’d got to the spot and got all ready when we suddenly discovered that we’d forgotten the bait—”
At this point any one of the listeners is entitled by custom to put in the old joke about not forgetting the whiskey —
“Well there was no use going ashore. We couldn’t have got any worms. It was too early for frogs, and it was ten miles to row back home. We tried chunks of meat from our lunch, but nothing doing! Well, then, just for fun I cut a white bone button off my pants and put it on the hook. Say! you ought to have seen those fish go for it. We caught, oh, easily twenty, yes thirty — in half an hour. We only quit after we’d cut off all our buttons and our pants were falling off us! Say, hold on boys, I believe I’ve got a nibble! Sit steady!”
Getting a nibble of course will set up an excitement in any fishing party that puts an end to all story telling. After they have got straight again and the nibble has turned out to be “the bottom” as all nibbles are — the moment would be fitting for anyone of them to tell the famous story called:
III
Beginner’s Luck, or The Wonderful Catch Made by the Narrators Wife’s Lady Friend
“Talking of that big catch that you made with the pants button,” says another of the anglers, who really means that he is going to talk of something else— “reminds me of a queer thing I saw myself. We’d gone out fishing for pickerel, ‘dorés,’ they call them up there in the lake of Two Mountains. We had a couple of big row boats and we’d taken my wife and the ladies along — I think there were eight of us, or nine perhaps. Anyway it doesn’t matter. Well, there was a young lady there from Dayton, Ohio, and she’d never fished before. In fact she’d never been in a boat before. I don’t believe she’d ever been near the water before.”
All experienced listeners know now what is coming. They realize the geographical position of Dayton, Ohio, far from the water and shut in everywhere by land. Any prudent fish would make a sneak for shelter if he knew that a young lady from Dayton, Ohio, was after him.
“Well, this girl got an idea that she’d like to fish and we’d rigged up a line for her, just tied on to a cedar pole that we’d cut in the bush. Do you know you’d hardly believe that that girl had hardly got her line into the water when she got a monster. We yelled to her to play it or she’d lose it, but she just heaved it up into the air and right into the boat. She caught seventeen, or twenty-seven, I forget which, one after the other, while the rest of us got nothing. And the fun of it was she didn’t know anything about fishing; she just threw the fish up into the air and into the boat. Next day we got her a decent rod with a reel and gave her a lesson or two and then she didn’t catch any.”
I may say with truth that I have heard this particular story told not only about a girl from Dayton, Ohio, but about a girl from Kansas, a young lady just out from England, about a girl fresh from Paris, and about another girl, not fresh — the daughter of a minister. In fact if I wished to make sure of a real catch, I would select a girl fresh from Paris or New York and cut off some of my buttons, or hers, and start to fish.
IV
The Story of What Was Found in the Fish
The stories however do not end with the mere catching of the fish. There is another familiar line of anecdote that comes in when the fish are to be cleaned and cooked. The fishermen have landed on the rocky shore beside the rushing waterfall and are cleaning their fish to cook them for the midday meal. There is an obstinate superstition that fish cooked thus taste better than first class kippered herring put up in a tin in Aberdeen where they know how. They don’t, but it is an honourable fiction and reflects credit on humanity. What is more, all the fishing party compete eagerly for the job of cutting the inside out of the dead fish. In a restaurant they are content to leave that to anybody sunk low enough and unhappy enough to have to do it. But in the woods they fight for the job.
So it happens that presently one of the workers holds up some filthy specimen of something in his hand and says “Look at that! See what I took out of the trout! Unless I mistake it is part of a deer’s ear. The deer must have stooped over the stream to drink and the trout bit his ear off.”
At which somebody says — whoever gets it in first — says,
“It’s amazing what you find in fish. I remember once trolling for trout, the big trout, up in Lake Simcoe and just off Eight Mile Point we caught a regular whopper. We had no scales but he weighed easily twenty pounds. We cut him open on the shore afterwards, and say, would you believe it, that fish had inside him a brass buckle — the whole of it — and part of a tennis shoe, and a rain check from a baseball game, and seventy-five cents in change. It seems hard to account for it, unless perhaps he’d been swimming round some summer hotel.”
These stories, I repeat, may now be properly narrated in the summer fishing season. But of course, as all fishermen know, the true time to tell them is round the winter fire, with a glass of something warm within easy reach, at a time when statements cannot be checked, when weights and measures must not be challenged and when fish grow to their full size and their true beauty. It is such stories as these, whether told in summer or in winter, that the immemorial craft of the angler owes something of its continued charm.
Have We Got the Year Backwards?
Is Not Autumn Spring?
Once a year with unfailing regularity there comes round a season known as Autumn. For a good many hundred years the poets have been busy with this season as they have with all the others. Around each of them they have created a legend. And the legends are mostly untrue and need correcting.
For example, in spring there is supposed to be a tremendous gayety let loose. The young lamb is said to skip and play; and the young man’s fancy is supposed to turn towards thoughts of love. Anybody who has seen a young lamb humped up and shivering in April rain for want of an overcoat knows just how false this lamb idea is; and anybody who has seen a young man of today getting smoothed up for a winter evening party knows just when the real season of the lovers comes.
There are hawthorns in blossom in the lanes in the spring, and in the winter there are rubber trees in the restaurants with no blossoms at all. But the rubber tree sees more of love in one evening than the hawthorn does in its whole life.
The same kind of myth has gathered round the summer. The poets have described it as rich, luscious, glorious, crowned with flowers and drowsy with the hum of the bee. In reality, summer is the dead time. It is the time of the sweltering heat and the breathless nights, when people sleep upside-down with their feet on the rail of the bed; when there is no one in the city but the farmers and no one on the farms but the city people; in short when life is all disturbed, deranged, and out of sorts; when it is too hot to think, too late to begin anything, and too early to start something; when intellect dies, oratory is dumb, and national problems slumber. At such a time there is nothing of current interest except the expeditions to the North Pole and the rescue parties sent out to drag away the explorers.
Then comes autumn. The poet describes it as the decline of the year. The leaf withers. The russet woods shiver in the moaning wind. The poet on his lonely autumn walk talks with the shepherd on the mutability of life and all is sadness.
Now it occurs to me all this stuff about Autumn, as applied here and now, is nonsense. No doubt it was all true when men lived in woods and caves, shivered in the rain, and counted the days until the return of the sun. But in our own time the thing doesn’t fit at all. Autumn is the real beginning of the year, the new start after the dead season. Witness, in illustration, some of the glad signs that mark the oncoming of the Autumn season.
