note on the character of the late Francis Gummere: "It was characteristic of him that he usually smoked Robin Hood, that admirable five-cent cigar, because the name and the picture of an outlaw on the band reminded him of the fourteenth century ballads he knew by heart." The Dignity of Letters has never laid her heavy hand on Christopher Morley, but the gusto of letters waits for him at every corner. Youth, romance, the sweetness of life and the shade of R. L. Stevenson in velveteen jacket—these are the spirits that have put him under obligation and that whisper him among the blue and gray shadows of an unimaginative realism to be blithe and yet more blithe.
Mr. Holliday takes me for twenty-eight turns about town. We visit undertakers' shops, murder trials, lunchrooms and hotels; we talk with "traffic cops" and landladies and editors; we patter about Mr. Huneker and other famous men who have recently died; we step into a "colorful" place where we can see John Drew and Joseph Hergesheimer and Alexander Woollcott and young Burton Rascoe toying with the celery; we glance over the want ads in the morning paper; we study some photographs which illustrate the difference between the female form divine as conceived by Fragonard and as seen by Schopenhauer, and then we dip into the underworld and visit various doggeries where gentlemen can obtain a thimbleful of the needful at "80 cents a throw." Mr. Holliday has been around a good deal, has acquired a kind of Beau Brummelish
