Or if it isn't that, it's dancing. Immediately after dinner, just as you are about to settle down for a comfortable evening by the fire, you notice that they are rolling back the rugs. "House-cleaning?" you suggest, with a nervous little laugh. "Oh, no, just a little dancing in your honor." And then you tell them that your honor will be satisfied perfectly without dancing, that you haven't danced since you left school, that you don't dance very well, or that you have hurt your foot; to which the only reply is an encouraging laugh and a hail-fellow-well-met push out into the middle of the floor.

A pox on both your house parties!

And yet, in a way, that is just what one might expect from Mr. Wells. He has done the same thing to me in his books many a time. I personally have but little facility for world-repairing. I haven't the slightest idea of how one would go about making things better. And yet before I am more than two-thirds of the way through "Joan and Peter" or "The Undying Fire" or "The Outline of History," Mr. Wells has me out on the hockey-field waving a stick with a magnificent enthusiasm but no aim, rushing up and down and calling, "Come on, now!" to no one in particular.

No matter how discouraging things seem when I pick up a Wells book, or how averse I may be to launching out on a crusade of any sort, I always end by walking with a firm step to the door (feeling, somehow, that I have grown quite a bit taller and much handsomer) and saying quietly: "Meadows, my suit of armor, please; the one with a chain-mail shirt and a purple plume."

This, of course, is silly, as any of Mr. Wells's critics will tell you.

It is the effect that he has on irresponsible, visionary minds. But if all the irresponsible, visionary minds in the world become sufficiently belligerent through a continued reading of Mr. Wells, or even of the New Testament, who knows but what they may become just practical enough to take a hand at running things? They couldn't do much worse than the responsible, practical minds have done, now, could they?

XLIX

ABOUT PORTLAND CEMENT

Portland cement is "the finely pulverized product resulting from the calcination to incipient fusion of an intimate mixture of properly proportioned argillaceous and calcareous materials and to which no addition greater than 3 per cent has been made subsequent to calcination."

That, in a word, is the keynote of H. Colin Campbell's "How to Use Cement for Concrete Construction." In case you should never read any more of the book, you would have that.

But to the reader who is not satisfied with this taste of the secret of cement construction and who reads on into Mr. Campbell's work, there is revealed a veritable mine of information. And in the light of the recent turn of events one might even call it significant. (Any turn of events will do.)

The first chapter is given over to a plea for concrete. Judging from the claims made for concrete by Mr. Campbell, it will accomplish everything that a return to Republican administration would do, and wouldn't be anywhere near so costly. It will make your barn fireproof; it will insure clean milk for your children; it will provide a safe housing for your automobile. Farm prosperity and concrete go hand in hand.

In case there are any other members of society who have been with me in thinking that Portland cement is a product of Portland, Me., or Portland, Ore., it might as well be stated right here and now that America had nothing to do with the founding of the industry, and that the lucky Portland is an island off the south coast of England.

It was a bright sunny afternoon in May, 1824, when Joseph Aspdin, an intelligent bricklayer of Leeds, England, was carelessly calcining a mixture of limestone and clay, as bricklayers often do on their days off, that he suddenly discovered, on reducing the resulting clinker to a powder, that this substance, on hardening, resembled nothing so much as the yellowish-gray stone found in the quarries on the Isle of Portland.

(How Joe knew what grew on the Isle of Portland when his home was in Leeds is not explained. Maybe he spent his summers at the Portland House, within three minutes of the bathing beach.)

At any rate, on discovering the remarkable similarity between the mess he had cooked up and Portland stone, he called to his wife and said: "Eunice, come here a minute! What does this remind you of?"

The usually cheerful brow of Eunice Aspdin clouded for the fraction of a second.

"That night up at Bert and Edna's?" she ventured.

"No, no, my dear," said the intelligent bricklayer, slightly irked.

"Anyone could see that this here substance is a dead ringer for Portland stone, and I am going to make heaps and heaps of it and call it 'Portland cement.' It is little enough that I can do for the old island."

And so that's how Portland cement was named. Rumor hath it that the first Portland cement in America was made at Allentown, Pa., in 1875, but I wouldn't want to be quoted as having said that. But I will say that the total annual production in this country is now over 90,000,000 barrels.

It is interesting to note that cement is usually packed in cloth sacks, although sometimes paper bags are used.

"A charge is made for packing cement in paper bags," the books says.

"These, of course, are not redeemable."

One can understand their not wanting to take back a paper bag in which cement has been wrapped. The wonder is that the bag lasts until you get home with it. I tried to take six cantaloups home in a paper bag the other night and had a bad enough time of it. Cement, when it is in good form, must be much worse than cantaloup, and the redeemable remnants of the bag must be negligible. But why charge extra for using paper bags?

That seems like adding whatever it is you add to injury. Apologies, rather than extra charge, should be in order. However, I suppose that these cement people understand their business. I shall know enough to watch out, however, and insist on having whatever cement I may be called upon to carry home done up in a cloth sack. "Not in a paper bag, if you please," I shall say very politely to the clerk.

L

OPEN BOOKCASES

Things have come to a pretty pa.s.s when a man can't buy a bookcase that hasn't got gla.s.s doors on it. What are we becoming--a nation of weaklings?

All over New York city I have been,--trying to get something in which to keep books. And what am I shown? Curio cabinets, inclosed whatnots, museum cases in which to display fragments from the neolithic age, and gla.s.s-faced sarcophagi for dead b.u.t.terflies.

"But I am apt to use my books at any time," I explain to the salesman.

"I never can tell when it is coming on me. And when I want a book I want it quickly. I don't want to have to send down to the office for the key, and I don't want to have to manipulate any trick ball-bearings and open up a case as if I were getting cream-puffs out for a customer. I want a bookcase for books and not books for a bookcase."

(I really don't say all those clever things to the clerk. It took me quite a while to think them up. What I really say is, timidly, "Haven't you any bookcases without gla.s.s doors?" and when they say "No," I thank them and walk into the nearest dining-room table.)

But if they keep on getting arrogant about it I shall speak up to them one of these fine days. When I ask for an open-faced bookcase they look with a scornful smile across the salesroom toward the mahogany four-posters and say:

"Oh, no, we don't carry those any more. We don't have any call for them.

Every one uses the gla.s.s-doored ones now. They keep the books much cleaner."

Then the ideal procedure for a real book-lover would be to keep his books in the original box, snugly packed in excelsior, with the lid nailed down. Then they would be nice and clean. And the sun couldn't get at them and ruin the bindings. Faugh! (Try saying that. It doesn't work out at all as you think it's going to. And it makes you feel very silly for having tried it.)

Why, in the elder days bookcases with gla.s.s doors were owned only by people who filled them with ten volumes of a pictorial history of the Civil War (including some swell steel engravings), "Walks and Talks with John L. Stoddard" and "Daily Thoughts for Daily Needs," done in robin's-egg blue with a watered silk bookmark dangling out. A set of Sir Walter Scott always helps fill out a bookcase with gla.s.s doors. It looks well from the front and shows that you know good literature when you see it. And you don't have to keep opening and shutting the doors to get it out, for you never want to get it out.

[Ill.u.s.tration: I thank them and walk into the nearest dining-room table.]

A bookcase with gla.s.s doors used to be a sign that somewhere in the room there was a crayon portrait of Father when he was a young man, with a real piece of gla.s.s stuck on the portrait to represent a diamond stud.

And now we are told that "every one buys bookcases with gla.s.s doors; we have no call for others." Soon we shall be told that the thing to do is to buy the false backs of bindings, such as they have in stage libraries, to string across behind the gla.s.s. It will keep us from reading too much, and then, too, no one will want to borrow our books.

But one clerk told me the truth. And I am just fearless enough to tell it here. I know that it will kill my chances for the Presidency, but I cannot stop to think of that.

After advising me to have a carpenter build me the kind of bookcase I wanted, and after I had told him that I had my name in for a carpenter but wasn't due to get him until late in the fall, as he was waiting for prices to go higher before taking the job on, the clerk said:

"That's it. It's the price. You see the furniture manufacturers can make much more money out of a bookcase with gla.s.s doors than they can without. When by hanging gla.s.s doors on a piece of furniture at but little more expense to themselves they can get a much bigger profit, what's the sense in making them without gla.s.s doors? They have just stopped making them, that's all."