"I shall have a wire running along the coping, as I have already said, that between the hours of eight and twelve p.m. will be so full of shocking things that my uninvited guests will cease to bother me. Can you imagine the effect of a live wire upon ten loving couples engaged in looking at the moon while sitting on it?" "Yet you claim to insist upon their rights as lovers," said the Poet, deprecatingly. "Certainly I do," said the Idiot. "Man has a right to make love wherever he can. If he can't make love on my wall, let him make love somewhere else." "But where?" cried the Poet. "Your swains up here have no home, apparently." "Or Jimpsonberry's wall," said the Idiot. "By the way, do you know anything about moths?" XIV SOME CONSIDERATION OF THE MOTH "Do you know anything about the habits of moths?" repeated the Idiot. "Moths?" echoed the Poet, eying the Idiot closely, the transition from live wires to moths proving rather too sudden for his comprehension. "No, I don't know anything about moths except that I have heard that they are an unmitigated nuisance." "They are worse than a nuisance," said the Idiot. "They are a devouring element, and they are worse than fire. If your house catches fire you can summon an engine and have it put out, and what damage it does you can collect for if you are careful enough to keep your possessions insured; but with the moth it is different. There isn't any moth department in town that you can ring up, nor is there a moth-extinguisher that you can keep close at hand to fight them with. Furthermore, there is no moth-insurance company here or elsewhere to protect the man who suffers damage at their teeth, that I know of. "He is a mean, sneaking, underhanded element, the moth is. Fire has a decent sense of the proprieties. Moths have none at all. When fire attacks you it smokes, and crackles, and hisses, and roars, and lets you know in clarion tones that it has come. The moth steals upon you in the dead of night, and chews up your best trousers, gorges himself upon your wife's furs, tickles his palate with your swellest flannel golf-shirt, munches away upon your handsomest rug, punches holes in your best sofa-cushions with his tusks, and then silently folds his tent and steals away without so much as a thank-you for his meal. For unmitigated meanness commend me to the moth!" "You seem to speak with feeling," said the Poet, with a smile. "Have you suffered?" [Illustration: "'AN UNPAID GROCER'S BILL BECOMES AN ABSOLUTE PLEASURE'"] "Suffered?" cried the Idiot. "Suffered is not the word. They have tortured me. Alongside of the moth and his nefarious work even a book-agent pales into insignificance, and an unpaid grocer's bill becomes an absolute pleasure. You can meet a book-agent on his own ground, for you know his limitations. I have done so myself. Only yesterday one of them called upon me to sell me a Cyclopedia of Cookery, and before he got away I had actually sold him a copy of your poems."