He is one of the loyalest patrons of that type of beguilement known as the “musical comedy,” which in its most engaging form is a naughty situation sprinkled with cologne water and set to waltz time. Still, if he dines at the proper hour at a Fifth Avenue restaurant and eats more and drinks more than he should (to further the hardening of his arteries for the German specialist), he may arrive late and still hear the tune every one on Broadway is whistling. The girl behind the book-counter knows Smith a mile off, and hands him at once a novel that has a lot of “go” to it, or one wherein “smart” people assembled in house-parties for week-ends, amuse themselves by pinning pink ribbons on the Seventh Commandment. If the illustrations are tinted and the first page opens upon machine-gun dialogue, the sale is effected all the more readily. Or, reluctant to tackle a book of any sort, he may gather up a few of those magazines whose fiction jubilantly emphasizes the least noble passions of man. And yet my Smith delighted, in those old days around the register, in Howells’s clean, firm stroke; and we were always quoting dear Stockton--“black stockings for sharks”--“put your board money in the ginger jar.” What a lot of silly, happy, comfortable geese we were! It seems only yesterday that the first trayful of cocktails jingled into a parlor in my town as a prelude to dinner; and I recall the scandalous reports of that innovation which passed up and down the maple-arched thoroughfares that give so sober and cloistral an air to our residential area. When that first tray appeared at our elbows, just before that difficult moment when we gentlemen of the provinces, rather conscious at all times of our dress-coats, are wondering whether it is the right or left arm we should offer the lady we are about to take in, we were startled, as though the Devil had invaded the domestic sanctuary and perched himself on the upright piano. Nothing is more depressing than the thought that all these Smiths, many of whose fathers slept in the rain and munched hard-tack for a principle in the sixties, are unable to muster an honest appetite, but must pucker their stomachs with a tonic before they can swallow their daily bread. Perhaps our era’s great historian will be a stomach specialist whose pages, bristling with statistics and the philosophy thereof, will illustrate the undermining and honeycombing of our institutions by gin and bitters. V