What do you know about that! In the next block another acquaintance of old I saw. But when I had known him he was stooped and little and thin and dried up and cringing. He worked in a basement and did not wear a collar, at least by day. He used to look very old. Now here he was swinging along looking very much like Mr. Caruso, or some such personage as that. How may this phenomenon be accounted for, what was the misfortune of one of these persons and the secret of the other? I know a man who has a theory which, at least, sounds all right. It is not buttermilk nor monkey glands, he contends, which will keep a man young and stalwart so much as (what he calls) an objective in life--a distant rampart to take, a golden fleece to pursue. That is why, he declares, scientists and artists frequently live happy and alert to such a great age: Thomas A. Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Jap chap (what's his name? Hokusai) who at a hundred and ten or thereabout was called "the old man mad about painting." Maybe it was thinking of that idea, maybe it was the fearsome thought of that dusty derby hat of my friend's which haunted my mind, or maybe my competitive instincts had been aroused from spring slumber by the spectacle of my Caruso-like friend careering along, anyhow a decidedly bugged-up feeling began to flow through me; I wavered in my loitering, I turned, my sails (so to speak) caught the wind, and I laid my course abruptly back to the office. I had suddenly a great itch to get at all those letters. I was very glad to see that fellow across the office from me. He is a good fellow and very helpful. I said to him, "Look here, what do you think about this idea for getting business?" "Oh, my goodness!" he said; "it's altogether too fine a day to think about work. I'd just like to go out and wander up the Avenue with nothing on my mind but my hair." CHAPTER XXI THREE WORDS ABOUT LITERATURE A friend of mine (and aside from this error a very fine friend he is, too) not long ago published a book which he declared, in his Preface, should be read in bed. He insisted, to such an extent was he the victim of a remarkable and pernicious fallacy which I find here and there, that this book could not otherwise be properly enjoyed. Now the difficulty about this particular book, that is the circumstance wherein my friend has got me in a position where it is not so easy for me to overturn him all at once, is this: one, not knowing any better, might take the author's advice, and find pleasure reading the book in bed, not being aware that this simply was because here was a book that one would find pleasure in reading anywhere. But because you have got hold of a book which it is possible to enjoy reading in the wrong way, it naturally follows (does it not?) that you'd enjoy it much more reading it in the right way. That, I should say, was simple and logical enough.