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Kansas University Weekly.
looked at each girl as if he loved her while he was simply finding out if he did. But Carleton was generally interested in people and things and would be bored only temporarily, while this man has the look of a past master in that art. Might it be Van Bibber? No, Van has never done anything but be a nice fellow all his days and somehow my sleepy friend has a look of power in spite of his lassitude. Travis is out of the question. For Travis is a hale fellow well met with everyone, and though he can be "swell" on occasions, he probably could never attain to that delicate shade of ennui which "rests upon the countenance of the unknown." I went over in my mind the list of Davis men of my acquaintance but nobody seemed to fit exactly. Each had some characteristic which might belong to the individual on the bench but none took in all his qualities.
"He might," I came at last to the conclusion, "be Van Bibber with a new stock of self sufficiency and an added power of some kind or other. Or he might be Morton Carleton with an extra supply of conceit." And as conceit, in my experience, is most easily added of all qualities I came to the conclusion that my "specimen" must be Morton Carleton.
That evening a party of us went to one of Abbey's "first nights." I've forgotten now what the play was, but anyway it was a great success and we were all in fine spirits as we took our seats in Delmonico's for a little supper after the theatre was over. We had barely gotten placed when another and larger party came in and took the tables near us. I had felt a slight draught and, busy with pulling my opera cloak up around me, though I half heard the low comments on the comers, I did not look up until they were all seated. When I did raise my head I gave a little gasp and clutched my cousin's hand. There facing me and looking beyond me with that same indefinite glance was my friend of the afternoon.
Alice turned and regarded me disapprovingly. "Well, I am surprised at you!" she said sternly, "have you taken it too?"
"Taken what?" I asked with wild visions of
malignant disease or plague galloping through my startled brain.
"Why," she replied, "The Richard Harding Davis fever. Else why did you start so when you saw him facing you over there." TAD.
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Wool-Gathering.
BEING A TRUE RELATION OF HOW TWO-STEP LIT HIS FIRST PIPE IN BOHEMIA.
It was an unusually foggy night in Buzzard's Roost, and the esoteric band lay at ease reclining on the improvised sofas, and languidly fanned the floating filagree of smoke that spun out from warm-bowled pipes.
"Do you believe that smoking really poisons a fellow?" said Booth after he sent a series of dilating smoke rings whirling aloft.
"Well, smoking includes cigarettes," said Daub, "but if you ask whether an occasional indulgence in tobacco hurts a man, I say, no. And I base my assertion on testimony of physicians, psychologists, Christian-scientists, and board of health statistics."
"You don't say!" said Grubb. "Why, I've been told that tobacco was one of the seven wonders of the world when it came to a depraver of humanity. Give us your argument."
"Well, every enemy of the soothing goddess Nicotine has enumerated a long list of the injuries she inflicts. Family magazines issue such lists in installments, and temperance journals substitute them for serial stories. I have carefully preserved such enumerations and I find that no two enumerate the same effects. Now it is beyond reason to believe that the whole number exists; ergo, either these investigations have not discovered the injuries, or the injuries are too slight to be discovered. So what's the use in worrying over a little thing like that." Puff, puff, puff—
"Good!" said Booth. "If tobacco fogs the brain and halves a life-time, would the world have had Tennyson—the lovely, lilting, liquid Tennyson who wrote the sweetest verse and smoked clay pipes when he was an old man?"
This raised a controversy as to the merit of Tennyson. Some declared that George Arnold surpassed him in everything but voluminous