yourself in a dream.”  And follow him, for sheer fun, in the “Going a Journey” essay.  Granted that it would never have been written but for Hazlitt and Stevenson and Belloc.  Yet it is fresh distilled, it has its own sparkle.  Beginning with an even pace, how it falls into a swinging stride, drugs you with hilltops and blue air!  Crisp, metrical, with a steady drum of feet, it lifts, purges and sustains.  “This is the religious side” of reading an essay!

Mr. Holliday, then, gives us in generous measure the “certain jolly humors” which R.L.S. says we voyage to find.  He throws off flashes of imaginative felicity—­as where he says of canes, “They are the light to blind men.”  Where he describes Mr. Oliver Herford “listing to starboard, like a postman.”  Where he says of the English who use colloquially phrases known to us only in great literature—­“There are primroses in their speech.”  And where he begins his “Memoirs of a Manuscript,” “I was born in Indiana.”

We are now ready to let fall our third memorandum: 

Third Memo—­Behind his colloquial, easygoing (apparently careless) utterance, Mr. Holliday conceals a high quality of literary art.

CHAPTER V

(FURTHER OSCILLATIONS OF OUR HERO)

Mr. Holliday was driven home from England and Police Constable Buckington by the war, which broke out while he was living in Chelsea.  My chronology is a bit mixed here; just what he was doing from autumn, 1914, to February, 1916, I don’t know.  Was it then that he held the fish reporter job?  Come to think of it, I believe it was.  Anyway, in February, 1916, he turned up in Garden City, Long Island, where I first had the excitement of clapping eyes on him.  Some of the adventures of that spring and summer may be inferred from “Memories of a Manuscript.”  Others took place in the austere lunch cathedral known at the press of Doubleday, Page & Company as the “garage,” or on walks that summer between the Country Life Press and the neighboring champaigns of Hempstead.  The full story of the Porrier’s Corner Club, of which Mr. Holliday and myself are the only members, is yet to be told.  As far as I was concerned it was love at first sight.  This burly soul, rumbling Johnsonianly upon lettered topics, puffing unending Virginia cigarettes, gazing with shy humor through thick-paned spectacles—­well, on Friday, June 23, 1916, Bob and I decided to collaborate in writing a farcical novel.  It is still unwritten, save the first few chapters.  I only instance this to show how fast passion proceeded.