to speak with horror of pie, although they were very
likely the foremost of the Americans in Paris who used
to speak with more enthusiasm of the American pie
at Madame Busque’s than of the Venus of Milo.
To talk against pie and still eat it is snobbish,
of course; but snobbery, being an aspiring failing,
is sometimes the prophecy of better things. To
affect dislike of pie is something. We have no
statistics on the subject, and cannot tell whether
it is gaining or losing in the country at large.
Its disappearance in select circles is no test.
The amount of writing against it is no more test of
its desuetude, than the number of religious tracts
distributed in a given district is a criterion of
its piety. We are apt to assume that certain regions
are substantially free of it. Herbert and I,
traveling north one summer, fancied that we could
draw in New England a sort of diet line, like the
sweeping curves on the isothermal charts, which should
show at least the leading pie sections. Journeying
towards the White Mountains, we concluded that a line
passing through Bellows Falls, and bending a little
south on either side, would mark northward the region
of perpetual pie. In this region pie is to be
found at all hours and seasons, and at every meal.
I am not sure, however, that pie is not a matter of
altitude rather than latitude, as I find that all
the hill and country towns of New England are full
of those excellent women, the very salt of the housekeeping
earth, who would feel ready to sink in mortification
through their scoured kitchen floors, if visitors
should catch them without a pie in the house.
The absence of pie would be more noticed than a scarcity
of Bible even. Without it the housekeepers are
as distracted as the boarding-house keeper, who declared
that if it were not for canned tomato, she should
have nothing to fly to. Well, in all this great
agitation I find Herbert unmoved, a conservative, even
to the under-crust. I dare not ask him if he
eats pie at breakfast. There are some tests that
the dearest friendship may not apply.
“Will you smoke?” I ask.
“No, I have reformed.”
“Yes, of course.”
“The fact is, that when we consider the correlation
of forces, the apparent sympathy of spirit manifestations
with electric conditions, the almost revealed mysteries
of what may be called the odic force, and the relation
of all these phenomena to the nervous system in man,
it is not safe to do anything to the nervous system
that will—”
“Hang the nervous system! Herbert, we can
agree in one thing: old memories, reveries, friendships,
center about that:—is n’t an open
wood-fire good?”
“Yes,” says Herbert, combatively, “if
you don’t sit before it too long.”
III
The best talk is that which escapes up the open chimney
and cannot be repeated. The finest woods make
the best fire and pass away with the least residuum.
I hope the next generation will not accept the reports
of “interviews” as specimens of the conversations
of these years of grace.