The shoeshiner was now asking me whether anything was wrong with the polish he had put on my boots, so I thought it best to leave.

In the earlier pages of Kenko’s book there are a number of allusions to the agreeableness of intercourse with friends, so I went into a nearby restaurant to telephone to a man whom I wished to know better.  He said that he would be happy to meet me at ten minutes after twelve.  That left over half an hour.  I felt an immediate necessity to tell some one about Kenko, so I made my way to Mr. Nichols’s delightful bookshop (which has an open fire) on Thirty-third Street.  I showed the book to Mr. Nichols, and we had a pleasant talk, in the course of which she showed me the five facsimile volumes of Dickens’s Christmas books, which he had issued.  In particular, he read aloud to me the magnificent description of the boiling kettle in the first “Chirp” of “The Cricket on the Hearth,” and pointed out to me how Dickens fell into rhyme in describing the song of the kettle.  This passage Mr. Nichols read to me, standing in front of his fire, in a very musical and sympathetic tone of voice which pleased me exceedingly.  I was strongly tempted to buy the five little books, and wished I had known of them before Christmas.  With a brutal effort at last I pulled out my watch, and found it was a quarter after twelve.

I met my friend at his office, and we walked up Fourth Avenue in a flush of sunshine.  From Twenty-fourth to Forty-second Street we discussed the habits of English poets visiting this country.  At the club we got onto Bolshevism, and he told me how a bookseller on Lexington Avenue, whose shop is frequented by very outspoken radicals, had told him that one of these had said, “The time is coming, and not far away, when the gutters in front of your shop will run with blood as they did in Petrograd.”  I thought of some recent bomb outrages in Philadelphia and did not laugh.  With such current problems before us, I felt a little embarrassed about turning the talk back to so many centuries to Kenko, but finally I got it there.  My friend ate chicken hash and tea; I had kidneys and bacon, and cocoa with whipped cream.  We both had a coffee eclair.  We parted with mutual regret, and I went back to the Hallbedroom street, intending to do some work.

Of course you know that I didn’t do it.  I lit the gas stove, and sat down to read Kenko.  I wished I were a recluse, living somewhere near a plum tree and a clear running water, leisurely penning maxims for posterity.  I read about his frugality, his love of the moon and a little music, his somewhat embittered complaints against the folly of men who spend their lives in rushing about swamped in petty affairs, and the sad story of the old priest who was attacked by a goblin-cat when he came home late at night from a pleasant evening spent in capping verses.  I read with special pleasure his seven Self-Congratulations, in which he records seven occasions when he felt that