he had really done himself justice.  The first of these was when he watched a man riding horseback in a reckless fashion; he predicted that the man would come a cropper, and he did so.  The next four self-congratulations refer to times when his knowledge of literary and artistic matters enabled him to place an unfamiliar quotation or assign a painted tablet to the right artist.  One tells how he was able to find a man in a crowd when everyone else had failed.  And the last and most amusing is an anecdote of a court lady who tried to inveigle him into a flirtation with her maid by sending the latter, richly dressed and perfumed, to sit very close to him when he was at the temple.  Kenko congratulates himself on having been adamant.  He was no Pepys.

I thought of trying to set down a similar list of self-congratulations for myself.  Alas, the only two I could think of were having remembered a telephone number, the memorandum of which I had lost; and having persuaded a publisher to issue a novel which was a great success. (Not written by me, let me add.)

I found my friend Kenko a rather disturbing companion.  His condemnation of our busy, racketing life is so damned conclusive!  Having recently added to my family, I was distressed by his section “Against Leaving Any Descendants.”  He seems to be devoid of the sentiment of ancestor worship and sacredness of family continuity which we have been taught to associate with the Oriental.  And yet there is always a current of suspicion in one’s mind that he is not really revealing his inmost heart.  When a bachelor in his late fifties tells us how glad he is never to have had a son, we begin to taste sour grapes.

I went out about six o’clock, and was thrilled by a shaving of shining new moon in the cold blue winter sky—­“the sky with its terribly cold clear moon, which none care to watch, is simply heart-breaking,” says Kenko.  As I walked up Broadway I turned back for another look at the moon, and found it hidden by the vast bulk of a hotel.  Kenko would have had some caustic remark for that.  I went into the Milwaukee Lunch for supper.  They had just baked some of their delicious fresh bran muffins, still hot from the oven.  I had two of them, sliced and buttered, with a pot of tea.  Kenko lay on the table, and the red-headed philosopher who runs the lunchroom spotted him.  I have always noticed that “plain men” are vastly curious about books.  They seem to suspect that there is some occult power in them, some mystery that they would like to grasp.  My friend, who has the bearing of a prizefighter, but the heart of an amiable child, came over and picked up the book.  He sat down at the table with me and looked at it.  I was a little doubtful how to explain matters, for I felt that it was the kind of book he would not be likely to care for.  He began spelling it out loud, rather laboriously—­

    Section 1.  Well!  Being born into this world there are, I suppose,
    many aims which we may strive to attain.