addicted to the extensive (and not merely external) use of alcohol. As others may be of the same impression it is perhaps worth remarking that, while in the Hunt Club, we saw a number of persons drinking tea, and that only two were drinking alcoholic beverages—those two being visitors: an illustrator and a writer from New York.
I mentioned that to the M. F. H., and told him of my earlier impression as to hunt-club habits.
"Lots of people have that idea," he smiled, "but it is wrong. As a matter of fact, few hunting people are teetotalers, but those who ride straight are almost invariably temperate. They have to be. You can't be in the saddle six or eight hours at a stretch, riding across country, and do it on alcohol."
I also learned from the M. F. H. certain interesting things regarding a fox's scent. Without having thought upon the subject, I had somehow acquired the idea that hounds got the scent from the actual tracks of the animal they followed. That is not so. The scent comes from the body of the fox and is left behind him suspended in the air. And, other conditions being equal, the harder your fox runs the stronger his scent will be. The most favorable scent for following is what is known as a "breast-high scent"—meaning a scent which hangs in suspension at a point sufficiently high to render it unnecessary for the hounds to put their heads down to the ground. Sometimes a scent hangs low; sometimes, on the other hand, it rises so that, particularly in a covert, the riders, seated upon their horses, can smell it, while the hounds cannot.
But I think I have said enough about this kind of thing. It is a dangerous topic, for the terminology and etiquette of hunting are even more elaborate than those of golf. Probably I have made some mistake already; indeed, I know of one which I just escaped—I started to write "dogs" instead of "hounds," and that is not done. I have a horror of displaying my ignorance on matters of this kind. For I take a kind of pride—and I think most men do—in being correct about comparatively unimportant things. It is permissible to be wrong about important things, such as politics, finance, and reform, and to explain them, although you really know nothing about them. But with fox hunting it is different. There are some people who really do know about that, and they are likely to catch you.
Two other Cleveland organizations should be mentioned.
Troop A of the Ohio National Guard is known as one of the most capable bodies of militia in the entire country. It has been in existence for some forty years, and its membership has always been recruited from among the older and wealthier families of the city. The fame of Troop A has reached beyond Ohio, for under its popular title, "The Black Horse Troop," it has gone three times to Washington to act as escort to Presidents of the United States at the time of their inauguration. Cleveland is, furthermore, the headquarters for trotting racing. The Cleveland Gentlemen's Driving Club is an old and exceedingly active body, and its president, Mr. Harry K. Devereux, is also president of the National Trotting Association.
A curious and characteristic thing which we encountered in no other city is the Three-Cent Cult—a legacy left to the city by the late Tom Johnson. Cleveland's street railway system is controlled by the city and the fare is not five cents, but three. But that is not all. A municipal lighting plant is, or soon will be, in operation, with charges of from one to three cents per kilowatt hour. Also the city has gone into the dance-hall business. There, too, the usual rate is cut: fifteen cents will buy five dances in the municipal dance halls, instead of three. No one will attempt to dispute that dancing, to-day, takes precedence over the mere matter of eating, yet it is worth mentioning that the Three-Cent Cult has even found its way into the lunch room. Sandwiches may be purchased in Cleveland for three cents which are not any worse than five-cent sandwiches in other cities.
Perhaps the finest thing about the Three-Cent Cult is the fact that it runs counter to one of the most pronounced and pitiable traits of our race: wastefulness. Sometimes it seems that, as a people, we take less pride in what we save than in what we throw away. We have a "There's more where that came from!" attitude of mind. A man with thousands a year says: "Hell! What's a hundred?" and a man with hundreds imitates him on a smaller scale. The humble fraction of a nickel is despised. All honor, then, to Cleveland—the city which teaches her people that two cents is worth saving, and then helps them to save it. Two points, in this connection, are interesting:
One, that Cleveland has been trying to induce the Treasury Department to resume the coinage of a three-cent piece; another, that the percentage of depositors in savings banks in Cleveland, in proportion to the population, is higher than in most other cities. And, by the way, the savings banks pay 4 per cent.
We were taken in automobiles from one end of the city to the other. Down by the docks we saw gigantic, strange machines, expressive of Cleveland's lake commerce—machines for loading and unloading ships in the space of a few hours. One type of machine would take a regular steel coal car in its enormous claws and turn that car over, emptying the load of coal into a ship as you might empty a cup of flour with your hand. Then it would set the car down again, right side up, upon the track, only to snatch the next one and repeat the operation.
Another machine for unloading ore would send its great steel hands down into the vessel's hold, snatch them up filled with tons of the precious product of the mines, and, reaching around backward, drop the load into a waiting railroad car. The present Great Lakes record for loading is held by the steamer Corry, which has taken on a cargo of 10,000 tons of ore in twenty-five minutes. The record for unloading is held by the George F. Perkins, from which a cargo of 10,250 tons of ore was removed in two hours and forty-five minutes.
Some of the largest steamers of the Great Lakes may be compared, in size, with ocean liners. A modern ore boat is a steel shell more than six hundred feet long, with a little space set aside at the bows for quarters and a little space astern for engines. The deck is a series of enormous hatches, so that practically the entire top of the ship may be removed in order to facilitate loading and unloading. As these great vessels (many of which are built in Cleveland, by the way) are laid up throughout the winter, when navigation on the Great Lakes is closed, it is the custom to drive them hard during the open season. Some of them make as many as thirty trips in the eight months of their activity, and an idea of the volume of their traffic may be gotten from the statement that "the iron-ore tonnage of the Cleveland district is greater than the total tonnage of exports and imports at New York Harbor." One of the little books about Cleveland, which they gave me, makes that statement. It does not sound as though it could be true, but I do not think they would dare print untruths about a thing like that, no matter how anxious they might be to "boost." However, I feel it my duty to add that the same books says: "Fifty per cent. of the population of the United States and Canada lies within a radius of five hundred miles of Cleveland."
I find that when I try to recall to my mind the picture of a city, I think of certain streets which, for one reason or another, engraved themselves more deeply than other streets upon my memory. One of my clearest mental photographs of Cleveland is of endless streets of homes.
Now, although I saw many houses, large and small, possessing real beauty—most of them along the boulevards, in the Wade Park Allotment or on Euclid Heights, where modern taste has had its opportunity—it is nevertheless true that, for some curious reason connected with the workings of the mind, those streets which I remember best, after some months of absence, are not the streets possessed of the most charm.
I remember vividly, for instance, my disappointment on viewing the decay of Euclid Avenue, which I had heard compared with Delaware, in Buffalo, and which, in reality, does not compare with it at all, being rather run down, and lined with those architectural monstrosities of the 70's which, instead of mellowing into respectable antiquity, have the unhappy faculty of becoming more horrible with time, like old painted harridans. Another vivid recollection is of a sad monotony of streets, differing only in name, containing blocks and blocks and miles and miles of humble wooden homes, all very much alike in their uninteresting duplication.
These memories would make my mental Cleveland picture somewhat sad, were it not for another recollection which dominates the picture and glorifies the city. This recollection, too, has to do with squalid thoroughfares, but in a different way.
Down near the railroad station, where the "red-light district" used to be, there has long stood a