dust before he got through. Great clouds of it went floating up the stairs, filling the hotel lobby and making everybody sneeze. When he finished we were renovated. "How much do you think we ought to give him for all this?" I asked of my companion.
"If the conventional dime which we give the washroom boys in New York hotels," he replied, "is proper payment for the services they render, I should say we ought to give this boy about twenty-seven dollars."
There are many other things about Buffalo which should be mentioned. There is the Buffalo Club—the dignified, solid old club of the city; and there is the Saturn Club, "where women cease from troubling and the wicked are at rest." And there is Delaware Avenue, on which stand both these clubs, and many of the city's finest homes.
Unlike certain famous old residence streets in other cities, Delaware Avenue still holds out against the encroachments of trade. It is a wide, fine street of trees and lawns and residences. Despite the fact that many of its older houses are of the ugly though substantial architecture of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and many of its newer ones lack architectural distinction, the general effect of Delaware Avenue is still fine and American.
My impression of this celebrated street was necessarily hurried, having been acquired in the course of sundry dashes down its length in motor cars. I recall a number of its buildings only vaguely now, but there is one which I admired every time I saw it, and which still clings in my memory both as a building and as a sermon on the enduring beauty of simplicity and good, old-fashioned lines—the office of Spencer Kellogg & Sons, at the corner of Niagara Square.
It happened that just before we left New York there was a newspaper talk about some rich women who had organized a movement of protest against the ever-increasing American tendency toward show and extravagance. We were, therefore, doubly interested when we heard of a similar activity on the part of certain fashionable women of Buffalo.
Our hostess at a dinner party there was the first to mention it, but several other ladies added details. They had formed a few days before a society called the "Simplicity League," the members of which bound themselves to give each other moral support in their efforts to return to a more primitive mode of life. I cannot recall now whether the topic came up before or after the butler and the footman came around with caviar and cocktails, but I know that I had learned a lot about it from charming and enthusiastic ladies at either side of me before the sherry had come on; that, by the time the sauterne was served, I was deeply impressed, and that, with the roast and the Burgundy, I was prepared to take the field against all comers, not only in favor of simplicity, but in favor of anything and everything which was favored by my hostess. Throughout the salad, the ices, the Turkish coffee, and the Corona-coronas I remained her champion, while with the port—ah! nothing, it seems to me, recommends the old order of things quite so thoroughly as old port, which has in it a sermon and a song. After dinner the ladies told us more about their league.
"We don't intend to go to any foolish extremes," said one who looked like the apotheosis of the Rue de la Paix. "We are only going to scale things down and eliminate waste. There is a lot of useless show in this country which only makes it hard for people who can't afford things. And even for those who can, it is wrong. Take the matter of dress—a dress can be simple without looking cheap. And it is the same with a dinner. A dinner can be delicious without being elaborate. Take this little dinner we had to-night—"
"What?" I cried.
"Yes," she nodded. "In future we are all going to give plain little dinners like this."
"Plain?" I gasped.
Our hostess overheard my choking cry.
"Yes," she put in. "You see, the league is going to practise what it preaches."
"But I didn't think it had begun yet! I thought this dinner was a kind of farewell feast—that it was—"
Our hostess looked grieved. The other ladies of the league gazed at me reproachfully.
"Why!" I heard one exclaim to another, "I don't believe he noticed!"
"Didn't you notice?" asked my hostess.
I was cornered.
"Notice?" I asked. "Notice what?"
"That we didn't have champagne!" she said.
CHAPTER III
CLEVELAND CHARACTERISTICS
Before leaving home we were presented with a variety of gifts, ranging all the way from ear muffs to advice. Having some regard for the esthetic, we threw away the ear muffs, determining to buy ourselves fur caps when we should need them. But the advice we could not throw away; it stuck to us like a poor relation.
In the parlor car, on the way from Buffalo to Cleveland, our minds got running on sad subjects.
"We have come out to find interesting things—to have adventures," said my blithe companion. "Now supposing we go on and on and nothing happens. What will we do then? The publishers will have spent all this money for our traveling, and what will they get?"
I told him that, in such an event, we would make up adventures.
"What, for instance?" he demanded.
I thought for a time. Then I said:
"Here's a good scheme—we could begin now, right here in this car. You act like a crazy man. I will be your keeper. You run up and down the aisle shouting—talk wildly to these people—stamp on your hat—do anything you like. It will interest the passengers and give us something nice to write about. And you could make a picture of yourself, too."
Instead of appreciating that suggestion he was annoyed with me, so I ventured something else.
"How would it be for you to beat a policeman on the helmet?"
He didn't care for that either.
"Why don't you think of something for yourself to do?" he said, somewhat sourly.
"All right," I returned. "I'm willing to do my share. I will poison you and get arrested for it."
"If you do that," he criticized, "who will make the pictures?"
I saw that he was in a humor to find fault with anything I proposed, so I let him ramble on. He had a regular orgy of imaginary disaster, running all the way from train wrecks, in which I was killed and he was saved only to have the bother and expense of shipping my remains home, to fires in which my notebooks were burned up, leaving on his hands a lot of superb but useless drawings.
After a time he suggested that we make up a list of the things we had been warned of. I did not wish to do it, but, acting on the theory that fever must run its course, I agreed, so we took paper and pencil and began. It required about two hours to get everything down, beginning with Aches, Actresses, Adenoids, Alcoholism, Amnesia, Arson, etc., and running on, through the alphabet to Zero weather, Zolaism, and Zymosis.
After looking over the category, my companion said:
"The trouble with this list is that it doesn't present things in the order in which they may reasonably be expected to occur. For instance, you might get zymosis, or attempt to write like Zola, at almost any