But There Isn't Space For Making A Classified List.
The One-Volume Chronicler Must Content Himself With Picking Out A
Few Particularly Striking Types.
I remember, with vivid distinctness, two individuals, one an elderly
gentleman from somewhere in the Middle West and the other, an old
lady who plainly hailed from the South.
We met the old gentleman
in Paris, and the old lady some weeks later in Naples. Though
the weather was moderately warm in Paris that week he wore red
woolen wristlets down over his hands; and he wore also celluloid
cuffs, which rattled musically, with very large moss agate buttons
in them; and for ornamentation his watch chain bore a flat watch
key, a secret order badge big enough to serve as a hitching weight
and a peach-stone carved to look like a fruit basket. Everything
about him suggested health underwear, chewing tobacco and fried
mush for breakfast. His whiskers were cut after a pattern I had
not seen in years and years. In my mind such whiskers were
associated with those happy and long distant days of childhood
when we yelled Supe! at a stagehand and cherished Old Cap Collier
as a model of what - if we had luck - we would be when we grew up.
By rights, he belonged in the second act of a rural Indian play,
of a generation or two ago; but here he was, wandering disconsolately
through the Louvre. He had come over to spend four months, he
told us with a heave of the breath, and he still had two months
of it unspent, and he just didn't see how he was going to live
through it!
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