"Well, old chap," said the Poet some weeks later, when he happened to be spending the night off in the suburbs with his old friend, "how goes the noble art of inventing? Has your horseless cauliflower bloomed as yet?"

"Horseless cauliflower is good, but tautological," said the Idiot. "The cauliflower is an automobile in itself, without the intervention of man. Who told you I was inventing instead of broking these days?"

"Mr. Pedagog said something about it the last time I met him," said the Poet. "He's a mighty good friend of yours. He says you are the most perfect Idiot he ever met."

"He's a bully good fellow," said the Idiot, affectionately. "You know I used to think Pedagog wasn't of any earthly use except to teach people things, but as I look back upon my experience with him he has never taught me anything that was worth forgetting. So he told you I was going into invention, did he?"

"Yes; and he said he thought you were going about it in the right way," rejoined the Poet. "You weren't spending ten thousand dollars to get a four-dollar invention on the market, he said, but were inventing things that you knew at the outset weren't worth risking your money on."

The Idiot smiled broadly.

"He said that, did he? Well, he doesn't know what he is talking about," he retorted. "I am spending money on my inventions. I have already invested fifty cents in my patent Clothes-Pin-Holding Laundry-Bonnet, and I have strung the wires along my fence to be used in my electric Hired-Man-Discourager; and when I have managed to save up a few dollars more I'm going to get a battery to attach to it, when woe betide that man of Jimpsonberry's if he tries to talk to Maria while she is at work! Furthermore, I have extended the operations of that same useful invention so that it will meet a long-felt want in all suburban communities as a discourager of promiscuous wooing. You never lived in the country, did you?"

"Not permanently," said the Poet.

"Then you are not aware of a singular habit the young country swain has of courting his best girl on some other fellow's stone wall after the sun goes down," said the Idiot. "Some balmy evening next spring, if you'll come up here I'll show you one of the features of suburban life that will give you an idea for a poem. That stone wall that runs along the front of my place has been the scene of more engagements than I can tell you of. Many a time when I have come home late at night I have counted as many as ten couples sitting on the cold coping of that wall telling each other how beautiful the world is, and holding each other on with loving arms."

"Rather an affecting scene, that," said the Poet.

"It was at first," rejoined the Idiot, "and I rather liked to see it. Indeed, I once suggested to Mrs. Idiot that we should have the coping upholstered, so that they might sit more comfortably. I even wanted to put a back along the inner side of it for them to lean against, but after a while it palled. We couldn't sit out on our own front porch on a summer evening and talk without sentimental interruptions that were demoralizing to a sustained conversation. We'd try to talk, for instance, about Browning, or Tennyson, or Le Gallienne, or some other poet of their class, when we'd be interrupted by such sentiments as, 'Ess I is,' and 'I's oo ducky,' and 'Ain't de moon boofer?' Then when we had guests we never dared to take them out-of-doors, but remained cooped up inside the house, because Mrs. Idiot feared to intrude upon the sacred right of those ten couples to do their courting comparatively unobserved."

"It must have been a nuisance," said the Poet.

"It grew to be so; but I hadn't the heart to stop it, even if I could have done so, so I put up a hedge to hide them from view and soften the sound of their voices; but it didn't work very long. They didn't seem to appreciate my motive, and it so happened that the hedge which I put up with the most innocent of intentions was a Japanese quince that blossoms out in thorns half an inch long, to an extent which suggests the fretful porcupine. These, for some reason or other, excited the animosity of my twenty young friends on the wall, and at the end of the season there were not two consecutive feet of the hedge that had not been hacked and cut to pieces by my indignant but uninvited guests."

"What impudence!" cried the Poet.

"Only the ardor of youth," observed the Idiot, calmly. "Put yourself in the same place. Suppose that you, just as you were about to declare your undying love for the girl of your choice, and while gently stealing your arm about her waist, were to have the back of your hand ripped off by a brutal hedge?"

"I see," laughed the Poet. "I dare say I should be indignant."

"They were properly so," said the Idiot, "properly so; and neither Mrs. Idiot nor I really blamed them."

"We let the matter rest, and made no complaint," he continued. "Time went on, and the courters became a trifle more assertive. One of them came into the house one evening and demanded to know what I meant by assaulting him and his lady friend, holding up a great Osage orange which he alleged to have been the murderous weapon I had used; and I really had to apologize, for I was guilty. It happened that while walking about my small preserves I had picked up this orange, which had fallen onto my lawn from a tree on Jimpsonberry's place, and had unthinkingly tried to see how far I could throw it. It went just over the hedge, and had unceremoniously knocked Strephon's hat into the middle of next week and frightened Phyllis into hysterics. I was placed on the defensive, but for the life of me I couldn't help laughing, with the result that Strephon stalked angrily away, alleging that I should hear from him further in the matter."

"And did you?" asked the Poet.

"No," said the Idiot, "I never did; but the incident rather soured me towards the people who seemed to regard my stone wall as their property. I even came to feel like purchasing a gatling-gun and loading it with Osage oranges for the purpose of repelling them, but even under this provocation I still continued to ignore the matter."

"You are too easy-going," suggested the Poet.

"I was," said the Idiot, "until they began to use the sidewalk that runs parallel with the wall as a tablet upon which to inscribe in letters of flame their undying affection. One Sunday morning, as Mrs. Idiot and I started for church, we were horrified to find our flagstones scribbled all over with poetry, done in chalk, after the order of

"Roses is pink, and violets is blue,
Sugar is sweet, and so be you.

"Further along was the picture of a heart with an arrow drawn through it, and the two names 'Larry' and 'Mame' written on either side. And one unusually affectionate youth had actually cut the initials of his young lady and himself in the top of the coping, with a cold-chisel, I suspect. It's there yet. It was then my spirit rose up into fierce denunciation. That night, when the clans had gathered and were going through the initial stages I marched out in front of them, cleared my throat ostentatiously, and made a speech. It was the most nervous speech I ever made; worse than after-dinner speaking by a good deal. I called their attention to how I had suffered: referred pathetically to the destruction of the hedge; inveighed sarcastically against the Osage-orange man; told them in highly original fashion that worms, if taken at the ebb that leads on to fortune, would surely turn and rend their persecutors, and that I'd had enough. I forgave them the hedge; I forgave them the annoyance they had cost me, but I asserted that I'd see them all condemned to eternal celibacy before I would permit my sidewalk to be turned into an anthology of love, and my coping into an intaglio of eternal blessedness. I requested them if they wished to write poetry to write it upon their own hearths, and if they had any inscriptions to cut to chip in and buy an obelisk of their own and hieroglyph to their hearts' content. I even offered to buy them each a slate and pencil, which they might bring with them when they came, upon which to send their sentiments down to posterity, and I finished with what I consider to be a pleasing perversion of Longfellow's poem on the Woodman, with a few lines beginning:

"Scribbler, spare that sidewalk.

"Then I departed, threatening to have them all arrested."

"Good!" said the Poet. "I didn't think you'd ever do it. You have nerve enough, but you are too good-natured."

"I wasn't good-natured then," said the Idiot, regretfully; "and when I got through I stalked back into the house, scolded Mollie, sent Tommy to bed, and behaved like a bear for the rest of the evening."

"And the people on the wall? They slunk away in despair, I suppose," said the Poet.

"Not they," said the Idiot; "not by a long shot. They combined against me, and next morning when I started for town I found my sidewalk in worse shape than ever. One flag had written upon it the pleasing mandate 'Go drown yourself.' Another bore the mystic word 'Chump' in great capital letters, and at the end of my walk was a pastel portrait of myself, of rough and awkward composition, labelled with my name in full. It took my hired man two weeks to scrub it out. And on the following Hallowe'en they strung a huge banner on my telephone wires, inscribed 'The Idiot Asylum,' and every blessed gate I have to my name had been removed from the premises."

"What an outrage!" cried the Poet.

"Not a bit of it. Merely a suburban ebullition," said the Idiot. "They don't mean anything by it. They are mere children, after all, and from their point of view I have interfered with their rights."

"And you propose to stand all this?" asked the Poet. "If I were you I'd get a pile of broken bottles, as they do in England, and place them along the top of that wall so that they couldn't possibly use it."

"Brutal custom, that," said the Idiot. "May do for Englishmen; won't do here at all. In the first place, it spoils the appearance of the wall; in the second place, it is not efficacious; in the third place, it would place me in a false position. Everybody'd soon be asking where I got all those bottles. An Englishman drinks enough beer in the course of a week to keep his walls covered with broken bottles for a century. I don't, and I'm not going to buy bottles. I've got a better scheme."

"Ah!" cried the Poet. "Now we are coming to the invention."

"Merely an extension of my 'Hired-Man-Discourager,'" said the Idiot. "Simple, and I trust efficacious. I am going to put a live wire along the coping of my wall. Broken bottles are cheap, my dear Poet, but they don't work. If I put broken bottles on my wall the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Wooers would meet on my lawn and pass resolutions against me, and ultimately they would demand the use of my parlor, unless I misunderstand their nature.

"The lovers' rights must be respected always, and I'm truly thankful that they have stopped short at my frontage. When they operate along my frontier-line they are harmless, interesting, even amusing. If they carry their principles through and penetrate beyond the edge, why, then Mrs. Idiot and I will have to give it up.

"My scheme is to make them feel that they are welcome to the wall, but to make the wall – well, to give an element of surprise to the wall. Just as Jimpsonberry's man is soon to be surprised electrically, which is legitimately, so do I propose to surprise these inconsiderate persons who cut down my hedges, who scribble up my sidewalk with their poems, and who hang Hallowe'en banners on my telephone wires. I wish them all well, but next spring when they attempt to revive the customs of the past they will find that even I am resentful."

"But how?"

"I shall have a wire running along the coping, as I have already said, that between the hours of eight and twelve p.m. will be so full of shocking things that my uninvited guests will cease to bother me. Can you imagine the effect of a live wire upon ten loving couples engaged in looking at the moon while sitting on it?"

"Yet you claim to insist upon their rights as lovers," said the Poet, deprecatingly.

"Certainly I do," said the Idiot. "Man has a right to make love wherever he can. If he can't make love on my wall, let him make love somewhere else."

"But where?" cried the Poet. "Your swains up here have no home, apparently."

"Or Jimpsonberry's wall," said the Idiot. "By the way, do you know anything about moths?"

XIV
SOME CONSIDERATION OF THE MOTH

"Do you know anything about the habits of moths?" repeated the Idiot.

"Moths?" echoed the Poet, eying the Idiot closely, the transition from live wires to moths proving rather too sudden for his comprehension. "No, I don't know anything about moths except that I have heard that they are an unmitigated nuisance."

"They are worse than a nuisance," said the Idiot. "They are a devouring element, and they are worse than fire. If your house catches fire you can summon an engine and have it put out, and what damage it does you can collect for if you are careful enough to keep your possessions insured; but with the moth it is different. There isn't any moth department in town that you can ring up, nor is there a moth-extinguisher that you can keep close at hand to fight them with. Furthermore, there is no moth-insurance company here or elsewhere to protect the man who suffers damage at their teeth, that I know of.

"He is a mean, sneaking, underhanded element, the moth is. Fire has a decent sense of the proprieties. Moths have none at all. When fire attacks you it smokes, and crackles, and hisses, and roars, and lets you know in clarion tones that it has come. The moth steals upon you in the dead of night, and chews up your best trousers, gorges himself upon your wife's furs, tickles his palate with your swellest flannel golf-shirt, munches away upon your handsomest rug, punches holes in your best sofa-cushions with his tusks, and then silently folds his tent and steals away without so much as a thank-you for his meal. For unmitigated meanness commend me to the moth!"

"You seem to speak with feeling," said the Poet, with a smile. "Have you suffered?"

"Suffered?" cried the Idiot. "Suffered is not the word. They have tortured me. Alongside of the moth and his nefarious work even a book-agent pales into insignificance, and an unpaid grocer's bill becomes an absolute pleasure. You can meet a book-agent on his own ground, for you know his limitations. I have done so myself. Only yesterday one of them called upon me to sell me a Cyclopedia of Cookery, and before he got away I had actually sold him a copy of your poems."

"Ah," said the Poet, shaking his head. "You sold my gift, did you?"

"Not a bit of it," laughed the Idiot. "When your book came out I bought a copy, and two days later you sent me another with an inscription, which I treasure affectionately. I sold him the one I bought."

"You are a beautiful Idiot," said the Poet, slapping his knee enthusiastically.

"I don't lay claim so much to beauty as to sublimity," said the Idiot, lighting a cigar. "And even that is not to my credit. Beauty and sublimity are gifts. No amount of cultivation can produce genius when it does not exist. When I see a beautiful woman it is not she that I admire. I admire the gracious Hand that made her."

"Give me that idea, old man!" cried the Poet.

"It is yours from this on," said the Idiot, with a sigh. "I am not equal to it. I may be able to think thoughts, but thoughts are of no more use to me than a piano is to a man who can't read music. But we are becoming discursive. We were talking about moths, not thoughts. You said that I must have suffered, and I said that I had been tortured, and I have. My evening clothes have been ruined by them; my best shirts have been eaten by them; my silk hat, in which I have taken much pride, has four bald spots on its side because of their insatiable appetite, and as far as I can find out, I have no redress. You can't sue a moth for damages, you know, with any degree of satisfaction."

"Why should you expect to sue a moth for damages any more than to have a mosquito indicted for assault?" suggested the Poet.

"Oh, as for that," said the Idiot, "you can treat the mosquito without much difficulty. He merits capital punishment, and if you are yourself alert you can squash him at the moment of his crime. But the moth is different. You are absolutely helpless in the face of him. He works in secret."

"I am told that there are such things as camphor-balls," observed the Poet.

"There are," said the Idiot. "And I truly think the moth enjoys them as much as a young girl enjoys a military ball. Whenever we give a camphor-ball the moths attend, and as far as I can find out dance all through it. They seem to enjoy functions of that nature. Furthermore, I have yet to meet the man who likes to go about in a suit of clothes that smells like a drug-store. I don't. I hate the odor of camphor, and if I have my choice of going to a dinner in a perforated dress-suit or in one that is redolent of the camphor-ball, I prefer the one with holes in it. What I can't understand is why a race as proud as the one to which you and I belong should have to knuckle under to an inferior lot of insects such as the moth represents."

"I suppose there is something about it that we cannot understand," said the Poet, dreamily. "All created things have their uses. The lion, the elephant, the tiger, the boa-constrictor, all have their work to do in life. Even the mosquito has his mission, whatever it may be. You must admit this. Why not, therefore, admit that the moth serves a purpose in the great scheme of life?"

"My dear Poet," said the Idiot, "far be it from me to deny the truth of what you say. There is hardly a living creature that I have ever encountered in all my life that has not had some truly utilitarian quality in its make-up. The lion is a splendid creature, and with the bear and the fox and the rhinoceros and the tapir he serves a purpose. They at least teach boys geography, and teach it interestingly. The boy who knows where the tapir hath its lair knows more geography than I do. My son Tommy has learned more of geography from a visit to the circus where those animals are shown than he ever learned from books. I can quite see likewise the utilitarian value of the mosquito. He keeps the sea-shore from being overcrowded, and he prevents some people from sleeping too much. He is an accomplished vocalist, and from my own point of view is superior to a Wagner opera, since Wagner opera puts me to sleep, while the magnificent discords of the mosquito keep me awake. But the moth is beyond me. What his contribution to the public welfare may be I cannot reason out, although I have tried."

"And you find nothing in his favor?" asked the Poet.

"Much," replied the Idiot, "but he has no system. His mission is to eat old clothes, but he is such a very disgusting glutton that he does not discriminate between old and new, and I have no use for him. If in his search for a meal he would choose the garments of three years ago, which I ought not to wear because they are so old-fashioned as to make me conspicuous when I do wear them, it would be all right. But the moth is no such discriminating person. He is not a lover of old vintages. When he calls in a number of his brother moths to dine at his expense he does not treat them to an overcoat of '89, or to a dress-suit of '93, or to a silk hat laid down in '95. He wants the latest thing, and as far as I can find out he gets it. I have just been compelled to lay in a new stock of under and over clothes because the ones I had have been served upon his table."

"The moth must live," observed the Poet.

"I'm perfectly willing he should if he'll only discriminate," retorted the Idiot. "We have enough old clothes in this house, my dear Poet, to give a banquet of seventeen courses to six hundred moths every night for the next six months. If they would content themselves with that I should be satisfied. But they won't. They eat up my new clothes; they destroy my new hats; they munch away upon my most treasured golf-vests. That is why I asked you if you knew anything about moths. I am anxious to reform them. As you have said, I have gone into inventing, and my inventions are wholly designed to meet long-felt wants in all households. The man who invents a scheme to circumvent or properly to satisfy the appetite of the moth will find his name indissolubly linked with fame. I have thought, and thought, and thought about it. The moth must either be domesticated or extinguished. I have tried to extinguish him, but without avail. When he has flown forth I have endeavored to punch him in the head, and I have wasted my energy upon the unresponsive air. Did you ever undertake to punch a moth in the head?"

"Never," said the Poet. "I am not a fighter."

"My dear boy," rejoined the Idiot, "I don't know a hero in real life or in fiction who could meet a moth on his own ground. I read about Mr. Willie B. Travers, of New York, who can drive four horses about the arena at the horse show without turning a hair. I read about Emerson McJones, of Boston, putting up his face against the administration on a question of national import. I have read of the prowess of Alexander, of Cæsar, of D'Artagnan, of Bonaparte, and of Teddy Roosevelt, but there isn't a man among 'em who can fight the moth. You can bombard him with a gatling-gun loaded to the muzzle with camphor-balls, and he still waves his banner defiantly in your face. You may lunge at him with a rapier, and he jumps lightly aside, and to express his contempt bites a hole in your parlor hangings. You can turn the hose on him, and he soars buoyantly away out of reach. You can't kill him, because you can't catch him. You can't drive him away, and until we go back to the dress of the knights of old and wear nickel-plated steel clothing, and live in rooms of solid masonry, we can't starve him out. There is, therefore, only one thing to do, and that is to domesticate him. If you in the course of your investigations into nature have ever discovered any trait in the moth that science can lay hold upon, something through which we can appeal to his better nature, if he has such a thing, you will be conferring a great boon upon the whole domestic world. What I want to find out is if he possesses some particularly well-defined taste; if there is any one kind of texture or fabric that he likes better than another. If there is such a thing I'll have a brand-new suit made of that same material especially for him, furnish a nice comfortable, warm spot in the attic as a dining-room, and let him feed there forevermore, when and how he pleases. The manners and customs of moths are an open book to most of us. His tastes are as mysterious as the ocean's depths."

The Poet shook his head dubiously. "I am afraid, my dear Idiot, that you have at last tackled a problem that will prove too much for you. How to get at the point you desire is, I fear, impossible of discovery," he said.

"It would seem so," replied the Idiot. "But I shall not despair. If the ordinary cook of commerce can be made humanly intelligent I do not see any reason why we should abandon so comparatively simple a proposition as the domesticization of the moth."

Tommy and Mollie had been listening with great interest, and as the Idiot finished Mollie observed that she thought the best way to do was to ask the moth what he liked most, but Tommy had a less conciliatory plan.

"Best thing's to get rid of 'em altogether, pa," he said. "Mollie and I'll squash 'em for you for fi' cents apiece."

Which struck the Poet as the most practical idea that had been advanced during the discussion.