BY STEPHEN LEACOCK

I

T is not given to every man to be able to take a vacation even if he tries. As with all other things, there are those who can do it and those who can't. One man spends in vain a thousand dollars and travels in vain a thousand miles in the attempt to encompass a vacation. Another man can put on an old pair of trousers and a battered felt hat and retire to his back yard with a hoe, and, lo! in five minutes the outer world is blotted out, the sounds of the street are hushed, and his mind is as far away as if he were among the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the Enchanted Islands of the South Seas.

There is an art in it. Either one can do it or one cannot; and in this workbroken world most of us have long since lost the key. When we try to take a holiday, we go so busily about it that we merely substitute one kind of work for another.

Every one recalls the story of the sexton in one of Dickens's books who took a day's holiday after continuous gravedigging for twenty years. He walked over a hill to the next cemetery and spent his day watching the sexton there dig graves. We are all a little bit like that. We carry our grave-digging around with us. Do but observe anywhere the tourist starting on his vacation and you will see at once that he still carries his burden on his back.

A stock-broker has no sooner started on his European holiday than he gets up an auction pool on board a steamship which he makes quite as complicated and as interesting as the Stock Exchange itself.

The liberated housewife, when you set her down in the Pitti Palace at Florence, finds a quiet corner, gets out her knitting and two pairs of children's socks, and straightway feels at home.

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Near by is her husband, a college pro. fessor. They gave him a year of Sabbatical leave of absence to ease his mind from the strain of his lectures. Watch him. He is lecturing to the doorkeeper and a nursemaid on mediæval Florence. Or behold in the galleries of the Louvre a stout gentleman with a pencil in his hand, ticking off names on a printed list. He is an auctioneer from Kansas City, and he is saying to himself (in his mind at any rate), "Lot No. 1, very fine painting by Van Dook, the great Dutch artist. Come, gentlemen! the frame alone is worth the price, what do I hear?" I remember one day in Paris

observing a man in rusty black habiliments who was saying to a French policeman, "Can you tell me, sir, where Napoleon is buried?" I knew at once that the man was an undertaker.

When I see a member of a State Legislature making speeches in a pension, or a contractor figuring out with a pencil the cubic feet of stone in the pyramid of Cheops, or a banker explaining on a Dover-Calais ferryboat the relation of the French franc to the British sovereign, then I know that the nemesis of our working civilization is upon them. They have worked so much that they cannot stop.

Most pathetic of all is the case of those whom a deceitful good fortune has allured into retiring and for whom the close of life is one long and melancholy vacation-a discount, as it were, upon eternity. These haunt like ghosts the scenes of their former activities, if not in body at least in mind. I knew once upon a time a retired banker, a shadowy, mournful-looking man of fifty on whom false fortune had smiled. He lived for the most part on the Riviera and spent his time looking out over the Mediterranean and talking about how he founded the Bankers' Association of South Dakota. When he got well into his topic and described the operations of the Association, its members, and the extraordinary interest of its annual convention, his mind was so absorbed that the blue Mediterranean and the palm trees and the white cliffs above the beach were all blotted out and he was back again in a sunless room in a side street in some mean town of South Dakota-happy. When his talk ceased,

he came to himself again and looked about him at his sunlit prison of blue and green with a sigh.

At times, more cruel still, the retirement and the vacation is forced. All over this continent one sees the melancholy spectacle of college professors being brutally forced by well-meaning trustees into pensioned retirement. Forced they literally are. In vain they cling to their classroom benches. They are lifted out and set down outside in the campus, blinking in the sun and looking aimlessly at their pension checks. Before Mr. Carnegie's wellintentioned philanthropy, professors worked till they died. Now they stop working and cannot die.

In all these cases, I repeat, one sees the impossibility of the trained, industrious mind abandoning its evoluted activity. In vain it announces itself vacant. It cannot be vacant if it tries. It puts up a sign, "Top Story to Let for Two Months," and hopes that there may enter in a new set of tenants in the form of Scenery or Foreign Culture or, shyest and strangest of all, the quiet tenant called Rest. The thing is not to be. The old tenants have not moved out. The imps of industry who have lived upon the premises these forty years are there still. Forty years ago they entered in; it was at the time when, under the rigorous discipline of

the thing called School, the dreaming spirit of the idle boy was chased out of its proper habitation; and now they will not leave; the dreams can never come back.

But contrast with all these those rare beings for whom the dreaming spirit that is the soul of the true vacation has not been cast out. Of such a sort is the man of whom I spoke who has but to step out to his back garden and kneel down beside a ten-foot tulip bed to be transported out of his daily existence. Such people have by temperament the vacational mind. Give them but an afternoon in the sunshine or a rainy day indoors and they will slip out of the prison in which we live so noiselessly that you will not hear the key turn in the lock. That matchless artist O. Henry, whose own mind was of just this temperament, tells us somewhere of such a one: a humble clerk inhabiting a hall bedroom in New York, but able, by seating himself with stockinged feet on the radiator and opening a paper-bound novel of Clark Russell, to transport himself bodily to the storms of the South Pacific.

I suppose that the supreme example of the vacation man-I mean the real thing at its acme is found in that misunderstood person called the tramp. In him the idea is so highly developed as to exclude almost all others. He will

sit on the shady side of a blossoming hedge and watch the clouds go by; and he will not turn his leisure into work, as you or I would, by naming and classifying the blossoms in the hedge, or by distinguishing the cumulus clouds from the cirro-stratus. Indeed, so perfect is his adjustment that the mere idea would make him tired.

Society has misjudged the tramp. It has confused him with the criminal. Never was a greater difference. The tramp may be compelled by the force majeure of hunger most reluctantly to steal a chicken-a thing requiring effort and contrivance and something suspiciously akin to work. But the true criminal is a busy, planful, contriving person, not absolutely different from what is called a captain of industry. Robbing a bank by night and running a bank by day are both operations that require thought. The tramp could encompass neither of them.

The tramp is in reality a survival. Evolution has passed him by. He is a reversion to the type of that far-away, forgotten period when man did not bave to work; when, countless centuries ago, somewhere in the paradise of Mesopotamia perhaps, man, half-humanized animal, existed on the bounty of nature or died for want of it, but never worked. Of such days of a "lost paradise" our literature still bears the dim remem

brance. And the Adam of that Garden of Eden was the tramp; once the type figure, now the despised survival sitting under his hedge.

The rest of us centuries and centuries ago learned to work. It was "evoluted" into us as an aptitude. We work-that is to say, we perform all sorts of routine, uninteresting tasks devoid of sense or meaning so far as our own particular faculties go. One man lifts dirt on a shovel, another spreads ink on paper, a third carries food to a pig. And we have become so fashioned and habituated to it that we work as the ducks

swim and as the birds fly. But, alas! when we wish to cease the work and announce ourselves to be on vacation, then the secret of it is gone forever. Our paradise is indeed lost.

If I had time to start a great National movement (I am a little too busy for it just now), it should be in favor of the resumption of primitive idleness. I should found a Garden of Eden Society in which-but, no, what would be the use? We are all so badly damaged with work and industry that it would fail at A biologist would break in and classify the animals, some one would

once.

introduce wire-fencing, some one else would begin improving the trees, and in less than no time there would be motor roads all through the garden and "rest houses," save the mark! with music after midnight. And for myself, the founder of it, no recourse but to go and talk with the serpent in his tree about the futility of it all.

But if that movement is impossible, I will start a humbler and more feasible one-a movement for the renovation of vacations. It would be after this fashion. You, sir or madam, who are about to start upon your European vacation, do not turn it into work. Do not exert your brain with railway folders and steamship guides. That is work. Avoid it. Do not buy and study the map of London; you cannot understand it, anyway, and it is work. Never mind about the Tower of London or which is the Tomb of Edward the Confessor in the Abbey. These things are dangerous. They will do you harm. Go and eat a bun on the Thames Embankment, and if you do not know in which direction the river is running, forbear to ask. When you go to Paris, do not brush up your French; you learned it in the Central High School, and it is really not worth brushing; it will only show the seams in it. If you must talk, hire a Frenchman to talk English, or, better still, why not keep silent for a week or two? You have talked so much these forty years, and silence is twin-sister to rest.

You will not take this advice. But if you did, you would come back from your vacation with that beautiful emptiness of mind, that charming Old World ignorance, so rarely seen to-day. In short. you would be voted by all your friends to be almost a vacuum. Can you do it?

F

IVE years ago it was unknown. To-day it has conquered the angling world and is being used in every country where artistic fishing is practiced.

As a fishing lure the floating corkbodied bass bug can perish only when rivers and lakes run dry. Just as long as water contains game fish, just so long will "floaters" be used. The floaters are not only bass lures, but when tied in trout sizes have proved successful with trout. I have a letter from an Eastern angler who writes, "I have just taken a four and one-half pound trout on a Zane Grey."

The invention of the floating bug equals in importance that of the English dry fly. What the dry fly means to trout fishing the floater means to blackbass fishing. Both have proved to be creators of ideals, and ideals mean higher ethics in sports.

Before the invention of the floating bass bug the trout fisherman rather

BY WILL H. DILG

VISCOUNT GREY

looked down from lofty heights at the humble bass fisherman below. He can do it no longer. The proper use of floaters requires all of the art daintiness and skill that the dry fly involves.

BUG

A black bass taken on a fly or a floater is worth six taken where one must send his lure down to the fish to hook it. There is art and skill expressed in making a fish come to the top. When a fish strikes at a floater, it frequently sounds like the crack of a pistol-the Iwater is fairly torn into a foam!

Floaters are used to the best advantage in streams, but are also effective in lakes, particularly late in the evening, and at the inlet of small streams.

The first floating bass bug was tied by Mr. Louis B. Adams. Mr. B. F. Wilder, of the Butterick Company of New York, found Mr. Adams using these bugs on the Belgrade Lakes in Maine. Mr. Wilder greatly improved them. In the winter of 1915 I met him at Long Key, Florida, and he told me of this wonderful lure, tied a few, and sent them to me with his compliments. The Wilder bug has a cork body and feather wings. It has no tail. I tried out these bugs on the upper Mississippi and had