Category: Greg-Jim Story Page 1 of 41

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, October 4, 1941.

“My family,” said Jimmie Frise, “are after me to clean the furnace pipes.”

“It’s a trifling job,” I said. “My gardener does it in a few minutes each year and doesn’t even mention it at the end of the month.”

“Still,” demurred Jimmie, “I don’t see why I should rob some poor man of a dollar.”

“It would do you good to engage occasionally in a little unpleasant toil,” I said. “One of the things that is wrong with the world is specialization, not only in industry, but in life itself.”

“How do you mean?” demanded Jim.

“We kick about the deadening effect of mass production,” I stated, “and the evil effect upon the human race of having men doing one small thing over and over again all their lives, like screwing up nuts or tightening a bolt or some other automatic action. It drives men mad. But how about us? We’re all living our lives automatically, never straying out of the rut, always doing the same things every day at the same time, getting out of bed the same side, shaving in the exact same way, starting with our top right cheek and ending with our left neck, kissing the same woman good-by each morning at the same place in the same hallway, and so forth.”

“What has this got to do with stove pipes?” demanded Jim.

“The deadly routine of your life,” I went on, “includes a furnace, and you stoke it and shake it, and remove the ashes and stoke it again. But the ghastly routine would be broken if, once in a while, you cleaned the pipes. It would be like getting out of bed the other side, and shaving your left neck first and ending with your right top cheek and kissing somebody else good-by in the front hall. It would give you a fresh and sudden zest.”

“I never heard anybody rave about furnace pipes the way you do,” said Jimmie. “How about helping me with them?”

“I could ask my gardener to,” I agreed.

“How about the ghastly monotony of your own life?” sneered Jim.

“I often shave backwards,” I said. “And sometimes I kiss my little daughter good-by instead.”

“If I clean the furnace pipes,” said Jim, “it won’t be for any philosophic reason. It will be simply to save a buck. For two years now I have been trying to contribute to the war effort by buying bonds out of my wages. But the war calls for more than that. It wants more than your wages. So from now on I am going to be thrifty and careful and do all my own chores and sole my own boots and cut my own grass and clean my own furnace pipes.”

A Real Chimney Sweep

“And what will you do with the money you save?” I asked.

“I’ll buy bonds,” said Jim.

“That’s patriotic,” I assured him. “Instead of spending your dollars on small jobs like furnace pipes and your garden, you will lend it to the government to pay for the war. Then, after they have conducted the war to a happy conclusion you get your money back in 10 years. Meantime, who paid for the war?”

“Don’t confuse me,” begged Jim. “I am trying to do the right thing by my country. My country wants cash. To lend it to them, I am going to cut down my spending. I am going to do my own furnace pipes.”

“While the man who used to do your furnace pipes,” I explained, “does nothing but drill and eat.”

“I suppose so,” admitted Jim.

“Then,” I demanded, “where does the money come from, 20 years from now, when the government pays you back the money they borrowed from you?”

“Look,” said Jim, “I have five children. In 20 years they will all be grown up and making money. The government can re-borrow from them to pay me back.”

“I’d rather have my furnace pipes done by a pipe cleaner,” I said. “It makes him happy. And it only costs me two dollars¹. It won’t cost my grandchildren anything.”

“But there will be five Frises to borrow from instead of only one,” pointed out Jim. “It will be easier. That’s what the government figures on. It will be easier to borrow by the time their note to me falls due.”

“It looks to me,” I said, “as if we were paying for having our pipes cleaned and cleaning them ourselves.”

“I only want to do what is right,” said Jim. “If they say spend. I spend. If they say save, I save.”

“And if you spend, it’s gone,” I enlightened, “and if you save, it’s loaned.”

But Jimmie had risen from the steps of his house, where we had been sitting in the sunshine, and was staring at a little man walking down the street.

This little man was small and smudgy. Under his arm, he carried a roll of what appeared to be very dirty carpet, and from the ends of the carpet protruded black brushes on long wire handles.

“Speak of the devil,” exclaimed Jimmie.

The little man, passing, halted and in a deep English voice cried.

“‘Ow’s yer pipes?”

“Come up a minute,” called Jimmie.

“A real chimney sweep, like in Dickens,” I breathed to Jim.

Professionally Speaking

The little man drew nigh and rested his roll of carpet.

“Are you a chimney sweep?” I asked excitedly, picturing him as one who has spent his entire childhood and infancy in the chimneys of old London.

“No, sir,” he said, with dignity. “I am a financial man, by profession, but during the present interregnum, as you might say, I am picking up what I can.”

“You clean chimneys?” asked Jim.

“I clean furnace pipes,” said the little man.

“How much do you charge?”

“Two dollars,” said he.

“Two dollars!” cried Jim. “Two bucks just to rattle a few furnace pipes into an ash can! Man, you’re crazy.”

“It’s quite a job,” said the chimney man.

“Two dollars! Why, that is ridiculous,” said Jim. “Some of you people have no sense of proportion. Just because a job is a little unpleasant you charge three times what it is worth. My friend and I can do those pipes in a few minutes after supper.”

“I shouldn’t try it of an evening, sir,” said the little man. “Professionally speaking.”

“Thanks very much,” said Jim, dismissing the small man, who hoisted his roll of carpet. “I had no idea.”

And as the little man retired down the walk, Jim said to me: “Look here, you save Saturday afternoon, we’ll do mine and yours both.”

“Mine were done,” I pointed out.

“Lend me a hand, just for the experience,” said Jim. “I want to look into the business of small jobs. Two bucks! Just because there’s a war on and men are scarce.”

Saturday Jim drove me home from the office very kindly and then reminded me, as he let me out, to come over at 2 p.m.

It is curious how seldom one looks at a furnace. One visits it in the dark, shovels coal into a glowing hole, rattles a shaker, reaches up to a familiar doohickey and turns the draft on or off, and the furnace remains a dimly seen, faintly disliked institution to be admitted only part way into one’s consciousness.

Jim and I surveyed his furnace in a bright light borrowed from the laundry. It was a bulging and somehow bowlegged sort of furnace It was aged and scaley and corroded. There were bands or belts of clay around it that fell away like dust when you touched them. Everything was rusty and squeaked.

The pipes were fragile and sagged. When we slapped them, they felt soggy and stuffed.

“How long is it since you had your pipes cleaned?” I asked Jim, doubtfully.

“I don’t recall them being cleaned.”

“Why, you have been wasting fuel for years and haven’t been getting a fraction of the British thermal units you should have been getting.”

“Furnaces,” said Jim, “are natural objects of neglect. They live apart from the domestic circle. By the time May comes and you are ready to let the furnace out, you are so sick and tired of it, that you don’t even want to think of it. There, in the dark cellar, it lurks all summer, gloating. Waiting. And then all of a sudden, the cold weather arrives and you haven’t time to get anything done to it. You just have to light it.”

“Furnaces,” I interrupted, “are the perfect reproach to human nature. They are always neglected. They are regarded with distaste if not loathing. Yet they are the source of the one supreme ingredient of human comfort – heat. In olden times, the hearth or fireplace was the very heart of the house. We treated the fire in the hearth with love and respect. We sat about it almost as worshippers. But now we have hidden our fire deep in the lowest part of the home, we never go near it until we have to, and then wearily and with a sense of hate.”

“Look at the bulgy thing,” said Jim, grimly surveying the furnace.

“You’ve certainly neglected it, Jim,” I accused.

“Chah,” said Jim, opening the cold fire door and slamming it.

“Okay,” I said, “what do we do now?”

“You’d better take off your coat,” said Jim, throwing his across the empty coal bin stall.

Dark Cloud of Endeavor

I stood ready while Jim stretched up and took firm hold of the joint of pipe that vanished into the cellar wall. It was stuck. It was corroded.

He tapped it with a stick. He hammered it with the shaker handle. He punched a hole in it.

“Poof,” said Jim, as a darkish mist filled the air.

“Get a couple of chairs, and we’ll both take hold and twist,” I suggested.

So Jim got on a box and I got on a chair, and we took firm hold of the pipe and twisted.

It was only a matter of a fraction of a second, but as the pipe came free, Jim, who was curved in one of those fantastic postures tall men can get into when doing the most commonplace things, lost his balance off the box and I felt a heavy and clumsy pipe slip from my grasp.

“Are you there, Jim?” I asked, from the depths of the inky darkness which had suddenly enveloped the furnace room.

“Curious-pfft-smell, isn’t it-pfft!” said Jim from below.

“We had better go outside,” I suggested.

“Take two or three sections of pipe each,” said Jimmie. “There are ash cans in the side drive.”

I felt above and found a sagging section of the pipe. It came fairly easily into my arms, but I felt a cool dry flood of something like talcum powder flow over my hands and wrists as I tilted the pipe level.

“Easy, there,” said Jimmie, coughing.

By only half breathing, we got out of the cellar, dark as night, into the semi-gloom of the stairs; and preceding Jimmie, I carried pipes to the side door. They were heavy. You can have no idea how neglected those pipes were. I saw a garbage can and I dumped them smartly head first into the can.

A great whoof of midnight whirled into the bright afternoon air.

“Make way,” gasped Jim, behind me, and as I turned, still marvelling at the fog, I beheld a devilish figure, black from head to foot, heave a section of pipe alongside mine into the ash can, and another and a vaster and more deadly black cloud billowed into the air.

“Jimmie!” I cried. “You’re filthy. What have you been doing?”

But I could tell by the red gape of Jim’s mouth in his face that I, too, was soiled.

“You’ll pay for cleaning these clothes young man,” I assured him. The more you try to brush soot off, the worse you get. Especially if you are perspiring a little.

I started to tap Jim’s pipe with a stick.

“Keep still,” said Jim. “Wait till I think.”

But from the rear of the house came screams and moans in a female voice. It was the next door neighbor. We turned around, and there was a lady, her arms held over her head like the statue of victory, and she was staring transfixed at a washing hanging on the clothesline, while the dark cloud of our endeavor slowly engulfed them in a fog.

“Dear, dear,” said Jimmie, drawing me back from the corner.

Accept Life’s Monotony

To the lady’s screams were suddenly added loud, brief and profane shouts of a man.

It was the man whose house abuts the rear of Jim’s place.

Headed low to avoid the cloud, he came hurdling over the fence and faced us.

“Look at that!” he roared. “Painted this morning, and now look at it!”

We could make out the back of his house. It was finished in white and light green. The cloud was aiming straight at it as if drawn by an electric fan.

“Anybody,” hissed the man from the house at the rear, “who would do a thing like this is worse than a fifth columnist.”

“We had no idea it…” began Jimmie filthily.

“You don’t belong in human society,” grated the man; “you have not the instincts of a neighbor; you care nothing for your fellow beings. Don’t you dare move. Don’t let go a hand of those pipes. You… you…”

The lady was standing waiting.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Jim, “I will make it right with you.”

“My son’s new wife,” wept the lady, “is coming to dinner and there is my table cloth!”

“That paint job,” interrupted the man, “cost me forty-eight dollars and to have the back done, by George, will cost you at least twenty. Twenty, I estimate. Yes, sir, twenty would be a fair estimate.”

There we stood, with the two pipe sections upended in the ash can, and with us the man and the lady, when we heard footsteps up the drive and the little man with the roll of carpet that we had seen last Wednesday joined us.

“Glory!” yelled Jim.

“Good-day, gentlemen,” said the little financial man.

“How did you turn up,” said Jim, trying to wring the little man’s hand, but the little man evaded him.

“I overheard you say Saturday, so I just dropped around. I do quite a little business this way, whenever I hear of gents planning to clean their furnaces.”

He laid his roll of brushes down in a business-like way.

“I’ll give you $5 to clean all this up,” cried Jimmie. “That is, if you can empty, these two joints as well.

“It would have been better,” said the little man, “if you had left the pipes. But I’ll do what I can.”

“Five dollars,” said Jim.

“And a dollar for my suit,” I pointed out.

“And a dollar for mine,” muttered Jim looking down.

“And twenty for the paint job,” I calculated.

The little man, who had trotted down the cellar, reappeared. “You’ll need new pipes,” said he. “These are all rotted and pitted.”

“How much?” asked Jim.

“I should estimate about two,” said he.

“Total,” said Jim, “twenty-nine dollars!”

He was very cheerful.

“Now you see,” said Jim, “that it is best not to try to get out of the rut. Accept the ghastly monotony of your life. And don’t try to be thrifty. It always costs you more in the end. Each man to his trade. I’m an artist. You’re a writer. And this gentleman cleans furnaces.”

“The furnace itself,” said the little man. picking up his carpet roll, “isn’t in bad shape.”

---

Editor’s Note:

1. $2 in 1941 is $40 in 2026. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, September 25, 1937.

“What is it,” asked Jimmie Frise, “that makes us Canadians so desperately respectful of authority?”

“I don’t imagine,” I replied, “that we’re any more respectful of authority than other people. The English, for instance, or the Germans.”

“Ah,” argued Jimmie, “yes, but the Germans have to be respectful or have their fingers jammed in doors in internment camps. And as for the English, it’s only put on. Did you ever try to pull a little authority over an Englishman?”

“If I had the authority, I think the English would recognize it as readily as anybody else,” I informed him.

“If you were an Englishman and had the authority,” corrected Jim. “They have a sort of agreement among themselves, a working agreement. But you take Canada. Somebody up top says what’s what and we all submit. There are no outbreaks. It isn’t as if these authorities had any tough gendarmes or black shirt police to back them up. I’m beginning to think Canadians are the most docile people on earth.”

“Remember the Chinese,” I protested. “Or the Eskimos.”

“All I’m thinking of,” said Jim, “is that cop back there at that fork in the highway. The way he ran up alongside of us and arrogantly turned us into the side of the road with a flick of his head.”

“He was perfectly right,” I said, “you didn’t slow down at that fork. There was a sign distinctly saying ‘slow to 15 miles’.”

“I’ve passed that fork a hundred times,” said Jim, “and there never was a cop there before.”

“That isn’t the point,” I assured him. “The law is the law whether there are any cops looking or not.”

“I don’t mind how many laws we’ve got,” said Jim, “so long as I am not humiliated in the enforcement of them.”

“You’re not mad at the cop,” I jeered. “You’re only mad at yourself for being so humble.”

“I wasn’t humble,” stated Jim. “I was only sensible.”

“You squawk about Canadians being docile,” I laughed, “and if ever I saw a docile Canadian, it was you when that cop nodded you haughtily to the side of the road and then bawled the daylight out of you.”

“I stared him straight in the eye,” cried Jim.

“Yes,” I said, “with your eyes wide and alarmed and full of an expression of deepest respect and humility.”

“We’ll Have to Be Smart”

“Oh, I did not,” protested Jim heatedly. “I did nothing of the kind. And anyway, how could you see me when you were cringing down in your seat as if God had suddenly appeared at the car window.”

“You were servile,” I declared. “You even called him sir.”

“An old habit,” said Jim, “I contracted in the last war. It was his khaki uniform.”

“Well,” I agreed, “it does seem absurd to me the way we kowtow to a cop. The way they bawl us out, the tone they take, you would think they were magistrates instead of cops. I don’t think we should put up with it.”

“The next cop,” said Jim, “I’m going to put in his place, if he so much as uses a tone I don’t like. He’s an employee.”

“Now you’re talking,” I said, sitting up hopefully to watch for cops.

“There must be some guilty conscience in us, or something,” mused Jim. “We Canadians must be descendants of people who came to this country fleeing from the law. All servility is based on fear. We must have some inherited fear of cops.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” I said guardedly (because after all what do we really know about our great-great-grandfathers?).

“I wish,” sighed Jim, “I had inherited something else from my ancestors than a guilty conscience. Craftiness, for example. I had a great-uncle Zebulon who was the craftiest man in seven townships. If I was crafty, I’d know what luck we were going to have tonight in finding the best place to go fishing.”

“It won’t be hard to find out,” I said. “A few discreet inquiries around the village.”

“Listen,” said Jim, “there are only nine houses, one general store and a gasoline pump in this village. Every man in the place is a musky fisherman. Dyed in the wool. The muskies at this time of year have left the weed beds and the deeps and have come in shore, along by the rocks and boulders. They are easier to catch and fight harder than at any other time of year. It is the peak, the glorious climax of the fishing season. These villagers look upon this season of the year as their share of the fishing. All summer long even in wartime they have been working madly for the benefit of vacationists who were getting all the fishing. Now the vacationists are gone, and it’s the villagers turn. They will resent us even arriving.”

“We’ll worm it out of them,” I assured him.

“We’ll have to be pretty smart,” said Jim.

“We can watch where they fish,” I reminded him.

“Yes, and waste half the morning trying to locate them,” argued Jim. “They’ll all be out before daybreak.”

“Jim,” I said, “you’ve got a poor opinion of country people. All we need to do is the old trick. Buy a few things at the general store, ask a few questions. Buy some gasoline, ask a few questions. Rent a boat, ask a few questions. Put two and two together, and there we are.”

Full of Great Quietness

We floated deeper into the musky country where civilization and the rocks were coming to grips. The farms grew fewer and more curiously laid out in fields bordered with shoals of primitive rock. We saw the first maples, gone gold and red. The villagers are right. This is the best time of year to go fishing.

The villages began to be farther apart. We left cement for gravel and gravel for sand, and finally entered a lovely narrow road winding amidst rocks and tall hardwood forests which we knew, according to our written directions, was the road that led to our happy destination where, along the rocky shores of a twisted and many-bayed lake, the big muskies, sick of the rotting weed beds, lay in the pure shallow shore water, waiting for something to wiggle past them, such as a well-cast lure.

And towards evening, we came to the village, full of a great quietness amidst all the equipment it had for summer, its park, the brightness, its shuttered outlying cottages. We cruised slowly down its one street, planning our campaign of reconnaissance.

“The general store, first,” I suggested.

And in front of the general store we drew up. It was the regular general store, with its ceiling covered with galvanized pails, bundles of hats, baled socks, boots. One side groceries. Other side, drygoods. Back, hardware.

Three or four men lingered leaning on counters as if expecting nothing to happen anyway.

“Good evening,” we said cheerily, in that easy city fashion. Our entry seemed to break a spell that had been holding the general store in thrall.

Everybody muttered except the storekeeper, an elderly gray moustached man who eyed us over his spectacles and said nothing. He went ahead quietly parcelling something out of sight.

Jim and I wandered slowly down the store, looking at the merchandise to see what we could reasonably buy as an excuse for visiting the store. Something inexpensive but useful.

“I think I’ll get a pair of overalls,” I said quietly, whispering through my nose.

“Nice bandanas,” murmured Jim. “How about a couple of bandanas each? Handy fishing.”

“You get the bandanas,” I muttered, “and I’ll take a hank of that clothes line. Good stuff to have in our kit for an anchor.”

“O.K.,” agreed Jim, “and two or three cans of tomatoes. I don’t like drinking this weedy water; and canned tomatoes are swell.”

“O.K.” I muttered, as we turned and proceeded to the front of the store where everybody was covertly taking us in out of the corners of their eyes.

The storekeeper finally finished whatever he was doing and came and stood facing us, planting both palms on the counter.

“Good-evening,” said Jim, amiably. “How much are those bandanas?”

“Two for a quarter,” said he, handing down a sheaf of them.

We examined them carefully.

“Two of them,” said Jim pleasantly.

“How much is that clothesline?” I inquired with a winning smile.

The storekeeper looked at me expressionlessly and said: “Thirty cents.”

“I’ll have one,” I informed him enthusiastically.

But it seemed very difficult to rouse any response. Jim strolled back eyeing the shelves speculatively, and I followed.

“What did I tell you?” Jim murmured. “We’re suspected.”

“Ask about the fishing anyway,” I whispered.

“Not now,” said Jim shortly. “Hostile.”

Our murmured conversation was not lost upon the silent company in the store. The merchant was tying up our small purchases in paper.

“Three cans of tomatoes,” said Jim. “About a pound of cheese and a box of soda biscuits.”

A Faint, Cold Smile

The storekeeper slowly gathered these items and set them on the counter. He seemed to be waiting. So did all the others. A curious electrical feeling was in the dim air of this store.

“That will be all,” said Jim, reaching into his pocket.

“Here,” I said, “you bought the gasoline. I’ll attend to this.”

“No,” said Jim, “I want this changed.”

And he laid a crisp new $20 bill¹ on the counter.

The storekeeper’s hands paused in the act of spreading a piece of wrapping paper. He stared at the bill. He picked it up gingerly and examined it closely. He held at up to the light. “I can’t change this,” he said.

“Can you get it changed handy?” asked Jim.

The storekeeper looked long and steadily at Jim. Then he shifted his gaze to me. There seemed to be a faint cold smile in his eyes.

“No,” he said.

“Can any of you gentlemen?” said Jim, turning to the others standing back in the store.

They stirred and looked away and shook their heads.

“Here,” I said diving into my pocket. But I had only 17 cents and a $10 bill, the expenses of the fishing trip, plus any sudden emergencies.

“Can you change the ten?” I said, tossing down the nice new Bank of Canada dix.

The storekeeper reached out cautiously and picked it up and examined it closely. He shot a quick look around at the men standing behind us.

“No,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Well, heh, heh,” I said, “I’ve only got 17 cents. How much have you got, Jim?”

“Just a dime,” said Jim.

“You can take two cans of tomatoes,” said the storekeeper, “or the two bandanas. Or the rope and one can of tomatoes. Or…”

“Maybe the gas-pump man can change it,” suggested Jimmie.

“Do You Mean to Insinuate?”

All eyes turned to one of the men standing back of us. He, it seems, was the service-station man.

“Sorry,” he said. “All I got is tens myself.”

In every face, all of a sudden, suspicion. Cold, undisguised suspicion.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “do you mean this money is no good?”

I picked up my 10 and examined it closely.

“It may be all right,” said the garage man, he was a heavy set and sulky type, “but there has been some phoney money spread around this country lately.”

“Do you mean to insinuate,” I demanded of the public at large, “that we are trying to pass bogus money? Are you accusing us at being criminals?”

Nobody replied, but the storekeeper turned his back and began replacing on the shelves the articles we had almost bought.

Jim and I looked anxiously around at the faces. They were mostly averted, and there was no friendliness on any of them.

“Could you tell us,” asked Jim, “If there is a boarding house in the village open or anywhere we can put up for a couple of nights?”

Everybody looked at us.

“We’re here for a couple of days’ fishing,” I put in.

“Fishing?” said the sulky garage man. “Well, my mother takes in a couple now and then.”

“Mrs. Tom is still open, I believe,” said the storekeeper.

His and everybody else’s face had come to life.

“I’ll slip over and see what mother says,” said the garage man, buttoning his windbreaker in a business-like way.

“Muskies you’re after, eh?” said the storekeeper, breaking into a friendly grin.

“Yes,” we said, “but er … ah…”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said the storekeeper. “If you want that stuff I can change your 20 easy enough.”

“How’s this?” demanded Jim. “A minute ago…”

“Sure, sure,” soothed the storekeeper. “But you acted so suspicious when you came in.”

“Suspicious?” I asked.

“Guilty as anything, the both of you,” laughed the storekeeper, starting to hand down the tomatoes and bandanas again “Didn’t they gents?”

Everybody smiled and nodded.

“I couldn’t figure out,” said the storekeeper, whose name proved to be McAndrews, and can he ever catch muskies? – “until you laid down that new 20, and naturally I thought there was something funny about it.”

“Well,” said Jim, “if we looked guilty it was only because our real purpose coming in here was to get some tips on where to go fishing tomorrow, but we were going to buy some odds and ends and ask you casually …”

“Ah,” said Mr. McAndrews, “a guilty conscience always shows.”

“All right,” said Jim, “here’s a straightforward question.”

And we got a straightforward answer, and five muskies, and we know the first name of the whole fourteen men in the village and we hope to leave a lot of tens and twenties there from now on.

---

Editor’s Notes: This story was repeated on September 16, 1944, as Money Trouble. It also appeared in Greg Clark & Jimmie Frise Go Fishing (1980).

1. $20 in 1937 would be $447 in 2026. ↩︎

If you had your choice, which would you rather not have: Hay fever, toothache – or rapid-fire hiccups?

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, September 20, 1941.

“You can’t really call it the hay fever,” ” said Jimmie Frise. “The hay crop is over months ago.”

“What I’ve got,” I explained tearfully, “is a sort of dust fever. I get it in the late summer and early autumn whenever I travel on trains or on dusty roads.”

“Well, this road is dusty, all right,” agreed Jim. “I didn’t realize what a miserable thing hay fever is. You’ve sneezed at least a hundred times.”

“Without stopping,” I added.

“And your eyes and nose’ are both running,” went on Jimmie, taking his eyes off the road to take a quick gander at me. “Are your ears running, too?”

“I may look funny,” I informed him, “but I don’t feel funny. Next to sea sickness, hay fever is the meanest feeling in the world.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jim. “Toothache is pretty bad.”.

Toothache is bad,” I agreed, “but it demands action and you give it action. There is some satisfaction even in knowing that you have an appointment with the dentist. But what can you do for hay fever? There is little satisfaction in knowing that when the frosts come you’ll be free of it until next summer.”

“There is nothing in human experience,” said Jim, “quite so horrible as the throb, throb, throb of a real toothache.”

“Hay fever,” I stated, “has no pain. That’s the heck of it. If it pained you, you would go and have your head cut off or something. But it is just a formless, horrible smear. Your head grows thick. Your eyes grow dim. Your nose and passages stuff up and all of a sudden you get the nasty sensation that you are quietly being smothered.”

“Even when you do call the dentist for an emergency appointment,” said Jim, “you know that ahead of you is the misery of sitting down in that great, big torture chair. And inside your throbbing mouth, the dentist is going to probe with a hot needle. And he’s going to buzz with the drill. And shove back your gums with a butcher knife. And then put his knee on your Adam’s apple and take hold of your jaw with a pair of pliers…”

“Bad,” I said. “Bad. But at least it is action. With hay fever, you have not even the remotest hope of action. You go and have the doctor cut 50 incisions in your skin and tattoo you with 50 kinds of pollen, to discover which you are allergic to. But it doesn’t work with me. They’ll cut no more slits in my hide. They’ll insert no more pollen or dust or cat’s dandruff or rabbit’s fur into my system. No, sir. I am condemned to go through the rest of my life knowing that every August and September, I have to go dim with hay fever, like a lamp that is running out of oil.”

“Hold Your Breath”

“Did you ever have boils?” inquired Jim.

“No,” I said. “I stick to the one affliction.”

“I think boils are the worst things in the world,” advised Jim. “You get a boil on the back of your neck or under your arm, and you’ll never complain again about a few sniffles.”

“You miss the point, Jim.” I explained. “Boils come and boils go. But hay fever returns like the season. You can look forward to it, which is something you don’t have to do with boils. If you get a boil, you can say, in a couple of weeks this will be over. But here I sit in this car, unable to see, unable to smell or taste, deprived of three of my five senses, feeling dejected to my very core, looking foolish, feeling silly, and knowing that as sure as fate, this condition will be on me again, not only within the next day or two as soon as I get near any dust; but that next year and so long as I do live, this same condition will recur. That’s the hellish part of hay fever.”

“Gurp,” said Jimmie.

“Which?” I inquired.

“Erp,” repeated Jim. “I’ve got the hiccups.”

“Well, I’m glad you’ve got something,” I stated, “because now you won’t be so darn philosophic about life’s miseries.”

“It seems to me, erp,” said Jimmie, “that it is the pain or ache that takes you by surprise, erp, that really is life’s meanest test. Erp. When you know you have some misery ahead of you, erp, you can more or less build yourself up, erp, see? Erp.”

“Hold your breath, Jim,” I said, “and count 20. That will stop them.”

“Erp,” said Jim.

We both kept silent for a few seconds while Jim sat upright at the car wheel and held his breath.

“Werp,” he said violently. That doesn’t work.”

“You didn’t count 20,” I said. “Count slow.

“Erp, uck,” he said, and then took a deep breath and stared grimly through the windshield while he slowly counted in his mind.

“Fourteen, 15,” I counted slowly, to encourage him. “Sixteen, seventeen…”

“Yuckup, erp,” exploded Jim. “Boy, I nearly bust with that one.”

“Slow the car down,” I commanded, “at this next farm and let’s drive in the lane and get a drink of water. That will stop them.”

“It’s nothing,” said Jim, “they’ll stop in a few minutes.”

But they did not stop. They got worse. They began to come more frequently and more loudly, and each one gave Jimmie quite a jolt as it exploded.

“Let me take the wheel,” I suggested. “One of those hiccups is going to put us in the ditch if we don’t look out.”

“I’ll be okerp,” said Jim. “Okay. Yupp.”

“What have you been eating?” I demanded.

“Hiccups don’t come from eating,” said Jim. They’re some kind of a nervous twitch of the diaphragm. There’s no explaining them. They just come on like erp. Yupp. Gawp.”

“Boy, that was a dandy,” I said anxiously. “Look, Jim, let’s turn in one of these farms and get a big drink of water. A good big cold drink of water out of a frosty dipper taken fresh from a cold deep, well.”

This seemed to decide Jim and he slowed the car at the next farm lane and we I drove in. The farmer was in the yard when we pulled up and I explained to him that all we wanted was a cold long drink of water to cure a bad case of the hiccups.

“Say, that is a dandy,” said the farmer, listening to Jim’s performance, which was now at the rate of about one every two seconds like those time signals the radio gives, only deeper toned.

Jim got out and walked to the pump and the farmer, after throwing away a couple of dippers full, handed Jim a full one of glistening, icy cold water. Jim waited a second and let two or three hiccups go and then upped with the dipper and downed into it. After two swallows, we could see the hiccup come up past his Adam’s apple. There was a violent struggle in his neck for an instant and then the hiccup conquered the Adam’s apple and up she came, with a regular bullfrog of a sound.

“Try again,” gasped Jim, sinking his muzzle in the dipper. But again the hiccup won. After four tries, Jim set the dipper down and sat on the well cover for a rest.

“I knew a man died of hiccups, once,” said the farmer

“Oh, I’ve often heard of people having hiccups,” I said quickly, “for several days. But never dying.”

“Yes, siree,” said the farmer. “This fellow got ’em so bad he couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink, couldn’t do nothing and finally he died a skeleton.”

“Erp, yupp, erp,” said Jimmie forlornly, and by now, each hiccup was giving him a slight jump in the air.

“Do you know what’s good for hiccups?” I asked the farmer.

“A long drink of cold water,” said the farmer. “That’s what we generally use here-abouts. Or we hold our breath and count 20.”

“Try holding your breath again, Jim,” I pleaded.

So Jim stood up and took a short walk, to get full control of himself. Then he halted dramatically and held his breath. He counted with his finger in the air beating time. At the fifth beat, the hiccup won, a loud one. And it seemed to shake Jim’s head on his shoulders.

“There’s a doctor in the next village,” said the farmer anxiously. “You will see his house, it’s the red brick one on your left. I wouldn’t fool with them hiccups. I knew of a man dying of hiccups once. A mere skeleton he became.”

But Jim was already in the car and had stepped on the starter and I hopped in and he drove rather quickly out the lane.

“Erp,” he said “how’s your erp fever, hey?”

“Jim,” I said, “no fooling. Let’s stop at that doctor’s in the next village.”

Which we did. But the doctor was out on a stork job and it was uncertain just when he would be back. The doctor’s wife was extremely sympathetic. She got Jimmie a dipper of cold water. She had him hold his breath. But nothing would down that hiccup.

“Give Him a Good Scare”

She signalled to me to follow her into the inner hall of the doctor’s office. “There’s only one sure cure for hiccups,” she whispered to me. “And that is to give him a good scare.”

“A scare?” I said.

“A real good fright,” she whispered earnestly. “The shock to the nerves of a fright will cure the hiccups like magic.”

“What do you suggest,” I asked, “in the way of a fright?”

“Well, if you could get him to walk across a field where there’s a bad bull,” said the doctor’s wife. “Or have a gun go off right behind him or something.”

I thought for a minute.

“There’s a garage down the street a few doors,” I said. “Do you know the boys that keep it?”

“Yes, I know them,” she said.

“Well, we parked our car a couple of doors beyond that garage,” I explained. “How would you like to telephone the boys – I saw them as we went by -good stout fellows – and explain this hiccups to them and ask them to suddenly jump out as we go past and attack my friend. Tell them to attack the big fellow, see? Not the small one. And the fright will cure the hiccups.”

“I’m sure they wouldn’t mind,” said the doctor’s wife excitedly. “I’ve known them since they were boys. I’ll ask them.”

“I’ll hold him in your front yard for a minute,” I explained, “looking at those bird houses, until I see you come and move the front curtains. Then I’ll know you’ve telephoned and all is set.”

“That’ll be fine,” whispered the doctor’s wife, gleefully.

So I went back into the office and got Jim who was leaning back on the old sofa dejectedly, and giving a violent jerk about every second and a half, emitting a formless, characterless and extremely weary erp with each spasm. He got up and followed me heavily. Out in the front garden were a dozen or so bird houses of very interesting design and I persuaded Jimmie to pause a few minutes while I studied them with great attention. Then I saw, the window curtains of the doctor’s parlor agitated and I glimpsed the mischievous face of the doctor’s wife smiling at me. She nodded.

“Okay, Jim,” I said, “let’s forget it and get in the car and proceed on our way. Maybe they’ll quit the way they came.”

“Yupp,” hiccuped Jimmie sadly.

I kept him on the inside, and as we approached the garage in the gathering darkness I could see in the shadows the figures of two husky gentlemen peering at us. I dropped slightly in the rear of Jim and motioned to them.

Like wildcats, the two lads leaped on Jim. The attack was sudden and it was complete. They fell upon him from two sides. I could hear the grunts of all three as their bodies met.

Then I saw one of the attackers reeling back with an expression of agony on his face. He collapsed at the foot of the lamp post.

And before I could take my eyes from the spectacle of that one, I saw Jimmie give a terrific fling, the second garage man went down all of a heap and down went Jim on top of him to pin him like a rat to the earth.

“Grab that other guy,” shouted Jim hotly, giving his victim’s arm a violent twist.

“Jim!” I gasped, “your hiccups! It was just for your hiccups…!”

“Call the cops,” commanded Jim. “Get help. Don’t stand there like a fool.”

The first poor chap was by now sitting on the ground holding his shin and moaning terribly.

Down the street came the doctor’s wife, to see this fine miscarriage of plans. “Your hiccups are cured,” she announced after bending down to listen to Jim for a moment. “Get up off him.”

So we all four went back with the doctor’s wife to her kitchen where she gave us buttermilk and tea biscuits and she patched up the shin where Jim had kicked the poor guy. And we put $2 in the doctor’s poor box, since it is unethical for a doctor’s wife to prescribe, even for hiccups.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by Jim Frise, September 13, 1947.

“Pssst!” hissed Jimmie Frise over the telephone. “Come over here as fast as you can make it!”

“Aw, Jim, I’m just relaxing after supper,” I pleaded. “You come over here.”

“For heaven’s sake,” cried Jim,” don’t argue. Come over as fast as you can. It’s colossal!”

“But…” I began.

Jim slammed down his receiver, commanding “Come on!” as he did so.

So I groaned and got my hat and walked the four or five doors around the corner that separates us. Possibly, I thought, a great horned owl in his apple tree. Or maybe something he had discovered in his cellar, where he is always unearthing some treasure he had stored there 10 years ago, and forgotten about.

But Jim was waiting for me in his side drive, with a very furtive air.

“This,” he said, and I could see he was rigid with excitement, “is something utterly incredible!” He glanced up at the neighbor’s windows in the drive and leaned down close to whisper:

“I’ve struck oil!”

“Eh?” I inquired, startled.

“I’ve struck oil!” he hissed. “Oil! In my back yard!”

“What are you talking about?” I scoffed.

“Come here,” he commanded. leading me on tiptoe down the side drive and into his garden.

Glancing carefully around to make sure we were unobserved, he led me to the edge of the south border of the garden, and stood back, eyes blazing, while he pointed to a hole in the ground about two feet deep.

I looked in. The bottom of sandy hole was filled with a black pool. The walls of the hole were smeared with a thick viscous substance. And the pile of earth he had excavated was dripping oozily.

“But Jim…” I gasped. “In the heart of a city! You don’t strike oil in the heart of a city.”

“Don’t you?” inquired Jim, his eyes glittering. “That shows you how little you know. You strike oil anywhere! You strike it in the middle of deserts, like Oklahoma. You strike it in mountains, like Peru. You strike oil wherever it is. And, by golly, I’ve struck it right here in my back yard.”

“How do you know it’s oil?” I demanded.

“Sssshh! Not so loud,” warned Jimmie, glancing apprehensively around. “It’s oil, all right, I’ve tested it. It burns like fury.”

“When,” I asked, a little breathless, did you first notice it?”

“Not an hour ago,” said Jim. “I happened to be out here and I saw this dark spot on the border. I thought maybe the women had emptied some sort of kettle of something, and I poked it with a stick. When I smelt the stick, I smelled OIL. Well, sir, I got a spade. I’ve been reading lately about those farmers out west, who struck oil on their farms. I’ve been kind of wishing I could strike it rich some way or other. Well, I got the spade and dug a couple of spadefuls, just to see how much somebody had spilled. Imagine my feelings when I saw, with the very second spadeful of earth, a little black pool forming!”

His face was flushed and triumphant.

“Well, sir,” he breathed deeply, “I started to dig in earnest. I got this hole three feet deep. And the deeper go, the bigger that pool of oil…”

“You tested it?”

“Yes, I tested it,” smiled Jim. “I soaked a rag in it, and sneaked in down cellar and touched a match to it. Man, does it burn!”

“Does your family know about it?”

“Not yet,” said Jim, tenderly. “I’ll announce the strike as soon as they’re all home. They’ve gone to the picture show. Boy, will I knock their hats off!”

“But look, Jim, I counselled. “How do you know this well – or spring or whatever you call it – is on your property? How do you know the main gusher, as they say, isn’t on one of the neighbor’s property? How do you… ?”

“I’ve thought it all out,” said Jim, very guardedly again glancing around to make sure we were not being watched. “This is where you come in. I’m going to let you in on it, naturally.”

“That’s mighty decent of you, Jim,” I thanked him warmly. “But if we strike oil on your property, maybe the whole block, maybe the whole district, has oil under it. Maybe I’ll be able to sink oil wells right in my own garden?”

“Right,” agreed Jim. “I can show you cities and towns in Texas where the oil wells pump right in people’s gardens, on their front lawns. Right along the main streets of the town, the big oil pumps, like the walking beams on the old fashioned side-wheeler steamers, slowly pump and rock, up and down, all day and all night long.”

“It would ruin this neighborhood, residentially,” I suggested.

“Who cares about that?” scorned Jim cheerfully. “If we’ve struck oil, we won’t have to worry about depreciating the value of our homes. We can own homes in the choicest millionaire suburbs.”

“Aw, now, not millions,” I protested.

“Millions?” said Jim, airily. “I tell you, there’s fortunes in oil. Didn’t you read about those farmers? Just humble dirt farmers, laboring and toiling to get just enough off their land to keep body and soul together. Then, all of a sudden, oil is located on their farms. And do you know what? Do you know those humble dirt farmers are receiving cheques today of $5,000 a DAY!”

“A day?” I swallowed.

“Five thousand bucks a DAY!” repeated Jim intently: “That’s what oil means! It isn’t like gold, where you’ve got to blast and tunnel and dig and crush and roll and refine. No, sir. Oil comes gushing.”

He paused and peered down into the hole.

“Look!” he whispered dramatically. “It’s an inch higher than the last time we looked.”

And it certainly was.

“Well, Jim,” I sighed. “It’s hard to believe. Here in the very heart of the city.”

I gazed around at the quiet September evening night – the empty gardens, the quiet homes, all unsuspecting. In a week’s time, how strangely altered all this will be. Peace and quiet gone. Swarms of oil men with their derricks and drills, their powerful engines roaring day and night as they strike down to the depths where the great oil reservoirs lie hidden by Nature.

“Why, Jim,” I breathed, “within a week, probably everybody in this block will be a millionaire.”

“If they’re fortunate enough,” pointed out Jim, ” if they own their own property. First thing I am going to do in the morning is call on my lawyer and make sure the title is clear -absolutely clear.”

“But as I as I say,” I cut in, “suppose the main gusher is on somebody else’s property?”

“Oil isn’t like that,” explained Jim. “This leak here is just a tiny seepage that has fought its way to the surface. Far below, maybe hundreds of feet, the great subterranean floods of oil, struggling to escape but imprisoned by the vast masses of the earth’s crust. This tiny telltale seepage has at last succeeded, through all the ages of time, in fighting its way through nook and cranny, fissure and fault, to reveal the whereabouts of fabulous fortune. And of all the places in the world for it emerge… MY BACK YARD!”

Jim raised enraptured eyes to heaven.

“Where do I come in?” I ventured to remind him.

“Ah yes,” cried Jim, back to earth. “In the morning, after I’ve seen my lawyer and made certain my title and deed are ironclad, I’m going to take a specimen of this oil down to one of the big financial operators. The lawyer can tell me who. And on the strength of this incredible discovery, he’ll advance me the money to buy as many neighboring properties as I can get a hold of. That’s where you come in. You’ve got to get here right tomorrow morning, and visit as many of the neighbors as you can. Offer them anything. Naturally, don’t rouse their suspicions. Just tell them that, in the interests of our business, you want to buy a house nearer to mine, so we can work more easily together.”

“Won’t the word get out,” I suggested, “that you and I are starting to buy houses all over the block?”

“Well just take options,” explained Jim. “That’s the word in the oil game. Options. We’ll take options. And then, when the oil field is proven, we take up our options.”

I leaned down and dipped my finger tip in the dark pool softly swelling in the hole.

I felt it. It was slick. I smelled it. It was oil – no possible question.

“Slip over home,” suggested Jim, “and put on some old things. Bring a spade. We’re going to go a couple of feet deeper. I want the best possible specimen I can get to show the financial men.”

“Rubber boots, too?” I proposed.

By the time I returned with old clothes and the spade, Jim had hung a length of ragged burlap along the fence to screen our activities from the back kitchen windows of his immediate, neighbor to the south, Brocklebank. His house stood on a slight terrace higher than Jim’s, and from the kitchen window, the whole operation would be plainly visible.

Jim was sitting on the edge of the hole, his rubber-booted legs dangling right in the oil. He seemed to desire oil on him, around him. His hands were stained, and there were splotches on his face. Already, he was looking like an oil operator.

“You know, I was just thinking,” said Jim with a rapt expression. “If this thing turns out really big – I mean, if there is really big money in it – the first thing I’m going to do is give a generous donation to the hospitals, especially the Children’s Hospital. I’ve got lot of poor relations, and I’m figuring on doing the decent and unexpected thing by them. What I mean is – gifts of $5,000 and $10,000. You know – outright gifts! When I think of all the rich men and what tightwads they are, and skinflints – carefully doling out their riches, $50 here, $100 bucks there… I’m not going to be like that.”

“My house, I figure,” I said, “isn’t 200 yards from here. I’m right on the spot, practically. Maybe I’m nearer the main oil body than you… eh?”

“It’s quite possible,” congratulated Jim, warmly. “The great oil fields are many miles in area, actually.”

“In that case,” I suggested, “shouldn’t we form a partnership? How about going in and drawing up documents and agreements right now? Partnership agreements. It would be a pretty cruel thing, for example, if you found the oil, and then the well sunk on my property hit the gusher and yours hit nothing but gas!”

“Okay,” agreed Jim. “Let’s dig another couple of feet and let her seep in and clear as much as possible. I want a pint milk bottle full of the clearest I can get, for the morning.”

So Jim stepped right down into the hole, in his hip boots, and the oil came to his knees. He sloshed around in it, very professionally, and then started to spade the heavy sludge and oil-bearing sands out to me. I stood on the edge of the hole and spaded and spread the oil-bearing sands, so they wouldn’t run back into the hole again.

“After we get this a foot or so deeper,” said Jim, “we’ll let it settle while we go indoors and draw up articles of partnership. I think I might telephone my lawyer, too, if I can catch him at home.”

“It’s getting pretty runny, Jim,” I offered. “I think to go in and get a pail to throw this stuff farther back.”

“Hey, maybe it’s going to gush!” suggested Jimmie excitedly. “That would ruin everything. The whole neighborhood would be in the know. It would be all over Canada on the 11 o’clock newscast.”

He stood peering in the twilight down at his legs. The oil did seem to be rising rather noticeably.

“Come out,” I warned. “If it gushes, it might come up like an earthquake. Don’t forget the power of those vast reservoirs of trapped oil, and the earth’s pressure.”

Jim climbed out of the hole with my assistance.

We stood, gazing down the hole intently. There was no doubt about it. The oil was coming in faster and faster.

“Jim,” I said reverently, “our fortune is made!”

“To think,” murmured, Jimmie, “of this vast city, filled with toiling and laboring multitudes, slaving for a mere pittance in salary or wages. While all the time, right under their feet, lay this countless fortune, wealth beyond all their dreams!”

“How strange,” I agreed, “that, out of all the wilderness, our pioneer forbears chose this spot to erect their poor little hovels, and their stinking factories, and their sweatshops.”

“There’s irony in this,” marvelled Jim, gazing tenderly down.

And then we became conscious of Brocklebank, Jim’s next-door neighbor, staring at us over the top of the burlap screen Jim had hung on the fence.

“Hello!” said Brocklebank, quietly. “What goes on?”

“We uh – we- uh…,” said Jimmie.

“We’re fixing a bust drain,” I came in with, adroitly.

“Drain?” said Brocklebank. “In your back garden? Don’t I smell oil?”

He sniffed.

Of course, he smelled oil.

I looked at Jim; and Jim looked at me and shook his head with a smile.

“Okay, Brocklebank,” he started, slowly and distinctly. “I suppose you might as well know the incredible news now, instead of later. Brocklebank, you stand to make millions! Millions! We have struck OIL!”

Brocklebank, stuck his head over the burlap and took a better look into the hole. The effect on him was sensational. With a loud cry, he dashed into his house.

“Well…” exclaimed Jim.

In a moment, Brocklebank came out of his back door again:

“It’s my tank, my tank!” he groaned loudly. “This is the third time I’ve had it mended.”

“Tank?” croaked Jim.

“My fuel oil tank, in the cellar¹,” grated Brocklebank. “I just went down. She’s empty again! Three times in two years!”

Jimmie bent down heavily and started shovelling the oil-bearing sands back into the hole.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. In the 1940s, there was a big conversion for furnaces to run on oil instead of coal. This might be why they did not think of this. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, September 1, 1934.

“The smell of ketchup being boiled,” said Jimmie Frise, “is of all the odors in nature or art the most beautiful to me.”

“It’s a swell smell,” I admitted.

“This season of the year,” went on Jimmie, “the year in its fulness, the fields ripe, the fruits burdening the trees, everything deeply and richly colored; the sunflowers and the zinnias, the great cannas red and yellow, no pale fragile flowers left, but only the blazing hues; the season of completion, of consummation, of perfection; and over it floating like an incense of thanksgiving the smell of pickling. Especially ketchup.”

“It smells swell,” I confirmed.

“Spring,” said Jimmie, “is like a child, beautiful, winsome and all that. But you have no desire to seize spring and hug her to your bosom. Early summer is like a young woman. Beautiful, attractive, but you can’t be sure whether she is sulky or perhaps she has funny teeth or maybe a high, squeaky voice. But late summer, ah, and early fall! There’s the woman, the matron, the mother of children. Her character stands clearly before you. She smiles and is at ease, her chief work done.”

“What’s winter, Jim?” I asked.

“Some old dame,” growled Jim, with a look at the weather. “I wish my family was home from the cottage and all of them up to their elbows in pickles. I’d stay home all day and lie on the chesterfield, with the radio going, and just inhale the pickle smell until I was saturated.”

“You are all worked up,” I remarked.

“It seems to purify the lungs,” said Jim. “It is the deepest breath you can take, pickle smell. It touches those farthest, deepest, little corners of your lungs, like the ears of a pillow slip that haven’t been touched for ages.”

“My family will be home soon,” I said, “and you can come over and hang around while they are pickling.”

“What do they make?” asked Jim, sitting up eagerly.

“Oh, ketchup,” I said, “and a kind of chopped-up mustard pickle with a lot of celery seed and curry in it.”

“Ah,” breathed Jim.

“And then a kind of small gherkins,” I added, “not sweet, not sour, but a kind of crisp, crunchy, sweetish, vinegary…”

“Stop!” cried Jim.

“Then we do up some pickled peaches,” I said, “with cloves. And crabapples and pickled punkin.”

“Pickled punkin?” exclaimed Jim.

“Well, some kind of squash or something,” I said. “It comes out in sort of square transparent pieces about the size of a small matchbox and it is lovely with cold beef.”

“Oooh!” breathed Jimmie.

“Then we make a kind of conserve,” I said, “with plums, peaches, apples and a lot of spices dumped in. It is different every year. It is a sort of adventure, after all the other pickling is done and there are still a dozen and half sealers left over and some odds and ends of peanut butter jars and things.”

“The Women Have All the Fun”

“Personally,” said Jim, “I don’t think women adventure half enough in the realm of pickles. Look at all the things there are to pickle and all the different ways there are to pickle them. In brine, in vinegar; sweet, sour; yet when all is said and done we have only four or five kinds of pickles. Look at the grocery store shelves. Not six different kinds. You would think there would be hundreds of kinds.”

“I’ve often thought,” I said, “that I might take a whirl at a little pickling myself. Some experimenting, you know. When the ladies are out some afternoon, after the regular pickling season is over.”

“The women,” said Jim, “have all the fun.”

“It isn’t hard,” I pointed out. “You just get the big preserving kettle and you boil up whatever you are doing, with either vinegar or sugar to preserve it. And you put it into the sealers, and there you are.”

Jim looked at me out of the sides of his eyes.

“What do you say,” he asked, “if we try to work out a pickle of our own?”

“Any time,” I agreed.

“A pickle,” said Jim, “that will embody all the things we like. Onions, curry, everything.”

“I bet we could work out a pretty fair pickle,” I concurred.

“Partly sweet,” said Jim, “and partly sour. Briney at the same time. A pickle that will be all pickles at once.”

“I don’t see,” I suggested, “why we shouldn’t include ketchup in the recipe. Work ketchup right in with mustard pickles, for example. And when you are eating them you never could tell when a nice snappy whole gherkin might pop up on your plate.”

“We will call it,” said Jim, “pickle surprise.”

“We’ll make it at my house to-morrow,” I said.

“No, no,” begged Jimmie. “I have everything ready at my house.”

“It was me suggested making them,” I said. “If it is a success we can then go over to your house the next day and make you up a batch.”

“It will be a success all right,” assured. Jim. “It isn’t like baking a cake. It is all in the ingredients.”

I went home early and spent the evening preparing for the pickling bee. I brought up from the cellar a good supply of sealers, quart and pint sizes, and a number of those numerous assorted jelly jars and modernistic marmalade glasses that seem to accumulate in a house nowadays.

I got the two big preserving kettles up and went through all the cupboards left so tidy during the absence of the family for the summer and laid out rows and rows of spices. There was allspice and cloves, tumeric and nutmeg, cassia and capsicum.

There was a bottle of “Preservit” and a small bottle labelled “Kitchen Kumfort, Gives a Flavor to Everything.” There was even a vial of bright red coloring and on it it said “Preserving.”

There was celery salt and paprika, onion salt and bay leaves.

Jimmie and I started by calling at the corner store for the raw materials of our pickle surprise. We got gherkins and silver onions, cauliflower and tomatoes.

“And why not a cabbage?” asked Jim. “If cauliflower, why not cabbage?”

So we took the cabbage. And beets and string beans and two quarts of vinegar and a large tin of mustard.

And, laden with baskets and bags, we repaired to my house for the great experiment. We laid out all the materials and stripped to our BVD’s¹ like sailors going into action.

Trusting to Inspiration

“Now,” said Jim, “what is to be the foundation of this pickle?”

“Gherkins,” said I.

“Ketchup,” disagreed Jim. “Ketchup will be the liquid in which all the rest of the things float.”

“Very well,” I said, “we will peel the tomatoes first and boil them and strain them through a cloth bag or a fresh sock.”

“That’s a woman’s way of doing it,” said Jimmie. “This is to be a man’s pickle. We’ll just dump the tomatoes in like everything else.”

“But the skins will come loose,” I expostulated. “And go floating around like pieces of chamois or those exploded toy balloons.”

“As we stir the pickle,” said Jim, “we can catch the skins as they appear and fork them out.”

“How much water do you put in the kettle to start with?” I asked.

“About three or four inches,” said Jim.

“Should we wash the cauliflower and things?” I asked.

“Nonsense,” said Jim. “Modern public health laws have done away with all those old-fashioned things. Vegetables and fruits nowadays are sanitary before they go before the public.”

“We just dump them in?”

“Correct,” said Jim. “Only we can cut them up into loose pieces.”

So we cut up tomatoes and cauliflower, cabbage and beets, string beans and celery. The gherkins and little silver onions we left whole.

“The gherkins feel a bit gritty,” I offered.

“That’s just the natural feel of them,” said Jim.

“How much salt?”

“Oh, a handful or two,” said I.

We turned on the stove before starting to mix the spices and flavorings. Then we went to the kitchen cabinet shelf and selected the spices.

“Allspice,” read Jim. “A couple of good handfuls.”

“Turmeric,” said I. “A level spoonful or two.”

Into the big preserving kettle we ladled them, spices and powders, Kitchen Kumfort and Preservit, vinegar and mustard.

“How about this coloring?” asked Jim, examining the little bottle.

“It’s for coloring jellies and cakes,” I explained.

“Most pickles are a dull brown or greenish gray,” said Jim. “Pickle surprise will be noted for its bright, happy color. Like cranberry jelly on the New Year’s dinner table.”

He dumped in the contents of the bottle.

“What’s this?” asked Jim.

“Beef cubes,” I replied.

“H’m,” said Jim, peeling one and tossing it into the pot.

“Now,” said he, “when it begins to cook we can taste it from time to time and add this and that to get it right. The way women go by the rules is the reason all pickles are alike. We will trust to inspiration.”

To let it get started we went in and turned on the radio, one or the other of us going into the kitchen every few minutes to see if it was boiling.

It took a long time to get going. But once it did, the most exciting odors began to fill the house. We stirred the cauldron, which had not yet taken on any definite color, but was red and green and white and yellow as the various ingredients floated to the surface. But the red coloring extract and the tomatoes were slowly exerting themselves and the faster it boiled the redder it got.

“Let’s walk over to the store and see if there is anything we have overlooked,” suggested Jimmie. “It will take a long time for those cauliflowers and onions to cook. Don’t let’s spoil it by hurrying.”

Over at the store we got some radishes and an egg plant.

“There are, two things I never heard of being pickled,” said Jim.

The man in the store suggested that plums and peaches made an awfully nice base for a mixed pickle. So we took some fruit and Jim got a small box of preserved ginger.

“It’s a sort of spice,” he explained.

Everything But Spinach

When we got home we split the big kettle’s contents in half and filled both the cauldrons, adding the new things we had bought. I caught Jimmie slipping a banana into the kettle.

“Who ever heard of a pickled banana?” I demanded.

“That’s the point,” said Jimmie.

So the two cauldrons stewed and boiled and everything began to cook and get soft and the rich red color began to dominate. Such softish items as the banana and the cauliflower gradually collapsed and grew limp and dissolved themselves amidst the multitude, while the firmer items, such as the cucumbers, got rather swollen and pale looking. The radishes bobbed about the top and the tomato skins swirled up and Jimmie and I were kept busy watching for them and snatching them as they were flung upward in the boiling. And the richest spicy odor imaginable filled the house.

“We ought to start tasting now,” said Jim. So we took spoons and blew and cooled and tasted.

“M’m,” said I. “It doesn’t taste like anything.”

“That,” said Jim, “is because it tastes like everything.”

But I could not detect it.

“It needs a little more character,” I suggested, “and it ought to be thicker. It is too loose the way it is. I hate loose pickles.”

“Ketchup is loose,” pointed out Jimmie.

Yet it didn’t taste like ketchup and it didn’t taste like mustard pickles and it didn’t taste like gherkins. It had a taste all its own.

“A kind of surprising taste,” said Jim. “That is why we call it pickle surprise.”

“I think it has stewed long enough,” I said. “How would you like to rinse off those sealers?”

Jim turned the tap on and rinsed the sealers while I got the ladle and prepared to scoop the surprise into the bottles. Jim put them on a tray as he rinsed them and I ladled in the pickle.

“Snick!” went the first jar.

“Snuck!” went the second jar.

“Tinkle, click,” went the third one.

“Those jars are cracking!” cried Jimmie.

So we waited for the pickle to cool before putting it in the jars, which we since have been told is not good practice.

We went to supper and came back and tasted the cooling pickle surprise.

It was gritty.

I mean, in addition to everything else, it was gritty.

“You should have, washed those beets,” I complained to Jim. “And the cauliflower. In fact, we should have washed everything.”

“That reminds me,” said Jim, rinsing out his mouth at the sink. “We forgot spinach. In our next batch we must put in some spinach.”

“And a parsnip or two,” I said. “When we do your batch we can profit by what we learned with this.”

But at bedtime Jim telephoned to say his family had arrived home from the cottage.

“They will be making ketchup Friday,” he said. “How about coming over for the afternoon?”

“Swell,” said I.

So I gave my seven bottles and four jars to charity.

---

Editor’s Notes: This tory appeared in Silver Linings (1978).

1. BVD is an old-fashioned slang term for men’s underwear. The term comes from a historic American brand of men’s undergarments named after its three founders, Bradley, Voorhees, and Day. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 26, 1939.

“How the dickens,” demanded Jimmie Frise hotly, “did you lose the engine?”

“It just fell off,” I stated patiently.

“Outboard engines can’t fall off,” declared Jim loudly. “If you fasten the screws tight, and look at them once a day. Just once a day. It isn’t much to ask.”

“I am not the kind of man,” I said, “who can look at anything regularly once a day. I’m the kind that fastens things once and for all. And if they don’t hold, it’s just too bad.”

“It sure is too bad,” said Jim. “Here I’ve been counting on borrowing your engine all week. I’ve planned this trip and got everything packed, the lunch hamper and everything. And now you say, quite coolly, your engine fell off.”

“Well, it did,” I stated hotly myself. “Do you imagine I pushed it off, just because you wanted to borrow it today? An engine that cost $140?”¹

“You take the loss of it very coolly,” said Jim.

“Well, how else can you take it?” I retorted. “There I was sailing along, with a good old faithful engine humming behind me. And all of a sudden, plop, it’s gone.”

“Didn’t you try to catch it?” demanded Jimmie.

“Catch it?” I cried. “I had hold of it. I was steering it. And it simply yanked itself out of my hand.”

“But you could have made a grab for it,” complained Jim.

“Listen, it was my engine, wasn’t it?” I said angrily. “It wasn’t your engine. Of course I made a grab for it. But it went straight down, leaving a trail of bubbles, and there I was, drifting along without even any oars.”

“I think you were very careless,” said Jim, “with something worth $140.”

With people like Jimmie, it is useless to explain, much less argue. They get an idea in their heads and there it lodges.

“Jim,” I said, “that engine didn’t owe me anything. It was four years old and had done a good $140 worth of work for me. I don’t regret its loss.”

“You could have turned it in on a new one and got $40 for it,” said Jim.

“I admit I am out some cash,” I agreed. “But that isn’t my philosophy. My philosophy is, what’s to be is to be. I even agree that I should be the kind of man who carefully examines the screws on an outboard engine every day, so as to never lose that $40 turn-in value. But it so happens, I am the kind of guy that likes to pay $40 in four years just for the privilege of not having to look at the screws every day. That comes to only $10 a year. It isn’t much to pay for a nice little bit of freedom.”

“You’ll never amount to anything, with that kind of a philosophy,” stated Jim.

“Well, what do I want to amount to?” I inquired. “Do I want to amount to one of those tight, measly, mean old buzzards that go through life peering and prying at the screws of outboard engine, so that he can be the richest guy in the graveyard?”

“I still think you might have taken a little precaution,” said Jim, “especially when you knew I wanted that engine for today.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, okay.”

“Whereabouts did it fall off?” inquired Jimmie.

“In 15 feet of water,” I said, “right off that point by Bain’s Island. It’s a goner.”

Wesley the Scientist

“Would you know,” pursued Jimmie, “just about where? How far out from the point? And how many yards east or west of the point?”

“I suppose,” I said sweetly, “you are going to dive for it? It only weighs 40 pounds, and it is only in 15 feet of water, and you can’t even swim, much less dive.”

“I had an idea,” said Jim.

“I suppose,” I continued, “that you will row the boat while I dive for it, maybe?”

“No, you’re past all diving,” said Jim, looking at me in the middle, and he is able to express much with his glance. “But down at the Landing there is a young fellow, one of the native sons, who has a sort of diving outfit.”

“You’ll never find it,” I assured him. “I spent two hours peering down in the water and dragging with big fish hooks. It’s probably lodged amongst rocks.”

“This kid,” said Jim, “has a home-made diving outfit. He made it himself. It has a big cylinder that fits over your head, with pads around your shoulders. It is weighted, and he has a hose running down to the head-piece, with an ordinary tire pump to shove the air down.”

“He couldn’t go 15 feet down, I scoffed.

“He charges 25 cents,” said Jim, “to let you down eight feet at the wharf at his place, and see the fish and all the eerie things on the bottom.”

“It’s extremely dangerous,” I declared. “Lots of kids have been drowned playing with amateur diving suits. They get tangled up in the ropes.”

“Well, this boy never lets anybody else monkey with it,” explained Jim. “He takes charge and watches every move. I’m going to see if he won’t help me find your engine.”

“It’s hopeless, Jim,” I assured. “You’d need a scow and everything.”

But when an hour later Jim returned in a boat with a scientific young man and a big iron diving helmet built out of scrap iron, with a whole tackle of hose, pump, ropes and gadgets, they had no scow. The whole outfit was accommodated in an ordinary skiff.

“You pay the costs,” said Jim, “if I get your engine.”

“You won’t get the engine,” I said. “It’s your adventure. How much is it?”

“Fifty cents an hour²,” said Jim.

“Okay then; I’ll pay the cost, and if I get the engine it will be mine.”

“Nothing doing,” I stated firmly. “That’s my engine, even if it is at the bottom of the lake. If you want to go and get it, in order to go on this picnic of yours, okay. But it’s my engine.”

“Very well,” said Jim, “I’ll pay the costs, but I’ll feel a lot freer about borrowing the engine any time I want it.”

“I don’t see how you could feel any freer than you do,” I stated, getting into the boat with them.

The young man’s name was Wesley, a name I had thought had gone out of fashion. He was extremely solemn about his diving apparatus. He had it as neatly coiled and stacked as if it were government property. “The principle of the thing,” he said, “is, Mr. Frise puts the helmet on and sets it snug and lowers himself over this little portable ladder I constructed. You hold the rope and pay it out as he descends. I am pumping. We got to be very watchful the rope and the hose don’t get snarled, or else.”

Owing to Specific Gravity

“How does he get back up?” I inquired.

“Owing to specific gravity,” said Wesley, “he is very light in the water. All he has got to do is sort of wish to come up and he gets light, see.”

“And where does the air go you pump down?” I demanded.

“It just comes up in bubbles,” said Wesley.

So we rowed across to Bain’s Island, and I did a job of navigation. It is not easy to recollect details of your position after the lapse of a whole day, especially when, at the time of the disaster, you were filled with indignation, excitement and no oars in the boat. However, I had Wesley row slowly back and forward, searching my memory and watching the gooseflesh sprout all over Jimmie as he sat with increasing mock cheerfulness in his bathing suit, carefully feeling the iron helmet and the rubber hose and other parts of the machine.

“I think,” I stated finally, “it was just right about here.”

“Do we take soundings first?” asked Jimmie.

“Generally we do,” said Wesley, and he I took a clothes-line with a stone on it and lowered it to the bottom. Then he hauled up, measuring it off in yards against his nose, arm extended.

“Seventeen feet,” said he. “Nigh, three fathoms.”

“Are there any leeches around here?” asked Jimmie. “Or snapping turtles or anything?”

“No,” I assured him. “This is fine clear water, though we did have quite a pest of watersnakes around Bain’s Island last summer.”

“Don’t we anchor?” suggested Jim, seeing no anchor in the boat.

“No, you act as an anchor,” said Wesley, “and you can walk along the bottom if you like.”

“What are the signals?” asked Jim.

“Mr. Clark holds the signal rope,” explained Wesley. “One means okay, two means less air, three means pull me up.”

Jim repeated these signals three times very loudly, and then swung on to the ladder that Wesley had hung overside. After a long last look at the coiled hose, the rope, which I held anxiously in my hand, and a final repetition of the signal numbers, Jim signalled Wesley to put the helmet on. It weighed Jim down, so heavy was it. Yet when he swung down and had the helmet half submerged he smiled cheerfully through the glass at us and moved his head around to show he was perfectly comfortable.

With a mute wave of his hand, he let go the ladder and I felt his weight on the rope. He weighed about 30 pounds, it seemed.

It was a grisly sort of feeling, paying out that rope with your friend tied to it. The rope was tied to a belt around Jim’s chest, and a feeling of tremendous responsibility brought perspiration out all over me.

It was spooky, too, to see the continuous bubbles rising as Wesley slowly and anxiously pumped. But spookiest of all was to feel the boat being towed, via the rope in my hands, as Jim started to walk slowly around on the bottom.

He kept giving the one short jerk which meant okay.

“He’s okay,” I kept saying breathlessly to Wesley.

“Don’t pay out the rope,” commanded Wesley, the scientist. “Just let him have enough to tow us.”

Jim walked this way and that. He seemed to climb over small hills and go down into little valleys. He probably wasn’t down two minutes, but it seemed like an hour when he finally signalled three.

“Up,” I said, rising and starting to haul.

“Up,” echoed Wesley, very scientific, pumping with one hand and gently lifting the hose in with the other, coiling it.

And with a great bubble and burst, out came Jim’s helmet beside the ladder and behind the steamy glass Jim was beaming.

“He’s got it,” I shouted.

“I See Something Shining”

Wesley hoisted the heavy helmet off, and Jim, all warm, breathed the cool air and then gasped “I see something shining about 50 feet to the north there.”

“It couldn’t be that far out,” I protested. “This is about where it fell off.”

“Of course,” agreed Jim. “But all I’m doing is looking on the bottom.”

So Wesley rowed over in the direction Jim indicated, and again Jim went overside and again vanished into 16 feet of water, Wesley and I, a little more courageously this time, manned the pump and the signal rope.

“Okay,” came the signal and Jim hit bottom. And then almost at once came a series of sharp single jerks, okay, okay, okay.

“He’s got it,” I cried happily.

“You’ll need to lift pretty easy,” said Wesley. “He’ll have his hands full.”

Jim seemed to cruise around the bottom quite a bit, returning to the same place each time, and finally, after all of three minutes, punctuated with seemingly joyous single jerks that all was well, Jim gave the three jerks to hoist. And as I hoisted, I knew the engine was with him.

Out of the water burst the round bell of the helmet. Through the steamy glass Jim beamed and shouted soundlessly.

Then out of the water came the propeller end of an engine.

But it was not mine.

It was a bigger, much newer engine than mine. It showed some signs of having been in the water a considerable time.

But in addition to the engine up flopped a steel fishing rod and reel, which Jim had tied by its line to the engine. Various other gadgets appeared, as I let go the rope and grabbed the engine to help hoist it on board. A wet sack of tools, a square brown tackle box, a heavy Thermos jar still full of something.

Wesley hoisted the helmet off Jim.

“Salvage,” cried Jim breathlessly.

“This isn’t my engine,” I accused.

“No, and I saw no signs of yours,” replied Jim. “But I found this one, and it’s mine.”

“And all the tackle,” I complained.

“That,” said Wesley, “must be the outfit those American tourists lost when they dumped here early in the season. They dragged all day for it and then gave it up in disgust.”

“Did they leave any address?” asked Jim.

“No, they were just passers-by,” said Wesley. “I guess this is all yours.”

“But look here,” I interrupted. “How about my engine?”

“Ask Wesley,” suggested Jim, turning to inspect his beautiful big engine.

“How about continuing right now,” I said. “I’ll pay the costs.”

“You can go down,” said Jim. “I’m too cold.”

He was blue. There were two leeches on him. He was shaking like a dog on a doorstep.

“Wesley,” I suggested, “how much would you charge to get a friend and spend a day finding my engine here?”

“Fifty cents an hour, and a dollar an hour for my friend who goes down,” said Wesley.

So tomorrow Wesley and his friend and I will continue the search for my engine. I know exactly where I lost it. It was about 100 feet this way of where we looked today. It is a wonder to me Jimmie did not see it shining.

Anyway, he’s gone on his picnic, with his new engine.

---

Editor’s Notes:

This story appeared in Greg Clark & Jimmie Frise Outdoors (1979).

1. $140 in 1939 would be $3,115 in 2026. ↩︎
2. 50 cents in 1939 would be $11.12 in 2026. ↩︎

Only in the good old days could everyone be friendly without getting into trouble over it

By Gregory Clack, Illustrated by James Frise, August 20, 1938.

“It’s a pretty good old world,” said Jimmie Frise.

“If it weren’t for the people in it,” I modified.

“I mean the people too,” said Jim, as he gazed with deep feeling over the ripe fields, the matronly trees in their full garments of the last summer. “I mean everything. She’s a pretty good old world.”

“I really don’t think,” I submitted, “that the world was intended to hold so many people. It would be perfect world if the people were more scattered.”

“You’ll end up a hermit,” warned Jimmie.

“No, I’m sociable enough,” I explained. “But you don’t see nature cluttering up the earth with other species. The birds and deer and other creatures aren’t crowded into space the way humans are. Nature spaces all creatures out, pleasantly. Did you know, for instance, that in the bird world, each pair of birds selects a precise area in which to live, and they don’t depart from it? Maybe an acre or two, in which only one pair of wrens, one pair of robins, one pair of warblers, and so forth, are organized into a sort of bird society.”

“I never knew that,” admitted Jim.

“Oh, yes,” I stated. “It’s called distribution. There can be a number of different kinds of birds in each of these little areas, but if another couple of the same species as any of those already settled there tries to intrude or trespass, there is a fierce fight.”

“How about starlings?” asked Jim. “They live in vast mobs.”

“Only after the nesting season is over,” I informed him. “During the nesting season, they are scattered just the same as all other birds, one pair to so much acreage.”

“The passenger pigeon lived in rookeries,” stated Jim. “Millions all nesting together.”

“Yes,” I cried, “and where is the passenger pigeon today? Extinct. Like the buffalo and all other creatures that live in herds. It is fatal, under nature laws, to live in herds.”

“Humans are different,” commented Jim, as we drove along the side road. “Humans aren’t bound by the rules that govern birds and animals.”

“I think they are,” I replied, “and I think that is one of the big truths science is going to hit on in the coming century. Science is going to discover that there are far too many people in the world.”

“And what,” enquired Jim, “will science do about it?”

“Weed us out,” I declared, “before nature does. Nature weeds out a little more thoroughly and painfully than science.”

“Birth control?” enquired Jim.

“Far better than birth control,” I stated. “I am willing to bet that fifty years from now, you will have to petition the government for a permit to have a child.”

“A permit?” cried Jim, scandalized.

“Certainly,” I decreed. “A permit. A man and wife will have to go before a board of examiners, who will not merely give them a thorough going over as to their physical fitness to have a child, but an intelligence test and everything else, check up on their political views and opinions, just to see if the world needs any more of that kind of opinion and intelligence.”

“Talk about dictators,” breathed Jim.

“Then, if you get a good report,” I explained, “you apply to the government for a permit to have a child. Most of the applications, of course, will be refused. Very few people will have the joy of having children. In a couple of generations, the human race will thus be reduced to a nice comfortable number. The world will not be overcrowded, the way it is now. It will be a very pleasant place to live.”

“It sounds like a heck of a world to me,” said Jim.

“Yes, according to present standards,” I admitted. “But what right has anybody to have as many children as they want? Nature doesn’t allow other creatures to have as many as they want, no, siree. A fish lays two million eggs, in the hope that about ten of them will hatch out and survive to be mature fish. In the bird world, for every five eggs a robin lays, only one robin survives to come back the next spring.”

“How do you know?” demanded Jim.

“Oh, well,” I said, “I was giving you round numbers.”

“That’s the trouble with science,” declared Jimmie. “It deals in round numbers. In fact, it deals in numbers of any kind and that is where it is wrong. Life is not to be solved by numbers. Life is a riddle, a mystery. Strange and beautiful forces drive us all, beasts, birds, insects, plants, to multiply and replenish the earth. Life is beautiful. It must be as beautiful, in its way, to that bug that just smacked against our windshield, as it is to us. A bug lives five days, we live three-score years and ten. But I venture the opinion that that bug crams as much excitement and adventure and strangeness and beauty into its five days, in proportion, as we do into our three score and ten years.”

“I wish the world weren’t quite so crowded,” I insisted. We could ride on the highways in peace, instead of having to be doping along these side roads.”

“Yeah,” said Jim, “and who would pay the taxes for highways? You and who else?”

“People are so pushing, so greedy,” I pointed out. “Each generation seems to be getting greedier and more pushing. Now you take in my grandmother’s time. They had bees. Barn raisings, sewing bees, threshing bees. People all helped one another, just two generations ago.”

“They had to,” explained Jim. “They couldn’t afford to hire anybody, so they had to gang up for the benefit of each other to get certain big jobs done.”

“Nowadays,” I continued, “we live unto ourselves. We do not know who our neighbors are. We nod to them, politely, in the garden, that’s all. How do we know what insuperable problems those neighbors are wrestling with? How do we not know that if we were neighbors in the old-fashioned way, what a godsend we might be to our next door neighbors?”

“Necessity is the mother of most social inventions,” said Jim. “We’ve worked out our present system of everybody living unto himself as the most comfortable way to live. We’d soon get sick of busybodies who would keep coming and ringing the bell at all hours of the day, asking if there was any little neighborly thing they might do for us, like helping to hang curtains or mend a tap.”

“I hate to see such a sudden change,” I stated, “in only two generations, from the husking bees of my grandmother to the cold shoulder we exhibit today, along miles and miles of streets in countless cities, towns and villages.”

“Ah, the villages aren’t so bad,” interposed Jim. “And the country too. It’s pretty neighborly right around here, I would say. Look at these lonely little farms, on this rocky soil. I bet you the people who live around here know where they can find a helping hand nearby.”

Ahead of us, an elderly man was standing on the side of the road, mopping his brow with a red handkerchief.

“There’s a fellow,” said Jim, “who doesn’t find the world too crowded. Why don’t you move up into this neighborhood, if it is a little seclusion you want?”

“He’s holding up his hand,” I remarked. “Will we stop?”

“Be old-fashioned,” suggested Jim, “like your grandmother, and see what help you can be.”

I slowed the car and rolled to a stop beside the old chap. He put one foot on the running board and leaned on the side of the car.

“You didn’t see nothing,” he asked, “of a cow back up the road that way, did you?”

“What kind of a cow?” I inquired kindly.

“Oh, just a red and white cow,” said the farmer, “with some black speckles on her back. I never rightly studied her. Her name is Bella.”

“Well,” said Jim, “we’ve passed a lot of cows along the road. How far would she be?”

“Well, sir,” said the farmer, shifting his position on the running board, “I couldn’t say. I milked her this morning and I ain’t seed her since. She’s got the habit of wandering off. I must put a bell on her one of these days.”

“I’m afraid,” I said, “we can’t be of much help to you. It’s hard to tell one cow from another if you are a stranger.”

“Well, sir,” admitted the old boy, “that’s a funny thing. I had this cow now about four years. I see her every day, but I never rightly took a good look at her. I’d know her when I see her, but if you was to ask me to describe her, I wouldn’t know exactly whether she was mostly brown or white or black. She’s a kind of combination of them all. I’ve owned so many cows, in my time.”

“Well,” I said. “I guess….”

“How would you like,” suggested Jim, “if we drove you a ways up the way we’re going? We might run into her.”

“Much obliged,” said the old boy, as if he had been awaiting this suggestion and he started trying various ways to open the car door.

“Hop in,” invited Jim, swinging the door open for him, and I gave Jim a sideways look. Jim is always making generous gestures like this, especially when I am driving.

“This is very kind of you,” said the old boy, leaning back with a big sigh.

So I drove slowly along the country road, not going too fast because after all, a cow doesn’t stray too far.

We drove leisurely along one whole concession, and no sign of Bella. We saw several cows idly chewing in the roadside, and my heart leaped as we approached each of them, but the old boy cried, “not her, not her.”

I slowed the car at the corner of the concession road, but the old boy made no move to get out.

“I kind of thought,” he mused, “that she would have come this way, but I guess I was mistaken. She must have gone up the side road instead of along here.”

“We’ll take you around the concession,” invited Jim, heartily. “It’s only a few minutes in a car but a long way on your feet.”

“Old feet like mine,” agreed the old boy. “And the rheumaticks, too.”

I turned the car north to go around the concession, while Jim and the old boy chatted about the rheumaticks and how they began to get bad about the end of summer. I did not go so slow this time. I stepped on it and slowed up just long enough, as we came to a cow along the roadside, for the old chap to call out, “not her.”

We made the complete tour of the four sides of the concession without seeing any signs of Bella. When we came back to the corner where we had picked up the old boy, I slowed the car with a sort of finality, which I was sure would serve for a hint.

But Jim again spoke up, ignoring a nudge I gave him.

“I bet we weren’t ten minutes going around that whole concession,” he said. “Now, figure out the likeliest way she went. What way does she usually go?”

“Well, sir,” said the old farmer, “it’s half a dozen of one and six of the other. I find her as often one way as the other.”

“All right,” smiled Jim, “you choose which way now. Will we go around this concession or that one?”

The old boy sat, cogitating. He took off his hat and scratched his head.

“Well, sir,” he said, “I kind of got a hunch that she went this way today.”

He indicated the south-eastern concession, an area two miles and a half by a mile and a half.

“We’ll take the east road first,” said Jim.

I turned the car and drove smartly down the east road. This was a swampy road and we met no cows at all. At the end of the concession, we turned on to a better road and we saw cows in the distance being slowly driven along the road by a little girl, going home for the evening milking. I slowed the car as we passed and the old boy called out to the child if she had seen Bella.

“Yes, Mr. Brown,” said the little girl. “She went past here about noon.”

“Ah, getting hotter,” cried Jim, and I put on the gas and we chased with more interest after the elusive Bella.

Around the concession we raced at a good clip, but by now the cows were fewer and farther between and we saw no sign of Bella.

“Try,” suggested the old man, “off this way. Two weeks ago she strayed and I found her away down here.”

This was in a new direction entirely, and a good three miles from where we had found the old man.

“There she is,” cried Mr. Brown, delightedly, after we had gone only a hundred yards. Bella was feeding along the roadside with a perfectly easy conscience. “The rapscallion. I’ll have to sell her to the cattle buyer if she keeps this up.”

I slowed alongside Bella and let Mr. Brown out.

“It’s a long walk home,” said Jim. “Leading a cow.”

“It’s a long walk,” agreed the old boy, taking a rope halter from his hip pocket, “without any cow.”

“Jim,” I hissed, “are we going to spend the night around here?”

“We’ll tow the cow,” said Jim.

“We will like heck,” I said, starting to change gears, while, Mr. Brown, in the friendliest, fashion, tied the rope on Bella who looked around lazily.

“You can’t abandon an old man like that,” charged Jimmie. “What would your grandmother think of you, driving a poor old boy miles away from his home and then leaving him with a cow?”

“My grandmother,” I informed him, “stayed at home. She didn’t go traipsing about the country in a motor car offering to tow cows home.”

“Mr. Brown,” called Jim, silkily, “climb aboard and we’ll give you a lift. You can lead Bella.”

“I was hoping you’d suggest that,” admitted Mr. Brown, hauling Bella over the ditch and getting eagerly back into the car.

So in low gear, we rode along, with Bella hauling and dragging behind, while Jimmie and Mr. Brown talked about all kinds of country subjects and I sat thinking about my grandmother and the good old days when men could be neighborly without getting into all kinds of trouble.

While planning to remember to forget, Greg and Jim forget to remember

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 19, 1939.

“Anybody home?” bellowed Jimmie Frise up through the humid and deserted halls of my home, in which I am a summer bachelor.

“I’m just going to have a bath,” I called down. “This heat.”

“It’s a doozer,” agreed Jim heavily. “Come and sit in the garden for a little while. I was just passing.”

“I’ll be down in a minute,” I replied, putting my feet back in my shoes.

It was one of those days of smouldering heat which leaves the body limp and the mind confused. What a day for a man, even an old friend, to come bothering around. Why didn’t Jimmie go on home and have a bath himself and then wander around his deserted house moodily, like all the rest of us summer bachelors?

Jim was already out the back door and settled deeply in the best garden chair. I took the swing with a sad groan.

“Oh, boy,” said Jim, “I’m just about through. I haven’t an idea in my head. I feel as if I can never do another cartoon as long as I live.”

“A nice coolish bath would make you feel better,” I remarked.

“It’s more than skin deep,” said Jim. “I’m getting too old to be left alone all summer like this by my family. Nature designed families for men so that men, as they grew older, could be waited upon and tended by their families.”

“Get away with you,” I accused. “You know as well as I do that this two months’ freedom from the nuisance of a family is one of the big things a man looks forward to all year.”

“Not me,” said Jim. “I guess I’m the domestic type.”

“Jim,” I declared, “there isn’t anybody in Canada gets more fun out of life than you do as a summer bachelor. All this legend, this bunk we have built up about the poor summer bachelor… it’s time we exposed it. Why, the peace, the freedom. No kids roaring and banging around the house. No wife waiting at the front door every evening to talk business with you the minute you stick your nose in. You can go to bed when you like. You can get up when you like. Is there anything lovelier than waking in the morning to that perfect hush, with only distant cars going dreamily by?”

“And no engagements all week but your own,” agreed Jim. “If I want to go to a movie, do I have to consider if Aunt Sue or my wife or the older kids have already seen it?”

“And all this bunk about dishes piling up in the sink,” I scoffed. “No house is tidier than a summer bachelor’s. Instead of coming home to a house in a panic, with kids’ toys and coats and junk flung everywhere, you come home to your house exactly as you left it.”

“No arguments about radio programs,” intoned Jim. “No worrying at night about which kids are in and which aren’t. No messages to go. No people calling to see you…”

“Is that so?” I checked.

“You don’t mind me dropping in?” demanded Jim. “I was just passing, and I was feeling so fed up.”

“What about?” I inquired.

“We’d Just Both Disappear”

“I was just figuring,” said Jim, settling back, “that in the past 20 years, I have drawn 1,040 cartoons about Birdseye Center.”

“Well, we started these stories about 1928¹,” I countered, “I’ve written over 600 of them.”

“And I’ve illustrated them all,” snipped Jim.

“I admit your seniority,” I said sourly.

“Coming along the lake shore,” said Jim, “a few minutes ago, I looked out over Lake Ontario and saw away to the south lovely white clouds piled up. There were little sailboats and yachts on the water. The scene shimmered. I got the most awful attack of wanderlust.”

“How do you mean?” I inquired anxiously.

“Don’t you think it’s about time,” asked Jim, “that you and I got around the world a little bit? Why stick in Birdseye Center all our lives?”

“What are you talking about?” I protested. “I’ve been to Rome this spring, and all over the country with the royal tour. I was to Europe the two years before. You were on the Vimy Pilgrimage.”

“I don’t mean that,” twisted Jim. “I mean we ought to take six months and go bumming all over, down to the Caribbean, off to Brazil, over to Russia and Finland and Scotland and all the strong, plain countries where human nature is more human than around here.”

“How could we get away?” I reasoned. “Don’t be silly. The office wants its stint of work from us every day. We couldn’t walk off and leave big families of growing children.”

“We could get amnesia,” said Jim quietly.

“Amnesia?” I exclaimed.

“Sure; it’s a disease,” explained Jim. “You forget everything. You forget who you are and all your past life. And you go wandering all over the place. It would be swell.”

“Is it contagious?” I inquired. “Could we both catch it?”

“As far as I know,” said Jim, “there never has been a double case of amnesia. But we could be the first.”

“How would it affect us?” I pursued.

“Well, we’d both just disappear,” explained Jimmie. “It would cause some excitement among our families and friends, but they’re used to us. At first, they’d worry. But then they’d recollect all the dizzy things we had done and inside of a week, they’d have forgotten all about us, beyond wondering, every now and then, where on earth we had got to. People aren’t missed long nowadays. The world is far too interesting a place for people to be missed.”

“And what would we be doing?” I asked.

“Well,” said Jim, “we’d have to wear old clothes and let our whiskers get stubbly. I’d head for California, I think,”

“Among the thousands of bums and other dopes heading for California,” I agreed, “we’d never be noticed. And then where?”

“Well, Mexico, first,” said Jim. “And then, with the advent of autumn, down through Central America to Brazil and the Argentine.”

Birdseye Center Everywhere

“How would we pay our way?” I inquired.

“We’d bum our way,” said Jim. “Or work it. Don’t worry. A couple of guys with amnesia with nothing to worry about, not even their appearance, can get along fine. We’d ramble all over South America. It would be summer down there. Then we could sign on a fruit boat or cattle boat for Sweden or Finland and get there just about the time spring is arriving.”

“Could I carry a fishing rod?” I asked.

“With amnesia, you don’t carry anything,” explained Jim. “You just wander.”

“And what good would all this do us?” I demanded.

“It would give us a rest,” sighed Jimmie, “and fill us full of material for future cartoons and stories. Men like us, who make their living telling tales and drawing pictures can get material anywhere, so long as it is fresh. There is a Birdseye Center in every country of the world. There are human beings in Peru and Czecho-Slovakia who go through exactly the same antics as people in Sarnia or Kelowna, B.C.”

“Could we go there?” I begged. “I’ve never seen the mountains.”

“No, we’d go to Natal² and Helsinke³,” said Jim, “and Danzig⁴ and Oberammergau⁵.”

“Perm⁶ and Damand⁷,” I contributed. “Sredne Kolimsk⁸ and Tas Ary⁹.”

“Isapahan¹⁰,” sang Jim, “and Samara¹¹, Ust Anabarsk¹² and Yarkand¹³.”

“And find Birdseye Center?” I scoffed.

“In every one of them,” enthused Jimmie.

“If I were to get amnesia,” I countered, “I would prefer to have it, say, in Pennsylvania – there’s a lovely country – or the province of Quebec up around St. Andre d’Avelin or Saint Sauveur des Montagnes. There’s a country full of little villages and hills and good humor.”

“See?” scorned Jim. “You’re retreating. You’ve got no real adventure in you, no desire, no longing.”

“There are people,” I informed, “who have travelled all over the world for 50 years and if you talk with them, they never saw anything, they have not a single interesting story to tell. Yet in some little lost village, you can talk with an old man who has never been anywhere outside the township, and he has seen everything and can talk interestingly and excitingly by the hour of his experiences and adventures.”.

“I wish you had seen that cloud over Lake Ontario, a few minutes ago,” sighed Jim. “With the blue lake and the little ships.”

“I’ve seen lots of sudden, glimpsed things,” I assured him, “that have filled me with far intangible desires. But if I’m going to get amnesia, I would want to really have it so that, if I got to Samarkand, I wouldn’t remember my sons, as they walk off to school in the morning, and me watching from an upstairs window, to see their young long legs striding away, and their backs straight, their heads bent in private thought.”

“Hmfff,” said Jim, but a little weakly.

“Or to remember my house,” I said, looking fondly at its back, “with the rooms the way they look when you come in, with chairs shifted the way somebody else in the family likes them, though it is different from the way I like them; and newspapers open and flung on the chesterfields, despite my life-long orders that the newspaper be read decently by everybody in my house – that is, kept in one piece, the pages not pulled out and bent back and all scrambled up so that I have to spend a lot of time assembling it, front page first.”

“Puh,” said Jim; though I could see he has trouble with his evening paper.

“If I were in Irkutsk,” I stated, “I would not like to remember Ontario in late August, with all the elms drowsing in the heavy fields and a sound of humming as the harvest goes into the barn; nor Muskoka, the season coming to an end, hale winds blowing diagonally across the lakes, a keenness coming, and all the young people brown and half-wild again, and ready to go home to the cities…”

“You don’t deserve amnesia,” muttered Jim.

“Memory is life’s kindest gift,” I declared, “It is the only bank account worth having. All other property is a nuisance, but there is no tax on our memories.”

“There are thousands of people,” disagreed Jim, “who could wish they had no memories.”

“For a little while, maybe,” I agreed, “after some tragic or hateful hour. But one thing about memory, it seems to sort out the best thing for the top. You have to rummage down deep in the heap to find the rags of a bad memory. On top are all the treasures.”

At that moment, a very loud and disconcerting sound came from my house. Out the dining-room window emerged a terrific crash and a complex scrape and clatter and jangle.

“Good heavens,” I cried, leaping up.

“Something fell,” suggested Jimmie reassuringly.

“Oh, oh, oh,” I moaned, unable to take a step. “I forgot to turn off the bath.”

“It wouldn’t be that,” assured Jim. “Modern baths have outlets to prevent overflowing.”

“What on earth could it be?” I begged, fearful of taking one step. Sometimes it is better just to wonder what a thing is than to go and find out.

“Let’s go in and see,” said Jim bravely.

So we went in, and the dining-room was a disaster. The plaster, all wet and dripping had fallen for an area of about six feet square, knocking all the silverware and jugs and trays off the buffet and burying the table with its vase in a horrid heap of rubble.

Water dripped busily from all the dangling jagged edges of plaster above.

“It’s the bath,” I shouted, starting for the stairs.

“But it couldn’t be,” cried Jim, following. “They have an overflow hole.”

“I left it running,” I snorted angrily, “when you came and called me down.”

It was, indeed, the bath. One of those highly modern bath sponges, very soft and technical, which I had tossed ready into the bath, had drifted down to the outlet and dammed it thoroughly. I snatched it out.

The bathroom, the hallway floors were saturated. In the corners, pools had formed, and long runnels ran exploring into every room, soaking into mats and rugs.

“You should have amnesia,” said Jim.

“If you hadn’t come bothering around here,” I stated coldly, “with your blather about amnesia and wanting to go to far places…”

“I’m extremely sorry,” said Jim. “It will be some time before I call again. Is there anything I can do to help you now?”

“This is a job for professionals,” I stated, looking about at the ruin. “I’ll call up the charlady and get her to bring some colleagues.”

It is now only 12 days until the family comes home, which allows time for the plasterer to do his stuff.

The house is damp; but cooler. A smell of wetness, of wet plaster, wet wool, wet wood, pervades it.

But even so, it is nice to remember the way it always has smelled and how it will soon smell again.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. 1932 to be precise, but Greg may be thinking of all of his previous humour stories illustrated by Jim. ↩︎
2. Natal was a former province of South Africa. ↩︎
3. Helsinki Finland. ↩︎
4. Danzig was a city-state at the time administered by the League of Nations. It is now Gdańsk Poland. ↩︎
5. Oberammergau is a municipality in Bavaria, Germany. ↩︎
6. Perm, Russia. ↩︎
7. I think he means Daman, India. ↩︎
8. Srednekolymsk, Russia ↩︎
9. Tas-Ary, a remote island in the East Siberian Sea and part of the Anzhu Islands within the New Siberian Islands (Sakha Republic, Russia). ↩︎
10. Isfahan, Iran. ↩︎
11. Most likely Samarra, Iraq. ↩︎
12. Ust Anabarsk (often written as Anabarsky District) is an isolated, indigenous-led Arctic settlement in the northwest of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), Russia. ↩︎
13. Yarkand is a historical area in Xinjiang China from the Qing dynasty. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 12, 1933.

“I wish,” said Jimmie Frise, “I knew of some innocent amusement us summer bachelors could engage in. Something quiet and domestic and not expensive.”

“In times like these,” I said, “we summer bachelors ought to devote our summers, free of family cares, to making a little money on the side.”

“Poker, you mean?” put in Jim.

“No, no, some quiet, gainful occupation.”

“Like raising rabbits or something?” cried Jimmie suddenly.

“Rabbits, by George!” I exclaimed. “There’s an idea.”

“Listen,” exclaimed Jimmie, “with the family all away for July and August, and no kids in the back yard, I bet we could raise enough rabbits, high-class fur-bearing rabbits, to buy a new car by the time the family gets back from the cottage.”

“Say, how often do rabbits multiply?” I asked excitedly. “Isn’t it every ten days or so?”

“I think it’s every two weeks there’s a new litter,” said Jim, who was raised on the farm. “Now, at this time of year, rabbits will be cheap. We could put in perhaps five pair…”

“Make it ten pair,” I said. “Our yards are big.”

“And at the end of two weeks, ten pair will give us a litter of say six each. There’s sixty rabbits each, plus the original ten pair. Then in two weeks more, forty pair will give us two hundred and eighty rabbits…”

“Hold on, Jimmie,” I cried, “you’ve got to let those young rabbits grow up.”

“Rabbits are very prolific,” replied Jim. “I forget how old a rabbit is when it gets married. But it is only a few weeks.”

“Let’s get some information on the subject, anyway, Jim,” I said. “And we can amuse ourselves for the summer, in an innocent and profitable way, watching rabbits multiply in our back yards.”

A day or two later, Jimmie brought into my office a small gentleman with whiskers, said to be one of the biggest rabbit men in Canada. He did look like a rabbit.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I assure you there is nothing you could think of more profitable than rabbit-raising. I predict a big future for the rabbit fur trade this coming winter. Rabbit fur will take the place of seal, coon, muskrat, mink and other costly fashions. If you gents will just raise rabbits this summer and have a good supply of prime rabbits for the fall trade, I assure you, you will turn your money over very nicely.”

“Are they any trouble?” I asked.

“Trouble?” the little man cried. “Are rabbits in the bush any trouble? No, sir, all you do is put them in your yard, throw in a little feed in the morning before you go off to work, and when you come home at night, there will be twice as many rabbits as when you left in the morning.”

“It certainly sounds interesting,” said Jim, “What kind of rabbits do you suggest?”

The best fur rabbit is the white Andalusian Malooka rabbit” said the little man, “and fortunately I have a few pairs I can spare you.”.

Launched On a New Career

“How much do they cost?” I inquired.

“A dollar each,” said the little man. His face twitched just like a rabbit’s.

“What kind of pens will we have to build?” asked Jim.

“No pens,” said the little man. “If your yard, as you say, has a wire fence around it, you need not worry. Just let them loose in the yard.”

“Won’t they destroy the garden flowers?”

“Rabbits don’t eat flowers,” said the little man. “Feed them plenty of lettuce and other rabbit foods, and all they will do will be to eat your grass and keep it cut, thus saving you the work of mowing the lawn.”

“How many could you spare us at a dollar apiece,” said Jim, “assorted sexes?”

“How many would you want?” asked the little man.

“Ten pairs?”

“Each?” said the little man, his face twisting again.

“Yes.”

And the next evening, a motor truck called at Jim’s house and mine, and from a chicken wire cage on the truck, little Mr. Whiskers hauled out twenty rabbits for each of us. They were large, white rabbits with blank expressions. They had crinkled ears and trembling noses, and the first thing I saw one do when we put it in the yard was hop over to the perennial border and bite one of my delphiniums.

“Hi!” I yelled.

But the delphinium fell with a crash, like a lordly Douglas fir, and by the time I had paid the whiskers $20 the delphinium was set upon by the whole twenty, and they consumed it, bloom and all. You could almost hear them snarling like wolves.

I chased into them with a stick and scattered them, and in the pleasant evening, they sat about, all over the lawn, with their backs to me, ignoring me completely.

“They’re a little nervous at first,” called the little man with the whiskers from over the fence. “But they’ll soon get used to you.”

“I thought you said they didn’t eat flowers?” I demanded.

“With a few exceptions,” said the little man. “Well, good evening.”

I sat in the garden chair, armed with a stick, and commenced my career as a rabbit rancher. The white rabbits did look lovely in the twilight, hopping about the garden, hiding amidst the flowers and shrubs, kicking their hind ends up in the air very quaintly. But when I saw another delphinium staggering in the dusk, I got busy with the stick and chased them around for a while until I felt they were ready for bed. Then I left and walked over to Jimmie’s house.

Jim was busy preparing shelter for his twenty rabbits. He had the empty dog kennel, and two old-fashioned round tubs propped upside down on the lawn, with a clothes peg holding up one edge of each tub. He was chasing the rabbits relentlessly, in the hope that they would take shelter either in the dog kennel or under the tubs. But when I arrived at dark, the rabbits were still scampering around the garden and none had taken refuge in the habitations he had prepared.

So we went out to his front steps and sat there for an hour or so smoking and talking about fur prices. When we crept stealthily around to the back garden, there were the rabbits hopping around in the dark, and apparently having a good time, bed or no bed. So I said good-night to Jim and went home. I decided not to look out the back windows at all, but just go to bed with the feeling that all was well.

Like a Battlefield

I was waked early in the morning by a dog barking fiercely, and I leaped out of bed in time to see a strange dog standing outside the fence barking at my rabbits. So I chased him away by shouting from the window and then visited my pets, with a basketful of lettuce, carrots, and some patent fur-promoting feed in a bag which the little man with whiskers had sold me for a dollar.

As the rabbits fed on the lettuce – and it is curious how a rabbit seems only to be playing with his food, when in reality it is vanishing at a tremendous rate – I made a tour of the garden and found not only had the rabbits eaten half my zinnias, all my delphiniums and a whole garage wall of sweet peas, but they had dug holes in some of the flower beds as if they were intent on tunnelling out of my premises altogether. I was looking at one of the holes when I discovered to my delight a litter of eight baby rabbits cuddled at the bottom of the hole.

“Jimmie,” I telephoned excitedly, “come on over! I’ve got my first litter!”

“I’ve got two litters,” replied Jim proudly.

We went to the office feeling a little like bankers.

That evening, Jim had a total of three. litters and I had two. The garden was now dug up like a battlefield, a nasturtium bed that I planned to have at perfection by the time my wife got home from Muskoka was entirely vanished. When Jimmie came around to visit me toward dark, I was sitting in the middle of the garden with a clothes prop, directing traffic and keeping the rabbits on the move past some of my phlox and early chrysanthemums. I set the alarm clock for 5 a.m.

“Jimmie,” I said, “I detect a curious odor in the garden. Do rabbits smell?”

“I don’t imagine,” said Jim. “But now that you mention it, there is a kind of zooey odor, isn’t there?”

The next morning at 5 a.m. I had five litters, and the members of the first litter were already up and hopping about in the general neighborhood of their mother.

I need not dwell on the remainder of the week, except to say that neither Jim nor I went up to the cottage for the week-end. We decided to stay at home and build chicken wire enclosures for our rabbits. We each had garages behind which a chicken wire runway would not be too unsightly. Jim helped with mine and I went over and helped him. We got the rabbits inside the enclosure by the simple device of putting the feed in there and nowhere else.

“That will be better,” said Jim. “Now we can plant a few more flowers and nobody will be the wiser.”

In the morning, when I looked out the back window, I saw nearly forty rabbits hopping all over the garden as usual. They had dug burrows underneath the wire.

That night, when I arrived home, Jim was waiting on my front porch.

“The neighbors,” he said quietly. “Mine have dug into the yards on either side. “How about yours?”

We took a cautious sortie into my yard, and I could see the lady on the east running wildly around her yard with a broom, while in the yard to the west, the head man was sitting on a kitchen chair on the lawn, armed with a shotgun.

“We’ll have to have proper rabbit hutches built,” said Jim, as we crept out the side drive. “There is no use trying to raise rabbits on the cheap.”

“They’ve destroyed the garden anyway,” I said. “I’m not going to waste money on rabbit houses.”

Jim and I ate a lingering supper at a Chinese restaurant down on Bloor St.

The Neighbors Are Heard From

When we came home, my two neighbors were standing in front of their homes waiting for me.

“Sir,” said the neighbor to the west, “I have shot two of your rabbits!”

“Any rabbit that escapes from my property belongs to whoever can get him,” I said.

“They are ruining my garden!” shouted the neighbor.

“I can’t be responsible for rabbits once they are off my property,” I said. “If they get shot, that is their own lookout.”

The lady next door said she had telephoned to her sister in Hamilton to lend her a savage brindle bulldog. It was arriving in the morning.

“I will not be in a position to sue you,” I admitted, “even if the bulldog does catch any of my rabbits. After all, they are trespassing when they leave my premises.”

Both neighbors retired.

“This is going to cost us money,” said Jim.

“I’m going out and talk to those rabbits,” I said, and we parted for the night.

I lost track of all litters. The last count I made showed fifty-five rabbits of all sizes in my yard.

But I was unprepared for what I saw the next morning when I looked out my window, at my wrecked garden, with the chicken wire enclosure sagging, and all dug under with holes.

By a conservative count, there were over a hundred rabbits leaping and frolicking in the dewy grass of my yard!

There is something so horribly silent about rabbits. I wish they would bark or mew or even cough. But there is something ghostly and unreal about a hundred white rabbits filling your yard with lively silence.

What little was left of my garden was out of reach of the rabbits, and they had eaten the bark off all the lilac trees as high as they could reach. Next door, a bulldog was making silent and dogged efforts to push the wire fence down and get at my pets. On the other side, I could see the legs of my neighbor sitting on his back steps, and he had one of those heavy English air rifles resting on his knees. I could see a couple of snow white forms lying along his perennial border.

I went to work without even feeding the rabbits. I hurried out the door and dashed for the bus.

I visited all my friends that night and stayed out until after midnight. I crept into the house and up to bed, and through the open windows came perfume that would never associate with so sweet and delicate a creature as a white rabbit.

In the morning I took a swift glance out the window, and you could not see any yard at all for rabbits!

I dressed and went down and charged from the back door right into the whole herd, armed with a floor mop. I shouted and chased, and the rabbits fell over each other getting to the fences and down the holes. Standing in the centre, I started to count, a well as I could, for rabbits are the least impressionable of all creatures. They ignore you. They do not even take fright for more than two or three hops.

But by the time I had counted along the east fence, down the south and up the west fence as far as where the hollyhock bed had been, I had counted one hundred and thirty-five rabbits. And that was only part of them.

The Old Nerve Cracks

Jimmie appeared tiptoeing down the side drive, and he signalled me to come and get into his car to drive to work. We didn’t want to disturb the neighbors.

“Jimmie,” I whispered, “a hundred and thirty-five! This is terrible. It looks as if we are going to be smothered with rabbits. I had no idea.”

“If you can just keep them till the fall,” said Jim.

“Man, by the fall, this garden will be three feet deep with rabbits!”

“A little patience…” began Jimmie.

“A little patience!” I cried. “How many have you got? Aren’t they getting on your nerves? Aren’t you seeing things at night? Has your appetite left you? Do you see black dots dancing before your eyes?”

I decided to face the problem that night. I had supper at an orange juice place on the way home. When I got in front of my house I lost my nerve momentarily and drove right on past over to Jimmie’s house.

I walked around to the back.

There was Jim with the hose in his hand watering his back lawn. Not a rabbit was in sight. All the borders had been raked and prettied, and what remained of his plants had been fixed up quite handsomely. All the holes and mounds had been levelled.

No rabbits.

I stood dazed at the gate and Jim turned and saw me.

“Where are they?” I asked, for I had expected to see a layer and a half of rabbits in Jim’s yard.

“Oh, they all got out,” said Jim, brightly. “All gone.”

He waved a hand airily, as if he wanted to change the subject.

I looked at Jim. He was flushed. I thought of the enormous increase in my yard. I thought of waking in the morning and seeing more than a hundred and fifty.

“So,” I said. “So.”

I went over and sat down heavily on the lawn bench.

“If you will tell me how you caught them,” I said, “I will forgive you for putting them in my yard.”

“I used my landing net,” said Jim. “My bass net. It took me all the night before last. I caught them in the net and carried them over four or five at a time in the parrot cage. Believe me, Greg, I didn’t know what I was doing! I was desperate. I was not myself. I am sorry I did it, but I didn’t know what else to do. I had ninety rabbits by the night before last.”

“Where do we find that little man with the whiskers?” I asked.

“I’ll telephone him,” said Jim.

The little man called with his truck at my house.

“If I give you these rabbits,” I said, showing him the spectacle of my yard, “will you take them?”

“Who will catch them?” asked the little man, his face twitching as usual.

“I’ll help you,” I said, “and Jimmie.”

“Profit and loss,” said the little man. “It will cost you $5 for my time. But I’ll do it.”

It was ten o’clock at night when we caught the last rabbit in a neighbor’s yard.

“There’s a fortune in rabbits,” said the little man, as we wished him good-night. “But you’ve got to know how to handle them.”

“And us,” said Jimmie.

But the little man climbed on to the truck and drove away in the night without repartee.