Category: Greg-Jim Story Page 2 of 36

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 28, 1937.

“Look,” said Jimmie Frise, “at all these pathetic little roadside stands.”

“Pin money,” I explained, “for the farmer’s wife.”

“If only,” cried Jim,” the farmers could be taught the art and craft of salesmanship.”

“Craft of salesmanship is right,” I agreed.

“They’re in the selling business,” went on Jimmie, “yet they know nothing of the science of selling. They’re years and years behind the times.”

“Wouldn’t a high pressure farmer look silly,” I protested.

“Listen,” cried Jim, slowing the car so we could have a better view of the little wayside stands as we passed, “we could make a fortune out of a correspondence school of salesmanship for farmers. Teaching the farmers the principles of modern salesmanship in twenty lessons.”

“If farmers were interested in selling,” I pointed out, “they would have quit farming long ago. The ones interested in selling have gone to the cities and are now our big executives in department stores and advertising agencies. The ones not interested in selling have stayed here on the farm.”

“Look,” said Jim, slowing still more. “Look at that outfit. A few mouldy old planks. A couple of untidy crates for support. And a few baskets of fruit and vegetables. And a woebegone lady sitting abjectly behind it.”

“The fruit looks swell,” I objected.

“Contrast that,” cried Jim, “with a modern city fruit store. The bright modernistic decoration of the shop front. The vast gleaming plate glass window. The beautifully patterned layout of the fruit and vegetables, all arranged in geometric design, making without question the most beautiful merchandise display in any city anywhere. And ready to wait upon you, a smart pretty girl in a snow white uniform.”

“Yeah,” I argued, “but the fruit has been packed and shipped and trucked and unpacked and handled and displayed and must have lost all its true freshness and tang. It is pretty but soft. It is ten days old.”

“That’s just the point,” insisted Jim. “If only these farmers knew a little about merchandise display. If they only woke up to what every little two-by-four shopkeeper in cities and towns knows. Here they’ve got the fruit fresh and lovely from their orchards and gardens. Here are highways, upon which flood ten thousand cars filled with consumers, not potential consumers but actual, daily, three times daily consumers. Yet they can’t make the contact. Why?”

“People like their stuff delivered,”¹ I suggested.

“Poff,” snorted Jim. “It’s because the farmers don’t know the first thing about salesmanship. For instance, instead of these measly little shake-down platforms they build with old disused planks and a few boxes, why don’t they erect a neat, well-built little shelter, painted a bright attractive color? Put a roof over it to shelter the buyer from the sun and to create in the public’s mind the impression that the vegetables and fruit are sheltered from dust and cow flies and things?”

Woebegone Wayside Stands

“How much would a shack like that cost? A hundred bucks?” I demanded.

“They could build it themselves, in their spare time, with material lying about every farm,” declared Jim. “Five dollars’ worth of bright paint, white, yellow, green and red, would cover every telltale stick of cast-off lumber. Make it modern. Make it snappy, fresh, vivid, like the very fruits and vegetables offered. Bright red like apples, frosty green like squash or corn on the cob. Yellow like pumpkins, white like onions.”

“I get you now,” I confessed, for almost every quarter-mile, as we ticked along, we passed a wayside stand in the ditch, each more dilapidated than the last one, more woebegone, more completely out of tune with the bright and pleading bounty on display.

“Why?” demanded Jim, “Why doesn’t it stop us? We go right by. Yet in the next town, we’ll probably be beckoned by some tawdry bright soft drink shack and go in for a bottle of pop. Or worse, we’ll be halted by some bedizened² fruit store, run by some guy who couldn’t make sunflowers grow, and there we’ll buy some fruit…”

“I feel like a nice sweetish, sourish harvest apple,” I said, “right now.”

“It is the same principle,” said Jim, “as the little country girl in a faded gingham frock as compared with some salty city jade done up in the latest snazzy slip covers… which does a man prefer?”

“The snazzy city jade, I’m afeared,” I feared, “but how about stopping along here somewhere for a few of those yellow harvest apples? The kind all wet at the core, you know?”

“O.K.,” said Jim, “but I think something ought to be done about it. I think the government ought to start a course of training in salesmanship for farmers.”

“Yeah,” I said, “and lose all the city merchants’ votes. Governments believe in leaving things sitting pretty.”

“I suppose it’s all a case of natural selection,” said Jim. “If a farmer had any ideas about selling, he wouldn’t be a farmer.”

“Yes, and a lot of people who are trying to sell,” I added, “and haven’t any ideas about it, ought to be farmers. It’s a matter of patience. The patient ones are on the farm, watching things grow. Waiting for things to get born. All the impatient ones are in the cities, dashing about, hustling, promoting, urging, stepping up.”

“Like us,” sighed Jimmie.

And then we hove into sight of the saddest and most derelict wayside shrine of agriculture either of us had ever seen. It was by a gate, half in the ditch and half out. It was built of odds and ends that included old fence rails, boxes, crates and pieces of thin board that might once have been part of a chicken coop but couldn’t stand the gaff.

On this rickety and skewed platform were laid, without any decorum or sense of straight from crooked, sundry baskets of apples, four green squash, two baskets of corn and some sundries.

A Little Shrine Does Wonders

Almost hidden from sight behind this poor spread sat a middle-aged woman, bowed as if in grief. She did not lift her face as cars went by, but sat as if counting beads or picking at her fingers, an object of complete symphony with the raggedy table before her.

“Aw,” said Jim, compassionately, as he started to slow the car.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I hissed. “Those don’t look like much apples to me.”

But ignoring me, Jim stopped the car on the shoulder of the road and stepped out. I followed.

“Well, lady,” said Jim, cheerfully. “How’s business to-day?”

The lady did not answer at once. She slowly struggled back to consciousness from the dim place she had been.

“No business,” she said at last. “Three days I been sitting here and you’re the first.”

I noticed the apples, while large and firm, were dusty and some of them had dry mud on them. The squash were muddy.

“Those apples aren’t windfalls, are they?” I inquired.

“No, indeed,” said the lady, now quite restored to consciousness, and getting up to her feet. “Hand picked. I picked them myself. They’re just a little dusty. I laid them on the ground while I put them in their baskets.”

“They’re not very attractive looking,” I muttered.

“Ah,” smiled the lady, “it ain’t the look of an apple.”

“Oh, but it is,” cut in Jimmie, who selected a big yellow one and polished it smartly on his sleeve. “Look at that, now.”

He held the apple up and it gleamed in the sunlight like lacquer.

“Aw,” said the lady, “people aren’t fooled by a little shine.”

“Oh, yes they are,” said Jim, leaning up against the stand in a friendly and conversational way. “Ninety per cent. of the apples you people grow are eaten by city folk. And city people are trained and schooled and brought up to expect a lot of shine on what they buy. Look at cellophane. Why you can hardly buy a shirt or a dozen eggs or anything in the world now that isn’t all wrapped up in the perfectly transparent shine and glitter of cellophane. It’s nothing but shine.”

“Aw,” said the lady, shifting the baskets a little but not improving their arrangement. “I don’t believe in fooling people. A good apple is a good apple, and I know it and they know it, and it’s a fair deal.”

“But how much better,” cried Jim, “if these good apples of yours were made beautiful to look at, attractive and appetizing to the eye?”

“You don’t taste with your eyes,” said the lady.

“In a way, you do,” argued Jim.

“Well,” I interjected, “we’d better be trotting along, Jim.”

“Wait a minute,” said Jim, standing back a little and surveying the rickety layout. “Now, lady, look at the facts. Hundreds of cars are passing here every hour. Full of people who eat three times a day. Yet in three days you say nobody has stopped at your stand.”

A Miracle of Art

“There’s too many of us along the highway,” said she.

“It’s not that,” said Jim, kindly. “Either way along this highway are dozens of stands.

We’ve been looking at them. And the stands where the cars are stopped are the ones that look the brightest, the most attractive.”

“Aw,” said the lady.

“It’s a fact,” cried Jim. “People, like bees, are attracted to the brightest flowers.”

“Yes,” argued the lady, “but where’s the best honey? In buckwheat, and how bright is it?”

“Madam,” said Jim, “let’s just experiment. Look, have you got any kind of a cover, any bright cloth, we could use to cover this stand?”

“I’ve got a patchwork quilt,” said the lady, after a moment, “the loveliest one I ever saw, and I made it myself when I was a young woman. It is red, with stars on it, and bright red roses.”

“Look,” cried Jim, “get it, and a platter or big dish,”

“I have a beautiful blue platter,” said the lady, “about this big, see?”

“Perfect,” cried Jim. “Now, I’ll tell you what we do. I’ll straighten up and strengthen this stand, see. Have you got an axe?”

“It’s in the shed,” said the lady.

“I’ll straighten up this stand,” said Jim. “You fetch the quilt and the platter and my friend here will polish up these apples and those squash.”

“What with?” I demanded.

“Polish them, polish them,” said Jim, urgently. “Take them back to the pump and wash them, first, and then polish them. Put a high glossy polish on them. Do you mind?”

“No, I don’t mind, but…” I said, for I am one who lives by my brains, not by my hands, and I find my brains never hurt me or get blistered or ache.

“Get going,” said Jim. “It won’t take ten minutes to do it.”

“What will I polish them with?” I repeated.

“Look around the house,” said Jim.

“Is there a dog?” I inquired.

“No dog,” said the lady, and she and Jim each took a basket and a squash and helped me back to the pump and then they went indoors while I carried the rest of the stuff. They came forth with quilt and platter and axe and some stakes of wood and I went in to look for polishing materials. There were dish towels on a rack and after hunting through drawers and cupboards, I came on a tin of floor wax, mostly used and pretty dry, but still capable of giving a little when I softened it with my finger.

I went out to the pump and took off my coat and set to. I pumped and let the fresh cold water gush over the apples as I held them two at a time in my hands, turning them. I washed the squash free of all dried mud. I then sat down and dried them with the towel and, with my finger nail, carefully applied a tiny bit of polish.

I could hear Jim thudding and banging down at the gate and could hear exclamations of delight from the lady, as she beheld the miracle of art happening before her eyes. I polished apples until never in my life had I seen such a polish even on red peppers. No apple ever glowed as these did. in their reds and yellows. I was careful not to put too much polish on, and I smelt each apple when complete to make sure no odor remained.

The squash came out of my hands so green and silvery gray and beautiful, so gleaming and shining, I lost all my distaste for the job, and when Jim shouted to me to hurry up, I him I was coming when my job was done.

I carried the first baskets of apples down gate, and if Jim was proud of his remodelling job, he certainly had to share it with me for the apples.

“Good heavens,” Jim cried, “what a shine!”

“They hardly look like my apples,” the lady said, in astonishment.

So I went back and got the rest of the apples and the squash and they were laid out triumphantly on the reorganized stand, and we were standing back admiring the transformation when a big car that was speeding by suddenly jammed on its brakes, skidded to a stop and backed up to us.

A big smiling fellow leaped out and stood staring in delight at the display.

“I’ll take a basket of the apples,” he said briskly, hand in pocket.

The lady made change trembling. Jim and I stood back, proud.

“Make it two baskets,” said the gent, and I snatched up a second basket for him. He selected a choice apple and bit it.

“Ug.” he choked, “guh, guh, thpew!”

“What is it?” Jim cried.

“Poison, arsenic,” shouted the man, gasping and grabbing his throat. “Did you spray these apples, woman? What with quick?”

All was confusion, the man dropped his basket and clutched his face, his neck, his Adam’s apple, his face went livid.

The woman picked up an apple and sniffed it. Then she bit it.

“Owek! Pehaff!” she screeched.

Jim seized one. Bit it.

“What’s this?” Jim shouted, glaring terribly.

“What’s what?” I said.

“What did you polish these apples with?” shouted Jim, each word by itself, as if I were deaf.

“I used a little eeny weeny bit, just a teeny flick of wax,” I said. “Floor wax.”

The gent simply got in his car, slammed the door and lurched off. Jim and the lady stood looking at me with their eyes all screwed up.

“City people,” said Jim, finally, “shouldn’t be allowed to help country people. At all.”

So we went back and washed the apples and squash all over again, and then Jim and I each bought two baskets and a squash and left the lady.

But she sat up a lot more business-like behind her stand.

Editor’s Notes: This story was repeated on August 26, 1944 as “Apple Polishers!”

1. Before the rise of the suburbs and supermarkets, if people bought more groceries then they could carry, they would have them delivered to their home. Most larger city grocery stores would have their own delivery vans or bicycles. ↩︎
2. Bedizened means “dressed up or decorated gaudily”. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 17, 1946.

“Never,” declared Jimmie. Frise, “have I seen such blueberries!”

I relaxed on the sunbaked rocks and brushed off a few deerflies.

“Jim,” I submitted, “we Canadians ought to eat about 15 pounds of blueberries every summer. Fifteen pounds each.”

“Well,” blushed Jim, “I’ve eaten about two pounds this morning already. For every handful I’ve put in the pail, I’ve et one handful.”

“The same here,” I admitted contentedly. “Especially those bright blue ones. They’re the aromatic ones. They’re the spicy ones.”

“I find the dark blackish ones more attractive,” demurred Jim, also sitting down and relaxing on the warm rocks. “Whenever I come on one of those patches of big, luscious black ones…”

And he absent-mindedly scooped a handful off the top of his pail and dribbled them, round and cool and tangy, into his upturned mouth.

We were each carrying a small tin pail which, when filled, we emptied into the larger six-quart fruit baskets. We had struck it rich. We had stumbled upon a veritable Garden of Eden of blueberries. All around at marsh we had found, in the big crevices of the hot rocks, huge veins of blueberries, both the bright blue and the dark blue, hanging in great. clusters, so that all you had to do was slip your hand under a cluster, twiddle your fingers, and you had a handful.

“Blueberries, Jim,” I enunciated, “are a fundamental Canadian fruit. The apple, the tomato, the plum, pear, peach – all are foreigners to this soil, like us. But the blueberry belongs to this particular earth, this sky, this climate. I have a theory that men should eat what grows where they live. If you eat the wheat that grows out of the ground you stand on, wheat that is nourished by the same air you breathe, and the same sun that filters its way through that particular air, then you are properly nourished according to the laws of nature.”

“How’s that?” inquired Jim, as if chewing blueberries had interfered with his hearing.

“I say.” I repeated, scooping a handful off the top of my own pail, “to be healthy and in tune with the life around you, you should eat food grown off the soil on which you stand. In other words, we Canadians should eat blueberries, maple syrup, and any other characteristic foods peculiar to ourselves; and we should not eat imported foods, not even the wheat our bread is made of. Our bread should be made of wheat grown within 50 miles of where we live…”

“What particular virtue would there be…?” asked Jim.

“Who are the healthiest and hardiest people in the world today, Jim?” I demanded. “The Scotch? They are a frugal people who eat the oats that are grown within the confines of their own parish. The South Sea islanders? They eat the food they pick on their own little. coral island. The Yugoslavs? The Chinese? Man, if we had to live under the conditions those races live under, we’d perish in a generation. Yet, what is the basic difference between those hardy people and us races that have to spend more millions per annum on public health than we do on education?”

Such is Familiarity

“Okay,” asked Jim, “wham im de dimmerance?” (He had taken another handful off the top of his pail.)

“The difference is,” I explained, “that, owing to economic difficulties, those hardy races eat what they grow in their own parish. Whereas we scour the ends of the earth for what we eat? We lack vim. We lack ruggedness. We lack contact with the earth, the climate, the atmosphere in which we live. We are thawed out. We are anaemic, debilitated. We call ourselves Canadians, but we are full of California fruit, Oriental oils, wheat grown thousands of miles away. Our body cells are built of materials as foreign to the soil on which we stand as we can possibly imagine.”

“I don’t see,” said Jim, swallowing with a dreamy expression, “that that has anything to do with it.”

“Jim,” I asserted, “any fisherman knows that you can catch minnows in one lake, and fish with them in another lake, and have no luck at all. Whereas, if you catch the minnows in the same lake as you fish in, you have the greatest luck. It is scientifically proven, for example, that the gray leech of Lake Simcoe, which is the favorite bass food in Lake Simcoe, and which will give you a catch of bass under almost any conditions in Lake Simcoe, won’t work at all in the Kawartha lakes only a few miles away.”

“That’s a matter of familiarity,” protested Jim. “The bass know the familiar food…”

“Precisely,” I agreed. “And our bodies are like feeding bass. Our bodies know the familiar airs and flavors of things grown out of the same soil and the same air we’re grown out of.”

“Then, that’s why westerners are husky,” suggested Jim. “They eat the wheat grown in the west.”

“And that’s why maritimers are so husky,” I confirmed. “They eat the fish out of the waters all around them, and the potatoes out of the soil on which they stand…”

Blueberry Paradise

“What’s Ontario got?” demanded Jim at little anxiously.

“Blueberries,” I announced proudly, holding up my pail.

So we sat, meditating, and scooping up the odd handful of the sweet, aromatic, spicy little round berries, while the mid-morning sun beat down on the rocks around us, and the wind, cured across a thousand square miles of rock and pine just like this surrounding us, seemed to fill our lungs with only half a breath.

“I think,” said Jim, “I am a little faster picker than you.”

“Heh, heh, heh,” I rejoined.

“I’ve dumped my pail three times,” he said.

“And I,” announced, “have dumped my pail three times. And I’ve got the pail ready for a fourth dump.”

“I’ve eaten more than you,” explained Jim.

“You can’t prove it,” I rejoiced.

“What I say is,” said Jim, struggling into an upright posture, “we work towards the cottage now, picking only the choicest berries. We have the baskets full. We have the pails almost full. Let’s eat a few more handfuls. Let’s top off the baskets AND the pails with just the prize-winners. And then we can have a swim and… what are we having for lunch?”

“Those bass we caught last night,” I advised.

“What are the ladies going to do with these berries?” demanded Jim darkly.

“Well,” I cogitated, “this afternoon, they are going to bake four fresh blueberry pies. And when I say FRESH blueberry pies, I hope you know what I mean. Not blueberry pies made out of canned blueberries. Not pies made out of home-preserved blueberries. But pies baked out of FRESH blueberries picked this morning. Cool, tight-skinned, explosive blueberries. You can taste them bursting in the pie…”

“How far are we from home?” asked Jim, struggling to his feet.

“About one mile,” I said. “We’ll wander around this end of the marsh and look for just the toppers.”

Personally, I don’t know any place in the world as beautiful as Canada. I’ve seen them all. They have their points. But here are the waste places of Canada. Here are the deserts of Canada. Nothing forever will grow here but what nature planted.

You can’t get farms here, you can’t get factories. No villages will ever come, except to keep a small general store for the accommodation of the cottagers, who will come to find a little air and peace and quiet amid the rocks and the spruce and the pines and the water.

And the air. As Jim and I meandered over the rocks, prospecting every vein and every lode, we could feel the Canadian air reaching down and back into our very vitals. When I am in the woods, I think my lungs are the shape of a pillow-case. In cities, no air ever penetrates into what you might call the “ears” of the pillow-case. But in the wild rocks of the north, every breath you take sends air deep and far into those “ears” of your lungs.

It was getting towards noon. We had filled the baskets. Our pails were full. There is a curious thing about blueberry picking. No matter how often you go, no matter what old, reliable patches you call on, it so happens that after your pails are full, you come, at last, to a new patch, a patch never noticed before, that is laden with the largest, coolest, most silvery sheened, most heavy-laden of all the patches you have found in the day.

It was so this morning. We finished prospecting the marsh’s rim. We had wandered a little west of the old familiar route which years of prospecting had proven the best blueberry terrain. And then we found Paradise.

There are two species of blueberry, as I have already suggested. There is the familiar huckleberry, almost jet black, with its purplish insides straining to burst through the delicate skin. Jim goes for them.

But there is also the really blue berry, with a skin as blue as the sky on an August day with the west wind blowing. Its delicate skin is covered with a dust as fragile as the dust a butterfly’s wing. It does not often grow as big as the black huckleberry, but it has a curious spicy flavor that sets it, in my opinion. far ahead of its fat, purplish relative.

Out of Season

On the edge of a small rock gulch, I found, around a copse of runty pine and baby birch, such a patch of my sky-blue lovelies as I had never seen before. On tall, slender twigs, great festoons of bright powdery blues as big – pardon me! – as robin’s eggs. While Jim, down in the rock gulch itself, in the shade of larger trees, found, snuggled close to the earth, a sort of witches’ treasure of his favorite great big black ones – as big, pardon me, as – gooseberries!

As a matter of procedure, I tried a few handfuls first, before picking for the pail. When I straightened up, to inform Jim that he was wasting his time down in the gulch, I happened to notice a movement amid the bracken and juniper.

A black, glossy movement.

I focussed my eyes sharply. And there, shyly, embarrassed, as little babies approach, came two brown-nosed bear cubs.

Bear cubs!

In August, bear cubs? Where there are cubs, the mother is nearby.

“Jim!” I said hoarsely.

But Jimmie was busy chewing.

So I slid down into the gulch with him. “Jim,” I said, in a low voice, “bear cubs. Follow.”

I said it, so to speak, in transit.

Jim followed.

We scaled the far side of the small gulch and looked back. “Where’s your basket?” whispered Jim.

I did not need to reply. My basket was where I had left it, over on the far side of the rocks.

As we moved, almost as delicately as shadows, out of sight of the two cubs, they were in the act of discovering my basket.

We moved smoothly and rapidly about 100 yards before pausing for breath.

“Where’s YOUR basket?” I demanded.

“I left it,” cleared Jim, “in the gully.”

“What will the women-folk say,” I accused, “when we turn up with these two pails?”

“Listen, Greg,” said Jim, “when you see bear cubs, there is no time to waste. See a grown bear, and you usually see him skedaddling as fast as he can go.”

“But when you see cubs,” I suggested, “the situation reversed?”

“Exactly,” said Jim, sitting down to catch his breath and to hoard his precious pail.

We sat on a slight eminence of rock, gazing back whence we had come, ready for instant action.

“Hist!” said Jim.

The Strategic Retreat

And we could hear crackling and crushing sounds, as of baskets being squashed; also sounds of animal greed floating on the mid-day calm air – grunts, growls, slurps, guzzles…”

“Jim!” I suggested. “That isn’t cubs…”

So we picked up our pails hastily and put another good 200 yards between us and the sounds. Two hundred yards of rock and hummock and ledge and crevice – it was hard going. Then we relaxed again, choosing a particularly high eminence of rock, with lots of field of fire, as the infantry say, all around us.

And we listened. And we peered.

And suddenly, over the far ridge, behind which lay the small rock gulch where we had parted with our berry baskets, we beheld three enthusiastic forms appear, in every movement expressing delight and concurrence. A pair of small cubs was coming, nose down, straight on our trail.

“Jim,” I gasped, as I made my feet, “leave the pail, leave the pail…”

“Eh?” huffed Jim.

“Remember,” I said, already in high gear, “the story of the Russians and the wolves chasing their sleigh, and how they threw out the robes… and the baggage… and finally, the child…?”

Jim laid his berry pail like an offering on the rock, and then joined me in free knee-action.

We put a good half-mile between us and the pails before relaxing once more. This time on the highest rock for miles around. With hundreds of yards of field of fire around us on all sides.

We waited until we got our breath.

“The bears figure…” puffed Jim… “that it’s easier to chase us and take our berries off us than… pick them… themselves…”

“It’s a great discovery,” I whuffed, “for the bears… human beings to pick their berries…”

And then we got mad.

And we got up and hurried to the cottage.

And we got my Winchester .33, which hangs on the wall awaiting the deer season.

And full of ire, we retraced our path.

We found the pails, empty, squashed, kicked about, as though by little children in mischief.

We found our baskets, empty, stained, squashed, chewed.

But of bears we saw never a trace.

And far and wide, over the afternoon rocks, the sun shimmered, the heat swooned, and the blueberries flirted at us from every crevice and every ledge.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, July 10, 1937.

“What do you think,” asked Jimmie Frise, “about this new psychology angle, about how to make people like you?”

“The weather’s too, hot,” I explained, “to think about things like that. Psychology is a winter sport.”

“An awful lot of people,” said Jim, “are taking up this friend-making business. You can make friends now just the same as you I can make pies. It’s a science. You take so many ingredients, mix them up, subject them to heat, and there you are – a friend.”

“Pie-making is a science nowadays,” I stated, “but it used to be an art. There are pie factories to-day where, in vast white-tiled sanitary kitchens, expert pie-makers, working with chemicals and employing every device of mechanical perfection of measuring, mixing and cooking in automatically controlled ovens, produce thousands of pies per day. But who wants a sanitary pie?”

“I was talking about friends,” Jim protested.

“It’s the same thing.” I declared. “Now in the old days, when pie-making was an art, a friend was a friend. I don’t like synthetic pies and I don’t think I would care for synthetic friends. You ought to have tasted my grandmother’s rhubarb pie.”

“The heat has got you,” said Jim, a little wearily. “You’ve got pies and everything all muddled up.”

“This rhubarb pie,” I continued tenderly, “had no top on it. The rhubarb was mixed with eggs and sugar in some way so that when it was cooked a sort of brown crust had formed, crisp and crystalline, over the tangy rhubarb. Ooooooooh!”

“The trouble with any art,” stated Jim, “is that so much of it is lousy. When pie-making was an art, only those who knew the artists were in luck. Maybe your grandmother could make pies, but think of all the terrible pie you have tasted in bygone, years, before science came to the rescue of mankind as a whole.”

“You’re right,” I admitted. “I can recall those awful pies I had away from home. Apple pie especially, with a sort of thick, pallid crust, almost white. Filled with horrible hunks of half-cooked apple, heavily sprinkled with nutmeg to try and conceal the true facts.”

“And punkin pie,” said Jim. “I’ve eaten some punkin pie that might just as well have been boiled newspaper.”

“My grandmother,” I said, “had a way of making blueberry pie that passed away with her. She put vinegar in it, somehow, and the bottom crust, instead of being leathery, like most pies even nowadays, was so crisp it splintered under your fork. Yet the blueberry juice which spurted all over the place when you sank your fork into the pie never sogged down into that paste. As a kid I used to spend most of my summer holidays picking blueberries for my grandmother.”

“It was an art,” agreed Jim. “But I would say that the average pie to-day is a thousand per cent. better than the average pie of your grandmother’s time.”

“Suppose I admit that,” I asked, “where does it land us? Don’t you see that it only makes pies commonplace? Don’t you see that instead of really great pie being something beautiful and strange and treasurable and lovely, that anybody can have really great pie nowadays and something beautiful and treasurable has gone out of life?”

“What nonsense,” said Jim.

Making Everything Good

“It’s not,” I assured him. “We are eliminating all the values from life. By making everything good, there will soon be no good left. By making everything beautiful, where will we turn for beauty?”

“How absurd,” insisted Jim.

“Science,” I decreed, “is the guilty party. What art created science has bent itself to reproduce in mass. Discover something good, and what happens? Science gets busy and makes a million of it for general use.”

“And why not?” cried Jim indignantly.

“Because,” I explained, “a million of it isn’t deserved. This world didn’t get where it is by patient plodding. No, sir. It got here by the fire of inspiration and genius. But now we are making everything available to everybody, beauty, comfort, pleasure joy – all the sweet remote prizes of life – we’re making them commonplace. So what? Well, there’s going to be fewer and fewer fires amongst the human spirit, and I bet you the next hundred years are going to be the dullest and silliest in human history.”

“Utter rot,” asserted Jim. “We’re going to see in the next hundred years the flowering of the human spirit as the result of long ages of patient cultivation. What can the effect of universal cheap transportation be but to show all men the earth? Think radio and its effect, making beautiful music and good ideas available in every home on earth, rich and poor?”

“Until science got busy with means of transportation,” I said, “only those with courage and the high heart went forth to see the world. The rest of mankind stayed home like hogs in their bin. And those who went forth into the world told of its beauty and strangeness in song and story and picture, and made us believe the world was beautiful. Nowadays any fathead who works like a horse at some stupid job and saves his money can go safely to the ends of the earth, and he sends home picture post-cards and secretly feels the poets lied. He doesn’t realize that just by being there he has stolen away the beauty.”

“Oh, what a Tory,” breathed Jim malignantly.

“And as for radio and beauty and good ideas,” I informed him, “what is the greatest program on the air to-day? It is the program of a man with a large red nose in controversy with a ventriloquist’s dummy.”¹

“What a miserable attitude you have towards life,” said Jimmie. “You’re one of those who ought to study this new science of making friends. It would give you a sweeter feeling towards your neighbors.'”

“What kind of a science is this friend-making?” I demanded.

“It’s simplicity itself,” said Jim, happy to be rid of me. “All that it requires of us is that we become aware. Aware of others. Alert to life all around us. Psychology teaches us that we use only a little fraction of our powers, mental and physical. We go through our lives like worms burrowing in the dark earth.”

“Worms,” I pointed out, “would darn soon regret it if they came up and started cavorting around in the hot sun”

“Wait a minute,” protested Jim. “The trouble with us is that we are aware only of our own lives. And aware dimly of a few right around us with whom we grudgingly share a little of our interest in life. If we open our minds and hearts, if we deliberately become aware of others, their interests, their cares and labors, their lives, then, without effort at all, they become our friends.”

A Larger Awareness

“What good would we get out of it?” I inquired. “All they would do is keep coming around after supper and wanting to tell us their troubles. I know those friends. A guy has got to be guarded in his sympathy.”

“I’m not talking about sympathy,” said Jim. “What we get out of a larger awareness of others is a fuller feeling of ourselves, a kind of indefinable joy and pleasure, like waking up in the morning after a grand night’s sleep, or sitting on the cottage veranda after a swell swim waiting for lunch. Waking our minds to others makes our spirits tingle. It is like reading eight or ten exciting novels all at the same time.”

“Just a muddle,” I said.

“In no time at all,” went on Jim, “those who deliberately practise awareness are revolutionized in their manners and attitude. They become good natured and agreeable. All the harsh angles are rounded off…”

“Old stuff,” I cried. “This is the old personality idea. How to be a success in any company. How to be the life of the party. They laughed when I sat down at the piano…”

“It’s entirely different,” insisted Jim. “There are no rules or formulas for making friends. It is just an inner change. A sort of rousing. Wakening. And immediately people are attracted to you, as people are attracted in the lonely night to a house with all its windows lighted.”

“Of two houses,” I stated, “one all lit up for a party, full of gabbling people and cars parked outside and eight or ten people besides myself inside trying to hold the limelight, and another house with only one room dimly lighted but in that room a friend…”

“Well,” said Jim, “I’m interested in this stuff and I’m starting to practise it. It doesn’t seem to work with you. Have you noticed any change in me? Don’t I seem sort of easy and open minded this morning?”

“I never saw you more pigheaded,” I assured him. “All you want to do is argue.”

So we continued with our work, Jim scratching away at his cartoon with his head held back, squinting dreamily; and I sneering at my typewriter. And after a while there came a light knock on the office door.

“Come in,” called Jimmie in a musical voice.

“Who the…” I muttered.

The door opened gently and revealed two young men standing respectfully on the sill. They carried leather cases. They were well dressed. But it was their expression that was remarkable. A look of warmth, of restrained joy, of hope no longer deferred, glowed in their eyes; and their smiles were like Robert Taylor’s.²

“Mr. Frise? Mr. Clark?” said the dark one, tensely, as if he could scarcely believe his eyes.

“Yes,” I said sharply.

“Come in, come in,” cried Jim, throwing down his pen.

All speechless with pleasure, the two young men stepped in. With intaken breaths and quick glances around our tousled office as if they were entering some holy place, they set their leather cases down and laid their hats on our desks.

“What is it, what is it?” I said pleasantly enough. “I’m very busy this morning.”

But the sheet of paper in my typewriter was still blank.

“Mr. Clark,” said Jim, rising and offering them a cigarette, “tries to pretend he is a fierce little man.”

“Really,” I said, “I have to get this done. this morning, as you can see…”

“Gentlemen,” said the dark one, “we can come back some other time. Just name an hour. We wouldn’t dream of interrupting your work.”

His voice went deep and quivered.

The fair one reached for his hat and picked up his leather case, giving me a most apologetic little grin, as he half backed to the door.

“To what are we indebted for the honor of this visit?” said Jim.

“Our visit,” said the dark one, quietly “is probably more important to us than it is to you, and therefore I hesitate…”

“Forget it,” said Jim.

“We represent,” said the dark one, in a tense and almost confidential voice, “a worldwide organization that includes universities, royal societies, international organizations, publishing…”

“Ah,” I said, “books.”

“Sir,” said the dark one, turning respectfully to me, “I sincerely beg your pardon. I know we are intruding. Please excuse us, and some other time…”

He, too, reached for his hat. He was flushed and embarrassed and the very embodiment of apology.

“What kind of books have you got?” I relented slightly.

“I’m afraid,” said he, “they are hardly the kind of thing we ought to show you two gentlemen, so widely…”

“Now you’ve got me interested,” I cried. “I never met anybody selling books who didn’t have to be thrown out by the office bouncer. Here, let’s see what you’ve got.”

“It is a collection,” said the dark young man diffidently, “of biographical and historic sketches of successful personalities, and differs from all other biography in that in each instance selected from the world’s great statesmen, authors, soldiers, leaders in all walks of life, attention has been focussed on the personality of each, and studied in its relation to his success.”

“Mff,” I said, the dark one began to unbutton his leather valise.

“In biography,” explained the dark one, “so much attention is paid to such detail as origin, ancestors, early environment and then historical record, that the true secret of their greatness, their personality, is lost sight of. The scholars who prepared this collection, scholars from many countries and all of them famous men themselves, have delved into hitherto neglected records, letters, unpublished lore of all sorts, anecdotal, contemporary gossip, in order to recreate, as it were, the living personality, without boring you with an account of the activities of these whom the world accepts as our greatest men. An astonishing truth emerges from this new approach to the question of greatness…”

Foundations of Personality

“What of that?” I asked.

“That all our great, from Caesar, down to present day and living men accepted as great,” said the dark young man, “had almost identical foundations of personality.”

“You mean Caesar and Einstein?” I demanded.

“Exactly,” said the young man, with a look of admiration on his face. “You’ve hit it square on the head.”

And he turned and gave his partner a swift look as much as to say, “Didn’t I tell you this was a smart man?”

He then just stood and looked at me reverently, never saying a word, but handing me volume after volume out his case. They were pleasant, stiff volumes, with gravure portraits of the subject of each chapter. There were Caesar, Beethoven, Theodore Roosevelt, Marlborough, Lindbergh, Titian, General Pershing, Charlemagne, Rembrandt, Edison, hundreds of them, some disposed of in a few pages, others taking up a quarter of a volume.

“It’s more just to show them to you,” said the dark young man. “To get your reaction. We’ve read your articles for years, ever since we were schoolboys, haven’t we, Eric? And I said, before we start in on our select list, given us by a federation of university advisory boards, I will just get the reaction of a practical man who makes personality his daily study…”

“It’s a little over my head,” said Jim awkwardly. “I don’t even know who half of these people are written up here. But you certainly made no mistake in coming to Mr. Clark. Now he…”

“How much is it?” I asked doubtfully.

“The normal price, as a matter of fact,” said the young man, “is forty dollars, but we have been given a few sets to be disposed of, confidentially of course, to any who assist us with counsel or advice of a critical nature, at only twenty-five dollars. In return for your kindly interest in this work, I almost wish I could afford, out of my own pocket…”

“Tut, tut,” I said. “I am getting together a library for my sons, and biography is in line…”

And in no time at all, I had signed the little slip of paper and paid my cheque and was assured the complete set would be delivered to my home within a few days.

“Now,” said the fair-haired young man, stepping forward and starting to unbutton his leather case, “Mr. Clark, I’d like to show you this set of four volumes on how to attract friends.”

“Which?” I demanded, hardly having my fountain pen back in my pocket.

“It’s a remarkable work,” said the young fellow. “My partner and I have studied it and it has done us an unbelievable amount of good. It has entirely revolutionized our methods of salesmanship. We are no longer high pressure, but low pressure. And it works twice as good. The secrets, as set forth here, as to awareness, alertness to our fellow man and his temperament personality…”

“Gentlemen,” I said loudly, “good morning.”

And Jim, the silly, accompanied them out to the elevator, joking and laughing.

Editor’s Notes: This story was repeated on July 8, 1944 as “Making Friends”.

1. This is probably in reference to Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. They were only recently on the radio in 1937. As mentioned in the Wikipedia article, the popularity of a ventriloquist on radio, when one could see neither the dummies nor his skill, surprised and puzzled many critics, then and now. ↩︎
2. Robert Taylor was a popular actor at the time. I guess he lost some popularity as in the 1944 repeat, his name was replaced with “their smiles were like a tooth-paste model’s”. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, June 29, 1935.

“Ah,” cried Jimmie Frise, “come illy bong!”

Come what?” I requested anxiously.

“Come illy bong,” explained Jimmie. “It’s a French saying. It means, ‘Ah, how good it is’.”

“How good what is?” I asked.

“Everything,” cried Jim, expanding his chest and sighing. “This June day. This new flannel suit I’ve got on. This blue tie. This crisp, fresh underwear. I feel like a million dollars.”

“I’m glad you feel good,” I said. “I feel kind of dowdy myself.”

“Ah,” sighed Jim. “To feel good all the time. To feel fresh and crisp and cool and listless, if you get me?”

“I think so,” I said doubtfully.

“I mean, life could be so swell,” said Jim tenderly, “If only we could surround ourselves with the finer things, good clothes, nice furniture, pleasant people. Just to hold this feeling I have right now and hold it all my life!”

“Maybe it would be kind of monotonous,” I suggested.

“I think,” said Jim thoughtfully, “that this feeling I have right now, this sense of well-being, this cleanness and peacefulness, is the goal of all human life. I think this is what millionaires and kings and princes, all those swell people you read about in England and Boston and the Riviera are aiming at. What you call culture. Culture is the business of getting hold of this feeling I have right now and making it permanent.”

“Some days it would be rainy,” I suggested.

“Do you ever read those society magazines?” asked Jim. “They sometimes show two or three pages of somebody’s estate. Beautiful big gardens all filled with flagstone walks and statues and fountains.”

“And nobody in them,” I pointed out.

“And big cool houses,” went on Jim, “and rooms filled with only a little bit of furniture, but all of it old and antique and oval and lovely.”

The chairs look as if nobody had ever sat in them,” I remarked.

“And grand staircases,” continued Jim. “Great curving walnut staircases. And panelled walls with maybe two paintings.”

“I’ve seen them,” I agreed. “The living quarters are in the attic.”

“I’m trying to explain something,” said Jim, “if you’d give me a chance. What I mean is that sense of peace and purity you see in those estates. That’s culture. That’s the way these rich people try to seize hold of this feeling I have got to-day and keep it forever. Now, you take food. Do you know what a gourmet is?”

“A guzzler,” I said.

“Just the reverse,” said Jim. “A gourmet is a person of discrimination in eating. He is a judge of good food. He never eats anything but what is cooked by an artist. He has taste. He wants food prepared for his sense, not to fill him up like pancakes.”

“I like waffles,” I admitted. “They fill you up.”

“Ugh,” said Jim, waving his hand delicately. “A gourmet feels the way I do all the time. Only it is his eating that keeps him cool and dreamy and peaceful. He thinks of eating all the time. As soon as he finishes one meal of, say, goose’s brains and truffles, which is a kind of mushroom, he lies back and starts thinking up something he will have for supper, say, plover’s eggs and filet of sole a la Mornay.”

Culture is a Food

“Where did you get all this stuff?” I asked.

“It comes to me naturally,” said Jim, “when I feel like this. I think some of my ancestors were French gourmets. The French are the most cultured people on earth.”

“Well,” I said, “between thinking of those pictures of beautiful estates in the society magazines and thinking of fancy eating, sort of dreamy like, taking little nibbles and rolling your eyes between each taste, I don’t think I would care much about being cultured.”

“You will observe,” said Jim, “that the big game hunters, the African lion hunters, are always rich people and Belgian barons and so forth. That is their occasional reaction. When they get too much culture, they go lion hunting in Africa and eat corn pones¹ cooked by Congo natives.”

“Culture,” I said, “is all right in its place, but it must be awful as a regular thing. Suppose you wanted to yawn and yell and get up and kick the cuspidor? You couldn’t do that if you were cultured.”

“The more I think of it,” ignored Jim, “the more I realize that we masses…”

“Ah,” said I.

“We masses are missing the greatest things in life,” said Jim, “by not cultivating this inward peace, this feeling of perfection. We toil and slave for some cheap and tawdry goal. We live amidst higgledy-piggledy furniture and eat food that fills us, that’s all. If only we could give all mankind a hint of how lovely life can be, every passing hour of life, every day. And have all mankind gently, culturedly striving, without effort, to achieve this goal.”

“I like that about gently striving, without effort,” I admitted. “Sort of dreamily working, like.”

“If, instead of the terrible drive of modern life,” declared Jim, “we could gear life down to a gentle pursuit of a feeling, a sense, a state of mind, even taxi-drivers and steam shovel men could be cultured.”

“How would we go about getting cultured?” I asked. “Would we have to go back to the university and all that sort of thing?”

“If you didn’t get it at the university the first time,” said Jim, “you won’t get it the second time. I venture to say that I could give you a better feeling of culture by taking you through an antique store for a couple of hours, and then leisurely wandering into a high-class restaurant where there is a good French chef and ordering a dinner for a gourmet, than five years at the university would give you.”

“I’ll do that some day,” I confessed. “Because the two years I was at the university, there was no talk about culture. A man away off at the far end of a big amphitheatre with 700 students in shouted something about the corollary of the some theorem. That wasn’t culture. And going to rugby games and having to yell the way the fellow in the white sweater signalled at us wasn’t culture. One time I tried to spend a night wandering amongst those lovely old stone towers on ‘Varsity campus to look at the stars, but Christie, the campus cop, chased me and told me to go home. It was no good.”

“Culture,” said Jim, “is a feeling, a mood. I’m in it now. Right now, I am cultured. I could go through an antique store right now and appreciate everything, the old glossy wood, the curves of the carving on chairs, the size and proportions of tables and dressers. I could look and fondle old silver. Away back in me something would wake and start to glow, like an ember in a fire that had gone out…”

“Jim,” I said, “I have a little feeling like that, too. Let’s go.”

“When one feels this way, one ought to go,” admitted Jim, rising elegantly.

“They’re My Set-Up”

So we went to a little antique store that Jim knew of because the man who runs it often meets Jim at the races where they choose the same horse. Dim and shadowy was the little store, and filled to the roof with lovely old antique furniture. So dim and shadowy was it, that the furniture seemed more antique than ever.

Old chairs, tables, funny little stands, pictures, old silver, tall cabinets, foot stools, the young lady who was in charge because Jim’s friend was away for the afternoon allowed us to wander among. We sat on old sofas, examined old tables and looked at the pegs that held them together instead of nails; fondled old silver teapots the girl brought us reverently: Jim working tears in his eyes several times, tears of appreciation of something specially fine. Most of all, we liked two chairs and a little table that stood in the window of the store.

They were perfect. The wood seemed to glow from within. The design actually flowed.

“We were still admiring these pieces when the boss came in, very dejectedly. He shook Jim’s hand sadly. Jim said:

“Not getting them these days, Ernie?”

“To-day,” said Ernie, “five of the six ran in the can. And the sixth one paid $1.15.”

So they talked horses for a while, and then Jim gradually wooed Ernie off horses and on to antiques. But Ernie was off antiques for good.

“Just like the horses I bet on,” he growled.

“We like those two chairs and that table in the window,” said Jim.

“You can’t have those,” said Ernie firmly. They’re my set up.”

“Your what?” asked Jim.

“My set up,” said Ernie. “I spent eight years in the antique business to get those. They’re what bring people in here.”

“Naturally,” said Jim, “you put your prize pieces in the window. But wouldn’t you sell them?”

“Sell those!” exclaimed Ernie indignantly. “They’re genuine.”

“Er-” said Jimmie, turning to look back in the shadowy store.

“Er-to you,” said Ernie. “Do you imagine for one minute that a gang of hicks working with hand tools a hundred and fifty years ago could make as good antiques as trained men with modern machinery can make? Be yourself, Jimmie.”

“But those in the window,” I protested.

“Listen,” said Ernie, “there were about ten artists a hundred and fifty years ago, and every stick they made is known to the world, just the way every picture Rembrandt painted is known. If you want any good antiques, I can get them made for you better than all the wood-choppers of Queen Anne’s reign. And within six days.”

“The silver?” said Jim, a little brokenly. “That teapot?”

“Exquisite 1934,” said Ernie contemptuously. “Stick to horse racing. Jim.”

“That sofa?” said Jim. “Horse hair?”

“My man made it in two days,” said Ernie. “Listen, Jim, when that sofa was supposed to be made the mobs of France were burning the chateaux: in England, millions were starving before the Napoleonic wars put up the price of goods, and the world was poverty-stricken in a way you can’t even imagine. How many swell homes do you suppose there were in the eighteenth century in order to equip all the swell mansions of the States, Canada, England, France and Germany to-day?”

A Silence As of Watching

Jim took another long look at the lovely dusky furniture, the gleaming silver, the smudgy oil paintings on the walls.

“Well, I’ll be seeing you at the races,” he said, and we went out.

We drove down the street.

“I’ve lost the feeling,” said Jim. “I feel soggy and damp. But maybe if we could get a little good food, if we could find a chef, a real chef.”

“I saw the dearest little place,” I told him. “Just a plain little restaurant, with small menus in ordinary handwriting on the windows. Let’s take a look at it.”

Jim followed my directions and we came, just as the crowds were going home, to the restaurant with the small, unimposing front, and the menus stuck in the window. We got out of the car and studied the carte du jour,

“Hors d’oeuvres varies

Potage paysanne

Filets de brochet

Poule Rotie

Asperges, petits pois.

Pommes de toutes sortes,

Petits fours

Cafe.”

“Read that” hissed Jimmie. “See that paysanne? That means peasant. I bet we have here the sort of chef you’d find in those little lost French towns, where kings and prime ministers go and hide in order to eat the incomparable cooking.”

“Not much on the menu, Jim,” I cautioned.

“Not much on the outside of the shop, either,” snorted Jim, “because, unlike the local beaneries, the value is inside, not outside. Let’s go in.”

Inside were five tables and one aged waiter in a black coat and white apron, who immediately began flicking around with his serviette when we came in the door. A silence filled the little restaurant. A silence as of watching.

“Good evening,” said Jim to the waiter, “what sort of a chef have you here?”

“Best in the country, sir,” replied the waiter, with an Irish accent. “Best in the country.”

Disillusioned Again

“Where has he been besides here?” asked Jim, still standing up.

“All over, in the foinest places,” the waiter. “He done a long time in Vancouver. He’s been in Montreal, Quebec and many foreign places.”

“Foreign places?”

“Sure, foreign places. I couldn’t remember the names,” said the waiter enthusiastically.

We sat down.

“Start,” said Jimmie, “at the top and go right down the menu.”

“It’s a fifty-cent dinner²,” warned the waiter.

“Tut, tut,” said Jim.

Hors d’oeuvres varies were four olives, two pieces of celery and two radishes. Potage paysanne was vegetable soup, filets de brochet looked like pike to me, the poule was plain chicken, asperges were asparagus the same ever, and petits fours were little fancy biscuits with a local factory name printed on them in the baking.

But Jim persuaded me the meal was incomparable.

“Ex-squeezy,” he said. “Come illy bong!”

“I’ve tasted that vegetable soup on camping trips,” I whispered. “Out of cans.”

“My dear boy, you’ll need to take a course,” he said. “Your palate is dulled. This fish! Taste it!”

“Pike, I swear,” I whispered.

But the old waiter kept coming in and out, so I caught some of Jim’s enthusiasm, and by the time we had finished the coffee and fancy biscuits, the old waiter, whose name was Patrick, was practically sitting at the table with us. He seemed lonesome.

“You don’t get many people in here,” said Jim.

“Just the crame,” said Patrick.

“Now, look here,” said Jim, “amongst my kind of people, as you know, Patrick, it is a custom when we have enjoyed a meal and recognized the hand of a master in the cooking, we see the chef and pay him our compliments direct.”

“Sure, sure,” said Patrick.

“Now would you be kind enough to step in there and ask Monsieur to come into the room while we compliment him?”

“Sure, sure,” said Patrick, uneasily. “He’s a busy man right now. Maybe some other time, when you’re dining?”

“Busy?” cried Jim. “Patrick, be so good as to ask Monsieur to step out here a minute.”

Patrick got up, waving his serviette hopelessly. He vanished through the kitchen door and was gone quite a long time. Presently the door slowly opened, and in backed Patrick.

“Here he is, gintlemen,” said he.

And in a large white hat and an oversize apron, freshly unfolded, appeared a Chinese, smiling uncertainly.

“Ah,” said Jim.

“Ha,” said Monsieur. “Muchee like?”

“Very nice meal,” said Jim, rising. And we both laid a dime down for Patrick. And got our hats. And were rather awkward getting out the door.

In the car, as we went down towards the lake shore for home, Jim said:

“Culture is a bit elusive nowadays.”

And he tooted his horn violently at a fat lady scuffling across Dundas street against the red light.

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

1. Corn pones are a variation on cornbread, with a thick and soft dough made from just cornmeal, water, and salt.  ↩︎
2. 50 cents in 1935 would be $11.35 in 2025. ↩︎