Walking-Stick Papers. Robert Cortes Holliday
any other article of dress, are peculiarly related to the mind. There is an old book-seller on Fourth Avenue whose clothes when he dies, like the boots of Michelangelo, probably will require to be pried loose from him, so incessantly has he worn them within the memory of man. None has ever looked upon him in the open air without his cane. And is not that emblem of omniscience and authority, the schoolmaster's ferule, directly of the cane family? So large has the cane loomed in the matter of chastisement that the word cane has become a verb, to cane.
There was (in the days before the war) a military man (friend of mine), a military man of the old school, in whom could be seen, shining like a flame, a man's great love of a cane. He had lived a portion of his life in South America, and he used to promenade every pleasant afternoon up and down the Avenue swinging a sharply pointed, steel-ferruled swagger-stick. "What's the use of carrying that ridiculous thing around town?" some one said to him one day.
"That!" he rumbled in reply (he was one of the roarers among men), "why, that's to stab scorpions with."
They've buried him, I heard, in Flanders; on his breast (I hope), his cane.
"When a Red Cross platoon," says a news despatch of the other day, "was advancing to the aid of scores of wounded men. Surgeon William J. McCracken of the British Medical Corps ordered all to take cover, and himself advanced through the enemy's fire, bearing a Red Cross flag on his walking-stick."
Indeed, the Great War is one of the most thrilling, momentous and colourful chapters in the history of canes. "The officers picked up their canes," says the newspaper, and so forth, and so forth. Captain A. Radclyffe Dugmore, in a spirited drawing of the Battle of the Somme, shows an officer leading a charge waving a light cane. As an emblem of rank the cane among our Allies has apparently supplanted the sword. Something of the dapper, cocky look of our brothers in arms on our streets undoubtedly is due to their canes. One never sees a British, French or Italian officer in the rotogravure sections without his cane. We should be as startled to see General Haig or the Prince of Wales without a cane as without a leg. With our own soldiers the cane does not seem to be so much the thing, at least over here. I have a friend, however, who went away a private with a rifle over his shoulder. The other day came news from him that he had become a sergeant, and, perhaps as proof of this, a photograph of himself wearing a tin hat and with a cane in his hand. It is also to be observed now and then that a lady in uniformed service appears to regard it as an added military touch to swing a cane.
Women as well as men play their part in the colourful story of the cane. The shepherdess's crook might be regarded as the precursor of canes for ladies. In Merrie England in the age when the May-pole flourished it was fashionable, we know from pictures, for comely misses and grandes dames to sport tall canes mounted with silver or gold and knotted with a bow of ribbon. The dowager duchess of romantic story has always appeared leaning upon her cane. Do not we so see the rich aunt of Hawden Crawley? And Mr. Walpole's Duchess of Wrexe, certainly, was supported in her domination of the old order of things by a cane. The historic old croons of our own early days smoked a clay or a corn-cob pipe and went bent upon a cane.
In England to-day it is swagger for women to carry sticks—in the country. And here the thoughtful spectator of the human scene notes a nice point. It is not etiquette, according to English manners, for a woman to carry a cane in town. Some American ladies who admire and would emulate English customs have not been made acquainted with this delicate nuance of taste, and so are very unfashionable when they would be ultra-fashionable.
Anybody returning from the Alps should bring back an Alpine stock with him; every one who has visited Ireland upon his return has presented some close friend with a blackthorn stick; nobody has made a walking tour of England without an ash stick. In London all adult males above the rank of costers carry "sticks"; in New York sticks are customary with many who would be ashamed to assume them did they live in the Middle West, where the infrequent sticks to be seen upon the city streets are in many cases the sign of transient mummers. And yet it is a curious fact that in communities where the stick is conspicuously absent from the streets it is commonly displayed in show-windows, in company with cheap suits and decidedly loud gloves. Another odd circumstance is this: trashy little canes hawked by sidewalk venders generally appear with the advent of toy balloons for sale on days of big parades.
In Jamaica, Long Island, the visitor would probably see canes in the hands only of prosperous coloured gentlemen. And than this fact probably nothing throws more light on the winning nature of the coloured race, and on the character and function of canes. In San Francisco—but the adequate story, the Sartor Resartus—the World as Canes, remains to be written.
This, of course, is the merest essay into this vast and significant subject.
I
THE FISH REPORTER
Men of genius, blown by the winds of chance, have been, now and then, mariners, bar-keeps, schoolmasters, soldiers, politicians, clergymen, and what not. And from these pursuits have they sucked the essence of yarns and in the setting of these activities found a flavour to stir and to charm hearts untold. Now, it is a thousand pities that no man of genius has ever been a fish reporter. Thus has the world lost great literary treasure, as it is highly probable that there is not under the sun any prospect so filled with the scents and colours of story as that presented by the commerce in fish.
Take whale oil. Take the funny old buildings on Front Street, out of paintings, I declare, by Howard Pyle, where the large merchants in whale oil are. Take salt fish. Do you know the oldest salt-fish house in America, down by Coenties Slip? Ah! you should. The ghost of old Long John Silver, I suspect, smokes an occasional pipe in that old place. And many are the times I've seen the slim shade of young Jim Hawkins come running out. Take Labrador cod for export to the Mediterranean lands or to Porto Rico via New York. Take herrings brought to this port from Iceland, from Holland, and from Scotland; mackerel from Ireland, from the Magdalen Islands, and from Cape Breton; crabmeat from Japan; fishballs from Scandinavia; sardines from Norway and from France; caviar from Russia; shrimp which comes from Florida, Mississippi, and Georgia, or salmon from Alaska, and Puget Sound, and the Columbia River.
Take the obituaries of fishermen. "In his prime, it is said, there was not a better skipper in the Gloucester fishing fleet." Take disasters to schooners, smacks, and trawlers. "The crew were landed, but lost all their belongings." New vessels, sales, etc. "The sealing schooner Tillie B., whose career in the South Seas is well known, is reported to have been sold to a moving-picture firm." Sponges from the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. "To most people, familiar only with the sponges of the shops, the animal as it comes from the sea would be rather unrecognisable." Why, take anything you please! It is such stuff as stories are. And as you eat your fish from the store how little do you reck of the glamour of what you are doing!
However, as it seems to me unlikely that a man of genius will be a fish reporter shortly I will myself do the best I can to paint the tapestry of the scenes of his calling. The advertisement in the newspaper read: "Wanted—Reporter for weekly trade paper." Many called, but I was chosen. Though, doubtless, no man living knew less about fish than I.
The news stands are each like a fair, so laden are they with magazines in bright colours. It would seem almost as if there were a different magazine for every few hundred and seven-tenth person, as the statistics put these matters. And yet, it seems, there is a vast, a very vast, periodical literature of which we, that is, magazine readers in general, know nothing whatever. There is, for one, that fine, old, standard publication, Barrel and Box, devoted to the subjects and the interests of the coopering industry; there is, too, The Dried Fruit Packer and Western Canner, as alert a magazine as one could wish—in its kind; and from the home of classic American literature comes The New England Tradesman and Grocer. And so on. At the place alone where we went to press twenty-seven trade journals were printed every week, from one for butchers to one for bankers.
The Fish Industries Gazette—Ah, yes! For some reason not clear (though it is an