Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/50

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN morning service he had announced that a returned missionary to the Indians would occupy the pulpit that evening, and bespoke the presence and the generosity of his congregation for the worthy man. The church was full that night and the platform crowded with clerical, dignitaries magnificent in their sacerdotal robes. On each side at the rear of the pulpit of Grace Church there is a niche containing an elaborately carved and fashioned sacerdotal chair, high-backed and roofed. The chair opposite the position of the volunteer choir was occupied this evening by a pastor emeritus, who caressed a beard, the peer of those surpassing whiskers which trade-marked St. Jacob's oil, a sovereign household remedy of the hirsute eighties.

Next to me sat a stout and giggly contralto. I whispered to the contralto that the reverend gentleman surely must be Saint Jacob himself, and added George Ade's comment that a club-foot is a deformity, a harelip a misfortune, but that a beard is a man's own fault. At this moment it is in order for the hairsplitters to arise and confute me with documentary evidence that Ade was a boy in high school in 1882 and wrote nothing about whiskers prior to 1897. What of it?