Page:The Trimmed Lamp (1907).djvu/50

 will show you a better habit and a worse story than you could find in the man who invented the phrase.

It began away up in Sullivan County, where so many rivers and so much trouble begins—or begin; how would you say that? It was July, and Jessie was a summer boarder at the Mountain Squint Hotel, and Bob, who was just out of college, saw her one day—and they were married in September. That’s the tabloid novel—one swallow of water, and it’s gone.

But those July days!

Let the exclamation point expound it, for I shall not. For particulars you might read up on “Romeo and Juliet,” and Abraham Lincoln’s thrilling sonnet about “You can fool some of the people,” &c., and Darwin’s works.

But one thing I must tell you about. Both of them were mad over Omar’s Rubaiyat. They knew every verse of the old bluffer by heart—not consecutively, but picking ’em out here and there as you fork the mushrooms in a fifty-cent steak á la Bordelaise. Sullivan County is full of rocks and trees; and Jessie used to sit on them, and—please be good—used to sit on the rocks; and Bob had a way of standing behind her with his hands over her shoulders holding her hands, and his face close to hers, and they would repeat over and over their favorite verses of the old tent-maker. They saw only the poetry and philosophy of the lines then—indeed, they agreed that the Wine was only