How to Be a Hermit by Will Cuppy
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This site is full of FREE ebooks - Check them out at our Home page - Project Gutenberg Australia Title: HOW TO BE A HERMIT or, A BATCHELOR KEEPS HOUSE Author: WILL CUPPY * A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook * eBook No.: 0607881.txt Language: English Date first posted: October 2006 Date most recently updated: October 2006 This eBook was produced by: Malcolm Farmer Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular paper edition. Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this file. This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Title: HOW TO BE A HERMIT or, A BATCHELOR KEEPS HOUSE Author: WILL CUPPY TO Isabel Paterson THAN WHOM THERE IS NO ---- WELL, THAN WHOM THERE JUST ISN'T, THAT'S ALL. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes to thank THE NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE, MC CALL'S MAGAZINE and MORROW'S ALMANACK for permission to reprint the articles in this book. They are nor responsible for the second thoughts--some of them highly inflammable--strewn recklessly through the original pieces, nor for the several added starters. CONTENTS I Discover My Island Be It Ever So Humble Living from Can to Mouth My Kitchen Beautiful Confessions of a Sardine Fiend Hard-Boiled Recipes The Home in Bum Taste Coffee, Please! Diogenes, or the Future of Housekeeping The Secret of Frederick Barbarossa The Hermit's Emergency Shelf The Duke's Dilemma A Few Hints on Etiquette Spinach and the Good Life Watch Your Budget Simplified Clams Bedrooms Are What You Make Them Consider the Lettuce A Plea for Better Batter Perils of the Home Down with Brillat-Savarin! How to Entertain So Why Be President? What Cabbage Has Meant to Me Next to Godliness If Christmas Comes The Feast of the Bean If You Have Tears I DISCOVER MY ISLAND All was excitement that June morning among the clams of Jones's Island (pronounced, by your leave, in two good healthy syllables, thus: Jone'-zez). Softies by the bushel dug themselves deeper into the shoreward mud, and whimpering little quahogs out in their watery beds clung closer to their mothers as they heard the dread news relayed by their kinsfolk of Seaman's Neck, Black Banks Channel, Johnson's Flats and High Hill Crick. To say that uneasiness pervaded the community would be putting it far too mildly. Those clams were scared plumb out of a week's growth; which, as the clam flies, is a lot of growth. In a word, panic reigned, if not pandemonium. And well it might, for the scouts along the meadows, the deep water observers and the liaison officers on the sandbars had forwarded marine intelligence of no mean importance. As one clam they reported the swift approach by rowboat across Great South Bay of a sinister stranger, by every sign a very devil for chowder, raging and roaring in the throes of starvation and flying the strange device, "Jones's Island or Bust!" Yes, downright terror gripped even the hardest of the clams. "He ought to be here at any moment!" shuddered a visiting cherry-stone. And see! Even now the hellish bark rounds Hawkins's Point, splashes its desperate way through the shallows and crashes into Savage's Dock with a sickening thud, hurling the oarsman from his position amidships to a point which may be defined as galley-west. Dizzily the skipper regains his feet, and as he rises to the general view his singular and touching appearance sends thrills of relief up and down the calcareous shells of the bivalves still on watch. Dame Rumor is wrong again! Here is no demon with murder in his heart. Here is no devil incarnate. For there in the full sunshine, the cynosure of every clam, he weeps, the stranger weeps. Anon, he sneezes, and again his eyes drip blinding tears. 'Tis plain some nobler grief than the want of a square meal is bothering this chap. All told, it was pretty pathetic. The sorrowful newcomer seemed, truly, a man distrait, as he stood there sniffling and snorting into his red bandanna, uttering violent and wicked words, shaking his free fist at nothing in particular and behaving generally as one bereft of all earthly solace and the greater part of the cerebellum. (But don't get too much worked up about this, dear reader; it turns out in a minute that it was only me, arriving at Jones's Island with my rose cold.) Ever and again he moved as though to cast himself and his afflictions into a low tide puddle, always he drew back in time. Then, extracting a small compass from his pocket, he made a few rapid calculations and, tossing a stray lock from a thoughtful brow, began running due South. And as he ran, he wept; and weeping, sneezed. Some furlongs on his way, about where he would catch sight of something blue and wonderful between the beach hills, he was heard to shout, "_Thalassa! Thalassa!_" which is as much as to say in plain English, "The sea!" and repeat. "_Eureka!_" he cried next--"_Excelsior!_"--"_Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres!_" So, naturally, the clams, after thinking it over, decided that he was perfectly harmless. Each happy shellfish, according to his individual lights, sank back into a sort of nervous lethargy or went about his own or his neighbor's business, forgetting as best he could the horrid threat of a clambake. "I told you there was not the slightest danger," squizzed the visiting cherry-stone. "He's only another goof come to look at the ocean--probably a typical New Yorker," he added, tapping his forehead significantly. Whereupon he and the other clams, like the solitary horseman in novels, only rather more clammily, disappeared from the picture. I'm afraid I had ruined their day. It was thus, or near enough, that I began my long and extremely pleasant relations with the Atlantic, an association which neither of us, I trust, has had cause to regret. You must forgive me for yelling "_Thalassa!_" and "_E Pluribus Unum!_"--especially "_Thalassa!_" since I have no Greek, and just got it out of a book. But I was all excited. I had waited so long! My early yearning for the sea had never been completely satisfied during my boyhood in the Middle West. Later I found Lake Michigan marvelous, but fresh; and seeing my ocean at long last, it struck me all of a heap, like. I hope my readers will permit me to skip what I saw that morning as I stood on the southern shore of Jones's and peered horizonward. I'm not so good in purely descriptive passages, and I believe the Atlantic has quite a number of sterling qualities which we need not argue about. Suffice it that stout Cortez hadn't a thing on me when with eagle eye he got into the wrong poem--it was really a couple of other explorers. I, too, was silent and just stared. Strangely silent, it occurred to me, after letting my Viking spirit run wild for an hour or two. Mark you well--for here the plot thickens--I had not sneezed once in all that time, nor sniffed, nor sniveled, nor wished that I had ne'er been born, nor any of the things one does when one is subject to rose cold. I had arrived at Jones's Island a human wreck, if that; just one more poor, underpaid book reviewer harried and hunted by hay fever's hideous little cousin. And here I stood, my vision clear, my smeller busy with salt fragrance, whole in mind and nose, thinking in terms of high romance, all of a glorious June day; convinced for the mad moment, I confess it, that Pippa was not a half-wit at all. For a nickel I'd have burst into song. Some subtle seaside virus was coursing through my system, sweeping out dusty clouds of landlubberly notions and raising merry hell with my logical faculties--I always hated them. "It would be sheer foolishness ever to leave this sneezeless island with its own private ocean," I told myself. "And it is our bounden duty as reasonable creatures to shun and turn from folly, at least once in a while, especially when the avoidance is so pleasant as this." So I philosophized. Already I was half a hermit. That afternoon I wandered back of the beach hills, seeking among the swamps and meadows of the interior some aspect of animate or inanimate Nature that might bring on a return of my tragedy, for as yet I could not believe that this Fortunate Isle contained no germs of rose cold. Though rose cold is mostly caused by the machinations of evil spirits, flowers are part of it, too, and the victim must watch them like so many wild animals. Flowers are very pretty, yes; and don't they know it? But the best of them are full of pollen, a substance used by Mother Nature to produce rose cold and hay fever when she might be in better business.