excellent spirits, and haven't drank a drop--so that I hope soon to
get out of trouble.

[Illustration]

Yes, let us clear the typewriter off the table: an ink-well is a sacred
thing.

Do you ever stop to think, when you see the grimy spattered desks of a
public post-office, how many eager or puzzled human hearts have tried,
in those dingy little ink-cups, to set themselves right with fortune?
What blissful meetings have been appointed, what scribblings of pain and
sorrow, out of those founts of common speech. And the ink-wells on hotel
counters--does not the public dipping place of the Bellevue Hotel,
Boston, win a new dignity in my memory when I know (as I learned lately)
that Rupert Brooke registered there in the spring of 1914? I remember,
too, a certain pleasant vibration when, signing my name one day in the
Bellevue's book, I found Miss Agnes Repplier's autograph a little above
on the same page.

Among our younger friends, Vachel Lindsay comes to mind as one who has
done honor to the ink-well. His _Apology for the Bottle Volcanic_ is in
his best flow of secret smiling (save an unfortunate dilution of Riley):

Sometimes I dip my pen and find the bottle full of fire,
The salamanders flying forth I cannot but admire....
O sad deceiving ink, as bad as liquor in its way--
All demons of a bottle size have pranced from you to-day,
And seized my pen for hobby-horse as witches ride a broom,
And left a trail of brimstone words and blots and gobs of gloom.