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HALF HOURS WITH THE IDIOT




By John Kendrick Bangs

       *       *       *       *       *

  A LITTLE BOOK OF CHRISTMAS
  A LINE O' CHEER FOR EACH DAY O' THE YEAR
  HALF HOURS WITH THE IDIOT




HALF HOURS WITH
THE IDIOT


BY
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS


[Illustration]


BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1917




_Copyright, 1917,_
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                                           PAGE
     I AS TO AMBASSADORS' RESIDENCES                                   1
    II AS TO THE FAIR SEX                                             22
   III HE GOES CHRISTMAS SHOPPING                                     43
    IV AS TO THE INCOME TAX                                           65
     V A PSYCHIC VENTURE                                              84
    VI ON MEDICAL CONSERVATION                                       101
   VII THE U. S. TELEPHONIC AID SOCIETY                              119
  VIII FOR TIRED BUSINESS MEN                                        137




I

AS TO AMBASSADORS' RESIDENCES


"I am glad to see that the government is beginning to think seriously of
providing Ambassadors' residences at the various foreign capitals to
which our Ambassadors are accredited," said the Idiot, stirring his
coffee with a small pocket thermometer, and entering the recorded
temperature of 58 degrees Fahrenheit in his little memorandum book.
"That's a thing we have needed for a long time. It has always seemed a
humiliating thing to me to note the differences between the houses of
our government officials of equal rank, but of unequal fortune, abroad.
To leave the home of an Ambassador to Great Britain, a massive
sixteen-story mausoleum, looking like a collision between a Carnegie
Library and a State Penitentiary, with seven baths and four grand pianos
on every floor, with guides always on duty to show you the way from your
bedchamber to the breakfast room, and a special valet for each garment
you wear, from sock to collar, and go over to Rome and find your
Ambassador heating his coffee over a gas-jet in a hall bedroom on the
top floor of some dusty old Palazzo, overlooking the garage of the
Spanish Minister, is disconcerting, to say the least. It may be a
symptom of American fraternity, but it does not speak volumes for
Western Hemispherical equality, and the whole business ought to be
standardized. An American Embassy architecturally should not be either a
twin brother to a Renaissance lunatic asylum, or a replica of a four
thousand dollar Ladies' Home Journal bungalow that can be built by the
owner himself working Sunday afternoons for eight hundred dollars,
exclusive of the plumbing."

"You are right for once, Mr. Idiot," said the Bibliomaniac approvingly.
"The last time I was abroad traveling with one of those Through Europe
in Ten Days parties, I could not make up my mind which was the more
humiliating to me as an American citizen, the lavish ostentation of one
embassy, or the niggardly squalor of another; and it occurred to me then
that here was a first-class opportunity for some patriot to come along
and do his country's dignity some good by pruning a little in one place,
and fattening things up a bit in another."

"Quite so," said the Idiot, inhaling a waffle.

"And I have been hoping," continued the Bibliomaniac, "that Congress
would authorize the purchase of suitable houses in foreign capitals for
the purpose of correcting the evil."

"That's where we diverge, sir," said the Idiot, "as the lady said to her
husband, when they got their first glimpse of the courthouse at Reno. We
don't want to purchase. We want to build. The home of an American
Ambassador should express America, not the country to which he is sent
to Ambass. There's nothing to my mind less appropriate than to find a
diplomat from Oklahoma named, let us say, Dinkelspiel, housed in a Louis
Fourteenth chateau on the Champs Eliza; or a gentleman from Indiana
dwelling in the palace of some noble but defunct homicidal Duck of the
Sforza strain in Rome; or a leading Presbyterian representing us at
Constantinople receiving his American visitors in a collection of
bargain-counter minarets formerly occupied by the secondary harem of the
Sublime Porte. There is an