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down every one of them—not a single one right,—‘Down they come,’ I said, and went at it with a will.”

A few days later Mr. Butt gave me a further report. “Yes,” he said, “the furniture is all unpacked and straightened out but I don’t like it. There’s a lot of it I don’t quite like. I half feel like advising Jones to sell it and get some more. But I don’t want to do that till I’m quite certain about it.”

After that Mr. Butt seemed much occupied and I didn’t see him at the club for some time.

“How about the Everleigh-Joneses?” I asked. “Are they comfortable in their new house?”

Mr. Butt shook his head. “It won’t do,” he said. “I was afraid of it from the first. I’m moving Jones in nearer to town. I’ve been out all morning looking for an apartment; when I get the right one I shall move him. I like an apartment far better than a house.”

So the Joneses in due course of time were moved. After that Mr. Butt was very busy selecting a piano, and advising them on wall paper and woodwork.

They were hardly settled in their new home when fresh trouble came to them.

“Have you heard about Everleigh-Jones?” said Mr. Butt one day with an anxious face.

“No,” I answered.

“He’s ill—some sort of fever—poor chap—been ill three days, and they never told me or sent for me—just like their grit—meant to fight it out alone. I’m going out there at once.”

From day to day I had reports from Mr. Butt of the progress of Jones’s illness.

“I sit with him every day,” he said. “Poor chap,—he was very bad yesterday for a while,—mind wandered—quite delirious—I could hear him from the next room—seemed to think some one was hunting him—‘Is that damn old fool gone,’ I heard him say.

“I went in and soothed him. ‘There is no one here, my dear boy,’ I said, ‘no one, only Butt.’ He turned over and groaned. Mrs. Jones begged me to leave him. ‘You look quite used up,’ she said. ‘Go out into the open air.’ ‘My dear Mrs. Jones,’ I said, ‘what DOES it matter about me?’”

Eventually, thanks no doubt to Mr. Butt’s assiduous care, Everleigh-Jones got well.

“Yes,” said Mr. Butt to me a few weeks later, “Jones is all right again now, but his illness has been a long hard pull. I haven’t had an evening to myself since it began. But I’m paid, sir, now, more than paid for anything I’ve done,—the gratitude of those two people—it’s unbelievable —you ought to see it. Why do you know that dear little woman is so worried for fear that my strength has been overtaxed that she wants me to take a complete rest and go on a long trip somewhere—suggested first that I should go south. ‘My dear Mrs. Jones,’ I said laughing, ‘that’s the ONE place I will not go. Heat is the one thing I CAN’T stand.’ She wasn’t nonplussed for a moment. ‘Then go north,’ she said. ‘Go up to Canada, or better still go to Labrador,’—and in a minute that kind little woman was hunting up railway maps to see how far north I could get by rail. ‘After that,’ she said, ‘you can go on snowshoes.’ She’s found that there’s a steamer to Ungava every spring and she wants me to run up there on one steamer and come back on the next.”

“It must be very gratifying,” I said.

“Oh, it is, it is,” said Mr. Butt warmly. “It’s well worth anything I do. It more than repays me. I’m alone in the world and my friends are all I have. I can’t tell you how it goes to my heart when I think of all my friends, here in the club and in the town, always glad to see me, always protesting against my little kindnesses and yet never quite satisfied about anything unless they can get my advice and hear what I have to say.

“Take Jones for instance,” he continued—“do you know, really now as a fact,—the hall porter assures me of it,—every time Everleigh-Jones enters the club here the first thing he does is to sing out, ‘Is Mr. Butt in the club?’ It warms me to think of it.” Mr. Butt paused, one would have said there were tears in his eyes. But if so the kindly beam of his spectacles shone through them like the sun through April rain. He left me and passed into the cloak room.

He had just left the hall when a stranger entered, a narrow, meek man with a hunted face. He came in with a furtive step and looked about him apprehensively.

“Is Mr. Butt in the club?” he whispered to the hall porter.

“Yes, sir, he’s just gone into the cloak room, sir, shall I—”

But the man had turned and made a dive for the front door and had vanished.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“That’s a new member, sir, Mr. Everleigh-Jones,” said the hall porter.







IV-RAM SPUDD THE NEW WORLD SINGER. Is He Divinely Inspired? Or Is He Not? At Any Rate We Discovered Him.

[Footnote: Mr. Spudd was discovered by the author for the New York Life. He is already recognized as superior to Tennyson and second only, as a writer of imagination, to the Sultan of Turkey.]

The discovery of a new poet is always a joy to the cultivated world. It is therefore with the greatest pleasure that we are able to announce that we ourselves, acting quite independently and without aid from any of the English reviews of the day, have discovered one. In the person of Mr. Ram Spudd, of whose work we give specimens below, we feel that we reveal to our readers a genius of the first order. Unlike one of the most recently discovered English poets who is a Bengalee, and another who is a full-blooded Yak, Mr. Spudd is, we believe, a Navajo Indian. We believe this from the character of his verse. Mr. Spudd himself we have not seen. But when he forwarded his poems to our office and offered with characteristic modesty to sell us his entire works for seventy-five cents, we felt in closing with his offer that we were dealing not only with a poet, but with one of nature’s gentlemen.

Mr. Spudd, we understand, has had no education. Other newly discovered poets have had, apparently, some. Mr. Spudd has had, evidently, none. We lay stress on this point. Without it we claim it is impossible to understand his work.

What we particularly like about Ram Spudd, and we do not say this because we discovered him but because we believe it and must say it, is that he belongs not to one school but to all of them. As a nature poet we doubt very much if he has his equal; as a psychologist, we are sure he

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