W

HEN the college Professor picked up the December Atlantic and saw on its first page the title "Riches: A Christmas Essay" of course he was unable to resist the peculiar fascination which such a subject has for his class, and began to read. Not that he had any business to be interested in such a topic, or that he was really or vitally interested in it; but college professors, like small boys at holiday time, are sometimes given to gazing with distant eyes into the display window of the world's glittering toys and wondering what they would do if the kind fairy should suddenly make her appearance and transport them to the realm of possession and enjoyment. He began to read with only a mild and contemplative curiosity, knowing perfectly well the futility of allowing himself to be concerned with a theme like that.

But when the Professor came to the affirmation that heads of American families, with not more than four children, and with incomes of fifteen thousand dollars a year, had nearly as much money as was good for them, though fifteen thousand dollars a year was not riches, he suddenly sat up, rubbed his eyes, and took a second look. Yes, there it was, fifteen thousand dollarsit had been no mistake of his vision. From that moment he was attentive. After convincing himself of the accuracy of his senses, his first thought was that the author of the essay was indulging in mean and unworthy irony at the expense of simple people like himself, and he began to feel resentful. But no, it was serious enough-fifteen thousand dollars a year, though it was not riches, represented so nearly as much money as was good for the head of an American family with not more than four children that he could well afford to be particular about what he did to make his income bigger.

Here, indeed, was a fruitful theme for meditation! The Professor sank back in his chair, closed his eyes, and set his imagination to work, or rather let it loose for a

holiday, in the attempt to spend that fifteen thousand dollars a year which was not riches. His imagination was of the sober, steadfast, and demure kind, not accustomed to play, much less work, with material of such magnitude, and at first he found it somewhat difficult to get it into action; but after recovering from a momentary paralysis it did fairly well.

Fifteen thousand dollars a year! He could have a home of his own, with calm peace and quiet, instead of inhabiting a Procrustean domicile which was forever interfering with both his physical and spiritual comfort; he could have his own shelves, and fill them with his own books, and be relieved of the necessity of either working amid the wooden surroundings of the college library or carrying to and from it armfuls of borrowed volumes, if indeed it afforded him the works most needful; he could afford a cook, a nurse-girl, and a maid to relieve his wife of the too great burden of domestic care; he could make more abundant provision for her future and that of their children by taking out another policy, and incidentally contribute a trifle more to the salary of his neighbor, the life insurance president-he liked to do a good-natured thing; he could afford his sons and daughters their fraternity and sorority expenses without depriving himself and his wife of ordinary comforts; he could even send them away to college-to some faculty with which he was not so intimately acquainted, and in which he therefore placed greater confidence

and relieve both them and himself of embarrassment; he could be independent in his choice of breakfast foods, and set his table with a view to health rather than economy; or, following the reasoning of Mr. Dooley, to the effect that " 'tis not what y' ate that gives y' th' indigistion-'tis the rint," he could roll from his shoulders the anxieties of meeting the monthly bills, and escape the nervously prostrating annoyance of being obliged to refuse his wife and daughters the quarterly bonnet and gown; he could afford a season in Europe once in a half dozen years

(he had to afford it, whether able or not, or drop into the background both in his abilities and in the esteem of his fellows) without wearing himself thin with economy and actual deprivation in the intervals; he could meet without hardship the, for him, really great expense of annual attendance at the gatherings of his two or three learned societies, where his duty alike to himself and to his institution (indeed the wishes of his president were so plainly expressed as to amount almost to compulsion) called him to read, in the name of scholarship, some reams of uninteresting manuscript on uninteresting subjects never heard of before to uninterested audiences who would never hear of them again—at least, if their wishes were consult ed; he could feel less dependent upon promotion, and more indifferent to the Juggernaut of original research, and go on building into the character of his young men and women students the knowledge already piled up and waiting to be used, leaving the writing of learned volumes to those whom Nature had begotten for that purpose; he could meet the demands of benevolent and religious organizations like his neighbors, without its costing him ten times as much in proportion to his salary as it did them; he could look forward to an old age not unseemly, when he should neither be an object of Carnegie charity nor suffer indignity or contempt at the hands of younger men who had forgotten his long and faithful service and not yet discovered that wisdom was not to die with them; he could indulge in a canoe, or a launch, or treat his wife to a drive occasionally, or discard that rusty, creaking bicycle, out of date years ago, which had long made him a conspicuous mark for the shafts of the small boy's wit in a woodless and bearless generation.

But the Professor opened his eyes, and they rested upon the reality. He had hardly realized the extent of his poverty hitherto. Here was a sober estimate which placed a comfortable annual living expense, not riches, at fifteen thousand dollars-something like ten times the amount he was receiving! If fifteen thousand a year was not riches, what was his own income to be denominated? He analyzed the situation, and somewhat more fully than he had ever done before. He looked about in the community upon those who possessed, if not the fifteen thousand, at least a great deal more than he

himself received. Many of them were associates of himself and of his fellows in the faculty, and some of them were faculty men of independent means. He recognized, and without conceit, that he was possessed of as much culture as they, that his morals were as good as theirs, that they were not better churchmen than he, nor better citizens. He was their equal morally, socially, religiously, legally, and politically-and a charitable public sometimes went so far as to give him credit, in spite of his profession, for something like as much common sense as they possessed. They were his friends; he moved in the same social circle with them, and was welcome-dined with them, went to church with them, contributed toward the same benevolences, educated his children in the same way, shared in the same ideals, wore the same quality of clothing, was bound by the same conventions-in short, participated in their life. Why should he not do so, endowed as he was with all the gifts of personality enjoyed by them? But the fact of which he could not dispose was that he was participating in a life whose pace was determined by them, not by him, and on the basis, not of the things they possessed in common with him, but on that of money, the one item in which he was unable to vie with them, and the pace was not accommodated to his financial circumstances. He was their equal in all but income. That was the troublesome factor in the problem. That was the atra cura which climbed up behind his classroom desk with him, and stood waiting at his bedside every morning when he woke.

But more than that, other people in the community did not view the matter from his angle. There lay one root of his difficulty. The community in which the Professor lived did not judge him according to his salary, nor indeed did they take the trouble to inquire what it was; but ignorantly, though reasonably, classed him among the rich with whom he kept company. From the tailor and grocer down to the plumber and the ashman, all based the valuation of their services to him on the assumption that he was rich; the milliner and dressmaker served his wife on the same assumption; the church looked to him for generous donations of time and money; he was solicited for contribution to every benevolent project which arose; the Improvement Association levied upon him for funds to keep up public

drives over which he had never driven; the lawyer charged him the same fees he did the merchant or banker whose income was five times his; the surgeon expected as much from him for the removal of his appendix as he did from the rich lawyer or broker or his rich neighbor of independent fortune; his sons associated with the sons of corporation magnates; his wife's intimate friends in the Woman's Club were among the richest women in town, and she and her daughters looked to him to dress them like the daughters and wife of the banker. His whole salary went in the attempt to meet all these demands; his whole life was a more or less unsuccessful effort to appear worthy of the circle in which his family seemed intended by nature to move. This was why his library was as full of gaps as his purse was of cobwebs; this was why his clothes were so dangerously near being threadbare; this was why he had grown wrinkled and gray in the effort to piece out his salary by struggling with magazine articles during the midnight hours of term time and through the vacation days which should have been given up to an attempt to regain something of the elasticity of mind lost during the year; this was why his digestion was impaired, and why some of the delight of teaching had left him, and something of the sunshine of his presence had begun to be missed by his students. Clearly, it was an impossibility. Clearly, either the company of his choice had set up a wrong ideal, or he had chosen the wrong

company.

The Professor cast about for remedies. Naturally, his first thought was that his own income ought to be greater. Why should the lawyer, the physician, the life insurance president, the broker, or the banker, whose professional preparation had been no more protracted and no more expensive than his own, and whose services to the commonwealth were no more valuable, receive a reward so much greater than that received by him? In justice, either his own reward should be greater, or theirs less; and in either case he could live on terms of greater equality with them.

But the Professor could see well enough that neither of these remedies would be wrought in time for his own salvation. His speculation took another direction. He remembered that his first year's service had brought him just eight hundred dollars, and

that he had managed to make it support his household; that the second year he had received a thousand, which had gone no farther than the eight hundred; and that of twelve, fourteen, fifteen, eighteen hundred, and two thousand no greater sum remained at the end of the year than had remained of the eight hundred; and that the expenses which took all his income now seemed to him as natural and necessary, and as little extravagant, as those of the first year. His needs had sprung into being as fast as his salary had risen to meet them. His increases of salary had contributed appreciably to the comfort of mind and body of the tradesmen with whom he had dealt, and had temporarily relieved his family of what seemed to them real need; but as for himself, he had become a stranger to peace of mind, and had almost as little peace of body. He had yielded to pressure, and allowed himself to be bound by new needs as they arose one by one, until he was hopelessly entangled in the meshes of an interminable net.

If he could only have headed off the new needs from the beginning! . . . If he could only begin now. Here might lie a remedy. Why not begin now? He called to mind the golden words of Thomas Carlyle: The fraction of life increases in value not so much by increasing the numerator as by lessening the denominator. He had not properly kept his denominator down, he saw. He remembered the equally golden words of Stevenson: To be truly happy is a question of how we begin, and not of how we end, of what we want, and not of what we have. That he had allowed himself to want too much was now very clear to him. He remembered his Horace, too:

Contracto melius parva cupidine
Vectigalia porrigam

Quam si Mygdoniis regnum Alyattei
Campis continuem. Multa petentibus
Desunt multa: bene est cui deus obtulit
Parca quod satis est manu.

He remembered the reply of wise old Socrates, whose property was worth about one hundred dollars all told, to Kritoboulos, who had a hundredfold that amount: he himself, said the homely philosopher, was the rich man of the two, for his possessions satisfied his wants, while Kritoboulos, whose income was only a third the sum needed to satisfy his, was the poor man. He also thought he saw in his mental storehouse a