"Montreal—this way out!"
One staggers painfully from the car down to the station platform. There a horde of "red caps" descend upon you in a flying phalanx. Taking your luggage and your breath at the same time, they vanish, only to reappear ten minutes later at the station door—you have just about decided they have absconded with your bags—and there they demand salvage for them.
"The luxury of modern travel"—O Lord!
HELPING OUR FRIENDS TO ECONOMIZE
Helping our Friends to Economize
We are of a saving nature. We say this more in sorrow than in pride. It has been forced on us. We have saved stamps and cigar-bands. We have saved cigarette pictures and theatre programmes. We have even made sporadic endeavors to save our soul. For the past few months especially our gaze has been fixed on the skies. We had hoped that once the fighting was over—but peace hath her battles no less than war. So we turn our eyes to those celestial abodes where the Bolsheviki cease from troubling. Our only hope is in heaven. In fact, even a nice, quiet corner in hell—but, hush, let us not think of such things!
When we speak, however, of our saving nature, we refer principally, if not exclusively, to money. We have a disposition to save money. We would like to put away huge jars of it. We would enjoy sneaking down to the vault in the middle of the night to count our gold and gloat over it. We would do it even at the risk of getting our new pyjamas all dirtied up with gold-dust.
Not that we have ever been able to accumulate any vast amount of coin, specie, mazuma, cush, dust, rhino, bullion, long green—in short, money. No trust companies grow plethoric with our securities. No vaults strain at their rivets with our lacs of rupees. But the disposition is there on our part. We would save if we had the wherewithal.
That is why we have such a kindly feeling for others who are trying to save—especially now when the high cost of living has combined with the high cost of killing, as represented in war-taxation, to put such a crimp in a fellow's income that it looks like a French pea to a famished ostrich. That is why we never feel aggrieved when our friends don't invite us to dinner, or give us cold mutton or stew when they do. That is why we never make any remarks on the age of their hats or complain of the cold in their houses or express wonder that they don't light the furnace sooner. They are cutting down expenses and we sympathize with them.