Mr. Finchsifter has compared my Lake to a gleaming sapphire reposing on a corsage of emerald green plush.

I have never seen Mr. Finchsifter’s wife—I do not even know that Finchsifter is married, but since the emerald plush bosom of his poetic fancy, stands for miles and miles of heaving Pines and fluttering Laurels and Finchsifter stands barely four feet six in his stockings, by all the laws of natural selection the human embodiment of his Brobdingnagian simile, must be either Mrs. Finchsifter or some not impossible Eve of a Finchsifter dream Paradise. A colossal counterpart (I picture her), of the waxen Demi-Goddess in the Finchsifter show window displaying with revolving impartiality on a faultless neck and bosom the glittering treasures of India, Africa, Peru, Mexico and Maiden Lane.

To be strictly truthful, I do not know that Mr. Finchsifter’s show window can boast such a waxen deity as I have described; indeed for all I know he possesses neither a show window nor the merchandise to advertise in such a window, but I have as the saying is, a “hunch” that Mr. Finchsifter’s imagery as applied to my Lake is based on something more than a mere academic interest in the adornment, textile or lapidarious of the human form.

And my Lake—in the first place it is not my Lake (but of that later), neither does it resemble a sapphire any more than the Pines and Laurels on its bank (save that when agitated they heave or flutter) resemble a green plush corsage.

If I were asked for an image, I should compare my Lake to an India-rubber band rather than to a sapphire. In form an elongated ellipse, it possesses an elasticity of circumference that is little short of miraculous.

The boastful pedestrian, glowing from his early morning trot around its shore will tell you it is a good ten miles.

The persistent swain, scheming to lure his Heart’s Desire, high heeled and reluctant, to the amorous shades of “Lover’s Landing,” tells her, upon his honor, that it is not more than a mile all the way round. To be precise, the distance round my Lake is something between a stroll and a “constitutional”—or to put it relatively about what the circumambulation of an ocean liner’s deck would be to an athletic inch worm.

As I said before, my Lake is not my Lake. It is nobody’s Lake. Not a human habitation profanes its bosky shores. The only beings that make even a pretense of ownership are five starch-white swans that patrol it from morning till night, turning fitfully this way and that and probing its depths and shallows with their yellow bills as if seeking for the missing Deed of title. On certain days when the diamond Lake is still, and the Pine and Laurel corsage is untroubled by a tremor, the starch-white company is doubled by five ghostly “understudies” who reflect their whiteness curve for curve and feather for feather with a fidelity of inversion that may find its match only in the art of a Shaw or a Chesterton.

It was on such a day as this that I met Mr. Finchsifter. I had completed the circuit of the Lake and leaving the wooded path that skirts its shore ascended through the woods to the level ground above, where on the further side of a well kept automobile road rises the lofty iron grille that engirdles for miles the country seat of Barabbas Wolfe, the Sausage King, typifying at once, by the safe deposit-like thickness of its bars and the view-inviting openness of its scrollwork, the innate love of show, tempered by newly acquired exclusiveness of a lord not to the manor born.

Gazing, in beady eyed appraisal at the neat but somewhat constricted Italian garden to which the railing at this point invited the eye—stood Finchsifter.

In this crowded jungle of spotless stone Lions, tomblike seats and arches backed by California privet and immature cypresses there was an irreverent suggestion of the Villa D’Este done into American slang.

He turned hearing my step, “Where is it I have seen it—before?”

“In the movies perhaps”—I ventured.

“That’s it! Thank you very much!” he exclaimed. “I knew I had seen it somewhere!”

After ascertaining my name in reluctant payment for the unsolicited tender of his own he continued, “but the Lions show better in the ‘pictures’ don’t they? Why didn’t they get them with moss already.”

“With moss?” I queried.

“Sure!” said Finchsifter. “Didn’t you know such a stone Lion comes also with the moss, the same as the genuine old antique furniture comes with the real hand-made worm-holes!”

I remembered guiltily how on the occasion of my last visit to Lake towers when asked by Mrs. Barabbas Wolfe, what I thought of her marble Lions, I had exclaimed with truthful enthusiasm “Wonderful! But my dear lady how do you keep them so clean?”

We walked on together, and though avoiding as we did so the physical proximity of my Lake we could not exclude it wholly from our conversation.

It was a passing glitter of the water caught through the pines below us at a turn in the road that inspired the Diamond-plush simile from which try as I may, I shall never be able to dissociate the image of my Lake.

Greatly to my surprise I found myself becoming interested in Finchsifter, and during the luncheon which followed our return to my Bungalow and the dinner that evening at his hotel, we laid what promised to be the foundation of a lasting friendship.

To be sure he was a man of many words, but the words of Finchsifter were well trained words, old family servants that knew their places and never presumed, or took liberties with the listener.

If a reply or comment were imperative—an adjective caught at random gave instant clue to what had gone before—even as a single toe joint restores to the naturalist the forgotten form of the Iohippus.

Finchsifter was a mental rest cure, his talk was soothing as a verbal brain massage. I conceived that one might form the Finchsifter habit, in time even become a slave to it as men become slaves to cocaine, Psychoanalysis, or Taxicabs.

But this was not to be.

As a would-be suicide has been turned from his purpose by the chill of the water into which he has plunged—so it was by Finchsifter himself that I was cured of the Finchsifter habit.

It was on the occasion of our second meeting, appointed at the suggestion of Finchsifter that we take our matutinal walk around the Lake in each others company.

He greeted me with a delighted smile, exclaiming as he took my hand in both of his very new saffron gloves.

“I have a great idea found—!—You are a poet? yes? Then you know all about this Free Verse which I read always about in the magazines? Perhaps you can yourself make it? Yes?” His face fairly shone with the inner flame of his project.

I found myself harkening against my will. What possible interest could Finchsifter have in verse of any kind—let alone free verse. “This will never do,” I reflected. “If he compels me to listen—then we shall cease to be friends—I came here to rest. I might as well take the first train back to New York!” Finchsifter was still talking. Eyeing me keenly as if mentally debating my trustworthiness—he continued: “If it is sure enough Free, then it don’t cost nothing.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, recalled abruptly from my own thoughts.

“Free verse!” cried Finchsifter. “That’s my scheme!—but don’t you tell it—It is between only ourselves—fifty-fifty—we split everything—we create the demand—we corner the supply, you and me together corner all the free verse in the United States—in this world for that matter and sell it for—” Again he hesitated—“If I might ask it—about what does a Poet get for such a little piece of poetry? The kind that is not free. A piece so long I mean.”—He measured a sonnet’s width of air between his thumb and fore-finger—“what do you get for that much?” I told him what the magazines pay me.

“What! A dollar a line! Gott in Himmel! we make a fortune! That’s what I tell Rebecca—If we corner all the free verse in the United States and sell it for no more as five cents a line—we make our fortune! but a dollar a line!—Himmel!”—he fairly danced for ecstasy and then it was I made the discovery, by which I lost if not a Fortune at least a Finchsifter.

I stood still as the tide of words with its flotsam of tossing gestures, continued—I heard nothing. I only waited for Finchsifter to subside.

“Am I right!” He gasped at length with what by every law of supply and demand should have been his latest breath.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about”—I replied angrily. “All I know is we’re walking the wrong way.”

“What do you mean the wrong way?” said Finchsifter.

“The wrong way round the Lake that’s what I mean!”

I don’t know how long we stood there arguing the question, I only know that his mind was inaccessible to reason, persuasion—even bribery, for, as a last resort, I offered to give him a list of all the best free verse writers in America if he would only listen to reason—nothing would move him—Finchsifter had always walked round the lake from right to left and always would—and what I said about his rubbing its precious plush corsage the wrong way of the nap was all rot.

I turned on my heel and left him. Half an hour later when we met at Lover’s Landing which is exactly half way round the Lake we passed without speaking.

And now I must wait each day until Finchsifter has taken his walk from right to left round my Lake, taking my walk (from left to right) in the chill of the evening to pacify the tutelary Goddess by smoothing back her green plush corsage, which has been rubbed the wrong way by Finchsifter.