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(Each of us by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature. ... The New Testament. Revised Version.)

My friend Alcorn is improving himself. I don’t mean just at this minute; I mean, that is the main thing in his life, improving himself. He begins improving himself first thing in the morning and gets as far as he can with it by night. If you happen to know Alcorn, don’t get facetious about it and say there’s lots of room for it, or something of the sort. That’s too easy. Sandy, scrubby and about half bald, Alcorn isn’t much to look at; and he cracks his knuckles, all his joints look reversible and he wears a shiny old black tail coat of the kind that other people gave up about 1890. Of course, it’s hard going to improve him. That’s the virtue of it; it’s like a ploughman stubbornly breaking rough land. It’s like those bees that that Frenchman used to write about—what was his name? Fabre! Of course—I’d forgotten it. Anyway one of these bees would go out on the empty, burnt, rocky waste near Fabre’s little cottage—well, you know Dordogne; we all do-nothing but scrub and cactus and glaring sun—and Fabre would sit for hours, often all day, watching that bee make—I forget what it made. But it shows what industry can do. Fabre, they say, made quite a lot, too....

But that’s neither here nor there. I am talking of Alcorn and what he looked like. And don’t get the idea that I want to make a pathetic figure out of him. He isn’t pathetic, and anyway, if he had been he would have bought a twenty-five cent book, How to Cast out Pathos, and got rid of it. Oh, no, he’s just ordinary. Don’t ask me what he does, apart from improving himself. I know he does something because there is always a good deal of ink on him late in the day. I frequently see him coming up in the street car in the quieter hours, always reading a little book, a manual of something, but never the same one; and I often see him in the Public Library, changing a book, and I see him in the Art Gallery and at any picture exhibition, studying a catalogue.

You see, if a man’s going to improve himself he needs books and catalogues all the time.

If you are the kind of person who would like to get a few hints on the matter, I must tell you that to improve yourself you’ve got to begin early in the day; in fact, you start by sitting up in bed and taking three deep breaths—one—two—three—it’s better to count them. That clears the trachea. Did you know it? And after that three quick movements of the neck, quick and snappy. That gives a knock to the anthrax.

The idea of the early morning stuff—here I am merely quoting Alcorn—is to clear the head. The great aim of the first part of the day, the bathroom exercise, the quiet walk, is to get the head absolutely clear. Avoid thinking, Alcorn says. It might hold the head back. He tells me that often when he comes in at nine—or rather, anywhere between nine and nine-five—his head is so clear that it just feels empty.

It is either then, or before going out (it doesn’t much matter) that it is well to put the eyes under cold water for about five minutes. Alcorn says “the eyes”—not his eyes—because he always looks on himself as made of adjustable parts. There are “the eyes” and “the ears” and “the joints.”—He himself is just the humble total, not half so important as the ones like diaphragm (be mighty careful with that) and the aesophagus ...

Still, that’s just the start. The main effort is directed at the mind.

Most of the improvement of Alcorn’s mind is done out of little manuals, all short and snappy. They have to be quick—Swedish in Ten Lessons, Spanish in Ten Minutes—things like that. Anything called a Digest hits him where he lives, or it used to till he found that you could get Digest of the Best Digests. “You get it all,” he said.

He seems always absorbed in that sort of stuff,—not exactly deeply, but like Fabre’s bees, busily. The World’s Great Poetry in Five Pages ... The World’s Great Two-Cent Dramas ... Religion (Five Cents) ... Outline of the Outlines of Wells’ Outline.

But these rapid studies are intermingled with the real stuff, the solid serious study of the world’s greatest and hardest literature. That is what takes Alcorn to the Public Library, with his last book under his arm, waiting for his new one. You will see him handing in Newton’s Principia to get out Descartes’ Discourse on Method. “Great stuff!” he would say for each of them. He told me that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was about the biggest stuff he’s struck. It took him all Sunday afternoon to read it. He had out Rawlinson’s History of Babylon on Thursday and was back with it on Friday. “The real thing!” he said.

One peculiarity is that Alcorn’s activities keep varying. You can never know what particular line of self-improvement he is at; you have to fit conversation to it as best you could.

Thus I noticed one day that as soon as he sat down in the street car beside me he began asking most solicitously about my health.

“How’ve you been keeping?” he said, looking up sideways into my face, with artificial interest. “All right,” I said.

“No difficulty with sleep? No insomnia? And I suppose you digest things all right?”

Then I remembered that there was a new book out called How to Win Friends, and I remembered that it said, “Always express a solicitous interest in your friends’ health.” That came, I think, in Lesson One.

Another section of Alcorn’s self-improvement is done in picture galleries and art exhibitions. He never misses one.

“You see,” he likes to explain, in accounting for his presence in such places, “I don’t enjoy pictures, that is I do, but I don’t naturally. But I enjoy trying to enjoy them. That’s why I like this exhibition; it seems to me the best we’ve had for years. There’s nothing, or practically nothing, here that I can understand. But I’m working on them. That’s why I like this new kind of Catalogue, with little notes about the pictures.

“You know there are lots here that a man likes to study. They don’t mean anything to me; I can’t get them; now take this one—Man with Bucket—of course I get the bucket but the man looks just a blotch—to me, that is. I imagine that the merit of it is in the composition. Aha!” he continued, turning over the leaves of his catalogue, “No. 171. Man with Bucket; The artist here attempts a daring composition to convey the sensation of a bucket. I’m getting it all right; I knew that was a composition.”

Music he tries also, but sparingly. “Were you at the Symphony Orchestra last night?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” Alcorn answered, “I never miss; I just like to sit there and close my eyes and drink it in.” But on the whole music beats him. But he loves a street piano and that hurts his feelings.

That’s the way I have known Alcorn, like that, ever so long, year in, year out ... no better, no worse.

Yet here is a strange thing. The kind of odd acquaintance, something between habit and friendship, such as I have had for years from my chance meetings with Alcorn, is a thing one gets unconsciously to value—and you never know it till you lose it. So it was with me when recently I all but lost—all but, not quite—my intercourse with Alcorn.

It was no fault of mine. Somebody gave him as a present my latest book (never mind the title; I’m not advertising), and there he was in the street car tapping the book wrapped up in his pocket.

“I’m looking forward to a great laugh,” he said. “Oh, boy!” And then he dipped back behind his spectacles into his Key to Babylonian Chronology ...

“Yes, sir,” he said, next day. “I’m looking forward to that book of yours; I couldn’t get at it last night, but the first night I have I’m going to get right down to it.”

A week later, he said he was keeping the book to take to the Laurentians and have a real laugh, “Eh what?”

After that he nearly took the book to Three Rivers, you know how dull it is there—just the spot, eh, to get right into a book, deliberately, and just sit and chuckle. Three Rivers didn’t work—it’s a hard place to chuckle in.... Then he talked of keeping the book for the holidays. Of course, I didn’t mind; I’m used to it; if people buy a book they read it, rather than feel stung. But if you give it to them, they don’t ...

Then one afternoon I saw Alcorn slipping into Car No. 65 when I got into Car No. 14. I knew that he was trying to avoid me and that I must do something.

So one day a little later I took care to meet him and I said, “Alcorn, here’s a little book for you. Send me that one of mine that you were reading as I’m out of copies, and you take this instead.”

“What is it?” he asked.

I showed him the cover. He read out the title. “The Witticisms of ... of ... I don’t quite see it—these spectacles—”

“The Witticisms of Hierocles,” I said, completing the title for him. “It’s Greek humor, the oldest there is. You see it’s in Greek on the page, but there are little notes that explain each joke. See this page—”

“Oh, boy!” said Alcorn, his spectacles glittering ...

Our friendship was all set again.