The Man With Two Left Feet

distorted, were nevertheless those of one whom he respected as a leading citizen.
    'Why, Mr Meggs!' he said.
    This identification by one in authority calmed, if it a little disappointed, the crowd. What it was they did not know, but, it was apparently not a murder, and they began to drift off.
    'Why don't you give Mr Meggs his letters when he asks you, ma'am?' said the constable.
    Miss Pillenger drew herself up haughtily.
    'Here are your letters, Mr Meggs, I hope we shall never meet again.'
    Mr Meggs nodded. That was his view, too.
    All things work together for good. The following morning Mr Meggs awoke from a dreamless sleep with a feeling that some curious change had taken place in him. He was abominably stiff, and to move his limbs was pain, but down in the centre of his being there was a novel sensation of lightness. He could have declared that he was happy.
    Wincing, he dragged himself out of bed and limped to the window. He threw it open. It was a perfect morning. A cool breeze smote his face, bringing with it pleasant scents and the soothing sound of God's creatures beginning a new day.
    An astounding thought struck him.
    'Why, I feel well!'
    Then another.
    'It must be the exercise I took yesterday. By George, I'll do it regularly.'
    He drank in the air luxuriously. Inside him, the wild–cat gave him a sudden claw, but it was a half–hearted effort, the effort of one who knows that he is beaten. Mr Meggs was so absorbed in his thoughts that he did not even notice it.
    'London,' he was saying to himself. 'One of these physical culture places… Comparatively young man… Put myself in their hands… Mild, regular exercise…'
    He limped to the bathroom.

THE MAN WITH TWO LEFT FEET
    Students of the folk–lore of the United States of America are no doubt familiar with the quaint old story of Clarence MacFadden. Clarence MacFadden, it seems, was 'wishful to dance, but his feet wasn't gaited that way. So he sought a professor and asked him his price, and said he was willing to pay. The professor' (the legend goes on) 'looked down with alarm at his feet and marked their enormous expanse; and he tacked on a five to his regular price for teaching MacFadden to dance.'
    I have often been struck by the close similarity between the case of Clarence and that of Henry Wallace Mills. One difference alone presents itself. It would seem to have been mere vanity and ambition that stimulated the former; whereas the motive force which drove Henry Mills to defy Nature and attempt dancing was the purer one of love. He did it to please his wife. Had he never gone to Ye Bonnie Briar–Bush Farm, that popular holiday resort, and there met Minnie Hill, he would doubtless have continued to spend in peaceful reading the hours not given over to work at the New York bank at which he was employed as paying–cashier. For Henry was a voracious reader. His idea of a pleasant evening was to get back to his little flat, take off his coat, put on his slippers, light a pipe, and go on from the point where he had left off the night before in his perusal of the BIS–CAL volume of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
—making notes as he read in a stout notebook. He read the BIS–CAL volume because, after many days, he had finished the A–AND, AND–AUS, and the AUS–BIS. There was something admirable—and yet a little horrible—about Henry's method of study. He went after Learning with the cold and dispassionate relentlessness of a stoat pursuing a rabbit. The ordinary man who is paying instalments on the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
is apt to get over–excited and to skip impatiently to Volume XXVIII (VET–ZYM) to see how it all comes out in the end. Not so Henry. His was not a frivolous mind. He intended to read the
Encyclopaedia
through, and he was not going to spoil his pleasure by peeping ahead.
    It would seem to be an inexorable law of Nature that no man shall shine at both ends. If he has a high forehead and a thirst for wisdom, his fox–trotting (if any) shall be as the staggerings of the drunken; while, if he is a good dancer, he is nearly always petrified from the ears upward. No better examples of this law could have been found than Henry Mills and his fellow–cashier, Sidney Mercer. In New York banks paying–cashiers, like bears, tigers, lions, and other fauna, are always shut up in a cage in pairs, and are consequently dependent on each other for entertainment and social intercourse when business is slack. Henry Mills and Sidney