THE SPREADING CHESTNUT

All that is necessary in order to immortalize a person, a locality, or even an inanimate object, is to have some near great poet commemorate its existence in deathless verse. At once tables are erected, little fences constructed, and the lives of prominent visitors made tedious with tours of inspection, personally conducted by a legal and enthusiastic peasantry. Unfortunately; however, human nature is of so frail a cast that when a poet has exercised his skill on behalf of some deserving object. Impostures are promptly brought into being by envious souls yearning for similar redirected glory, who also erect tablets, construct fences, and annoy automobilists.

To descend from the general to the specific, when the late Mr. Longfellew composed his eulogy on the Village Smithy, he was the unwitting founder of two conflicting schools of thought. The first, which had until yesterday been coldly unaware of the existence of the other, has always maintained and there have been none to venture a contradiction that the smithy stood on Brattle Street beneath what is now the Sign of the Galloping Stallion.

But yesterday, when newspapers were unfolded at Cambridge breakfast tables, the skeleton burst from its closet with a hideous crash. The cognoscenti were competed to realize that the original of the poem was calmly claimed by a village in far away England St. Mary Cray, in Kept, which the poet carelessly visited without making his purpose clear.

Here are all makings of a pretty scandal. In the unavoidable absence of Mr. Longfellow, no one can determine whether Mr. Dexter Pratt, who lived on Brattle Street, was he of the famous muscles, or whether the poet's hero spoke with a strong Kentish accent. The only possible solution is that Mr. Pratt was a man of means who kept two establishments. Or possibly the poet was inspired by the cumulative effect of two constant trees.