Short Fiction quotes

Sir Everhard approached the bedside of his patient and laid his hand gently on this sick man’s diagnosis. A shade of feeling passed over his professional countenance as he gravely and solemnly pronounced these words:

“Madam, your husband has croaked.”

Lady Oakhurst at first did not comprehend his technical language, and her lovely mouth let up for a moment on the cream almonds.

… at the Commissioner’s desk side by side with the preemptor, whose little potato patch lay like a minute speck of island in the vast, billowy sea, of his princely pastures, and played the old game of “freeze-out,” which is as old as Cain and Abel.

The trail of the serpent is through it all.

Honest, earnest men have wrought for generations striving to disentangle the shameful coil that certain years of fraud and infamy have wound. Look at the files and see the countless endorsements of those in authority:

He had always kept on the safe side of the law, but in the deed he was about to commit there was no compromise to be made with what little conscience he had left.

There is no well-defined boundary line between honesty and dishonesty.

The frontiers of one blend with the outside limits of the other, and he who attempts to tread this dangerous ground may be sometimes in one domain and sometimes in the other;

The boy was strong and vigorous, but the suddenness of the attack gave him no chance to resist. He struggled up again to his feet, but it was an animal, with blazing eyes and cruel-looking teeth that fought him, instead of a man.

Mr. Sharp, a man of high standing and good report, was battling for his reputation.

Presently there was a dull sound, and another, and still one more, and a blade flashing white and then red, and Edward Harris dropped down like some stuffed effigy of a man, that boys make for sport, with his limbs all crumpled and lax, on …

The last two years of his life were clouded with a settled melancholy for which his friends could assign no reason. The bulk of his comfortable fortune was made from the land he obtained by fraud and crime.

The disappearance of the file was a mystery that created some commotion in the Land Office, but he got his patent.

It is a well-known tradition in Austin and vicinity that there is a buried treasure of great value somewhere on the banks of Shoal Creek, about a mile west of the city.

We do not. You can’t raise anything on land in that section.

A man can always raise a dollar on a good pair of pants.

Name in order the three best newspapers in Texas.

“Thanks. You see how it is. I am not wealthy; I have only my per diem and my perquisites, and I cannot afford to pay for high lineage and moldy ancestors.

A little corned beef goes further with me than a coronet, and when I am cold a coat of arms does not warm me.

”

He had dared to aspire to the hand of Gladys Vavasour-Smith, the beautiful and talented daughter of one of the oldest and proudest families in the county. The bluest blood flowed in her veins.

Her grandfather had sawed wood for the Hornsbys and an aunt on her mother’s side had married a man who had been kicked by General Lee’s mule.

The lines about Bertram D. Snooper’s hands and mouth were drawn tighter as he paced to and fro, waiting for a reply to the question he intended to ask Gladys as soon as he thought of one.

At last an idea occurred to him.

“Why will you not marry me?” he asked in an inaudible tone.

“Because,” said Gladys firmly, speaking easily with great difficulty, “the progression and enlightenment that the woman of today possesses demand that the man shall bring to the marriage altar a heart and body as free from the debasing and hereditary iniquities that now no longer …

… “the progression and enlightenment that the woman of today possesses demand that the man shall bring to the marriage altar a heart and body as free from the debasing and hereditary iniquities that now no longer exist except in the chimerical imagination of enslaved custom.”

“It is as I expected,” said Bertram, wiping his heated brow on the window curtain. “You have been reading books.”

“Besides that,” continued Gladys, ignoring the deadly charge, “you have no money.”

“Stay here till I return,” he said, “I will be back in fifteen years.”

When he had finished speaking he ceased and left the room.

When he had gone, Gladys felt an uncontrollable yearning take possession of her. She said slowly, rather to herself than for publication, “I wonder if there was any of that cold cabbage left from dinner.”

Of course, our readers will understand that this is only supposed to the case.

It really took less than a minute to make the little stars that represent an interval of time.

We could not afford to stop a piece in the middle and wait fifteen years before continuing it.

It really took less than a minute to make the little stars that represent an interval of time.

We could not afford to stop a piece in the middle and wait fifteen years before continuing it.

We hope this explanation will suffice. We are careful not to create any wrong impressions.

The old man drew a bottle of medicine from his pocket and gave Pansy a spoonful.

“I was a little late,” said John Smothers, “as I waited for a street car.”

“I do not mind it in the least,” said the gentleman. “In fact, I am accustomed to it. I am Chairman of the Democratic Executive Committee, Platform No. 2, and I have a friend in trouble.

I knew you were Tictocq from your resemblance to yourself.

”

“I am a man of few words,” said Tictoq. “I will help your friend if possible. Our countries are great friends.

We have given you Lafayette and French fried potatoes.

You have given us California champagne and—taken back Ward McAllister. State your case.”

… of two dozen bottles of Budweiser from the handsome and talented young hack-driver, Bum Smithers, is promenading in and out the low French windows with Ethelbert Windup, the popular young candidate for hide inspector, whose name is familiar to everyone who reads police court reports.

Somewhere, concealed by shrubbery, a band is playing, and during the pauses in conversation, onions can be smelt frying in the kitchen.

Happy laughter rings out from ruby lips, handsome faces grow tender as they bend over white necks and drooping beads;

“I then began to think. I reasoned.

No man, said I, would carry a Populist’s socks in his pocket without wrapping them up.

He would not want to do so in the hotel. He would want a paper. Where would he get one? At the Statesman office, of course. I went there. A young man with his hair combed down on his forehead sat behind the desk.

His striped blouse is wide open at the neck and falls outside of his dingy leather trousers. The handle of a deadly looking knife protrudes from his belt.

One stroke of its blade would open a box of the finest French sardines.

“Voilà, Gray Wolf,” cries Couteau, the bartender. “How many victims today? There is no blood upon your hands. Has the Gray Wolf forgotten how to bite?”

“Then listen. I am the murderer of Marie Cusheau.

She was my wife and she had cold feet and ate onions. What was I to do?

Yet life is sweet to me. I do not wish to be guillotined. I have heard that you are on my track. Is it true that the case is in your hands?”

Then, springing forward, he snatches a wig and false eyebrows from his visitor, and the Gray Wolf, grinding his teeth in rage, stands before him.

The murderer of Marie Cusheau was never discovered.

I saw him jerk a string, and a camera snapped on another table, taking our picture as we stood.

“Don’t die in the House, Mr. President,” I said. “Go over into the Senate Chamber.”

“Peace, murderer!” he said. “Let your bomb do its deadly work.”

“Oh, no, he isn’t. You must be mistaken,” replied Mr. Cleveland, “for he says he is. I really must go down to Texas some time, and see the State.

I want to go up into the Panhandle and see if it is really shaped like it is on the map.

”

The vanquished combatant shot through the air like a stone from a catapult in the direction of the luminous earth.

“That’s three of ’em this week,” said the Man in the Moon as he lit a cigarette and turned back into the house.

“Those New York interviewers are going to make me tired if they keep this thing up much longer.”

The heartbroken widow scarcely divined his meaning, so deeply was she plunged in her sorrowful thoughts, but she caught some of his words, and answered brokenly:

“Oh, red, of course. Red harmonizes so well with black.”

“What was it?” she asks, “spontaneous combustion or snakes?”

“Then I’ve lost my bet,” she says. “I thought sure it would be whisky.”

Life, messieurs, is full of disappointments.

“Then I’ve lost my bet,” she says. “I thought sure it would be whisky.”

Life, messieurs, is full of disappointments.

The great weekly came out on time, but the editor gazed pensively at his last month’s unreceipted paper bill and said:

“So far, so good; but I wonder what we will print on next week!”

John turned without a word and rushed back down the street, but the shady-looking man was not to be found.

His wife often wonders why he never scolded her for losing the ring.

The range of subjects is wide, and the treatment light and easy without being flippant. A valuable feature of the work is the arranging of the articles in alphabetical order, thus facilitating the finding of any particular word desired.

Mr. Webster’s vocabulary is large, and he always uses the right word in the right place.

Mr. Webster’s work is thorough and we predict that he will be heard from again.

It is but justice to the Pension Bureau at Washington to state that they have not yet granted the pension claimed by a man who was wounded in the late unpleasantness by the accidental discharge of his duty.

A careful inquiry has revealed the fact that Samson was the first man who rushed the growler.

Better blow your own horn than one you haven’t paid for.

A careful inquiry has revealed the fact that Samson was the first man who rushed the growler.

Better blow your own horn than one you haven’t paid for.

If your rye offend you, buy a better quality.

Better blow your own horn than one you haven’t paid for.

If your rye offend you, buy a better quality.

Bill Nye’s jokes never had a sting.

They played like summer lightning around the horizon of life, illuminating and spreading bright, if transitory, pictures upon the sky, but they were as harmless as the smile of a child.

The brain of the man conceived the swift darts that he threw, but his great manly heart broke off their points.

He knew human nature as a scholar knows his book, and the knowledge did not embitter him.

He saw all the goodness in frailty, and his clear eyes penetrated the frailty of goodness.

His was the child’s heart, the scholar’s knowledge, and the philosopher’s view of life.

He knew human nature as a scholar knows his book, and the knowledge did not embitter him. He saw all the goodness in frailty, and his clear eyes penetrated the frailty of goodness.

His was the child’s heart, the scholar’s knowledge, and the philosopher’s view of life.

He might have won laurels in other fields, for he was a careful reasoner, and a close observer, but he showed his greatness in putting aside cold and fruitless discussions that have wearied the world long ago, and set himself the task of arousing bubbling …

woman can babble of the weather, and gaze with infantine eyes into the orbs of the wiliest diplomat, while holding easily in her breast the heaviest secrets of state.

Adam was the original blab; the first telltale, and we are not proud of him.

With the dreamy, appealing eyes of Eve upon him—she who was created for his comfort and pleasure—even as she stood by his side, loving and fresh and fair as a spring moon, the wretched cad said, “The woman gave me and I did eat.”

And man says that woman can not keep a secret!

Let him be thankful that she can, or his littleness would be proclaimed from the housetops.

“Young man, you’re a genius. I’ll put rents up twenty percent tomorrow.”

And one more capitalist was saved.

“

I told him there was one consolation; he couldn’t say his mother ever made any better ones.

”

“This is hell, isn’t it?”

“Worse,” said the other. “Even hell is paved with good intentions.”

He not only liked beer, but he fondly loved beer.

Beer never felt the slightest jealousy when this gentleman was out of its sight.

After supper the lady said: “Now, Robert, I have a little surprise for you.

His aunt glared furiously at him and drove away without saying a word.

Henry figured it up afterward and found that every word he said to her cost him $8,000.

“No, I just want to give myself up on general principles. You see, I went to hear Sam Jones last night, and he saw me in the crowd and diagnosed my case to a T.

Up to that time I thought I was a four-horse team with a yellow dog under the wagon, but Sam took the negative side and won.

I’m a danged old sore-eyed hound dog; I wouldn’t mind if you kicked me a few times before you locked me up, and sent my wife word that the old villain that has been abusin’ her for twenty years has met his deserts.”

There was something the matter with the electric lights Tuesday night, and

Houston was as dark as Egypt when Moses blew the gas out.

They were on Rusk Avenue, out on the lawn, taking advantage of the situation, and were holding as close a session as possible.

“What is it, my darling?” asked George, in an agony of suspense. “Speak, my own, and tell me what it is that has come between you and me?”

“I think, George” she softly sighed, “it is your watch.”

And George loosened his hold for a moment and shifted his Waterbury.

“

That fellow Red Conlin could talk.

”

“Let’s see,” he said. “The string was tied on my finger so I would not forget. Therefore it is a forget-me-not. Now forget-me-not is a flower. Ah, yes, that’s it. I was to get a sack of flour.”

The giant intellect had got in its work.

The pale woman unrolled the package with trembling hands.

It was a nice new calendar.

“That’s three today,” muttered the great editor as he returned the bill to his pocket. “

It works better than a gun or a club and the coroner always brings in a verdict of heart failure.

”

684, where the Qadi of a certain town came home late from the lodge with his shoes off and stepped upon a tack, all will be well, but if you work off a Joe Miller on us, verily you get it in the neck.”

Scheherezade took a fresh chew of gum, sat down on one foot and began.

“Oh, mighty Caliph, I have one story that would hold you spellbound. I call it my 288 story. But I really can not tell it. I—”

The Caliph made a sign: Mesrour, the executioner, whirled his scimeter through the air and the head of Scheherezade rolled upon the floor. The Caliph pulled his beard and muttered softly to himself:

“I knew all the time that 288 is two gross, but puns don’t go anywhere in my jurisdiction at present.”

“I am one man,” he continued, “who has arrived at the fruition of his dearest earthly hopes.

I have got something on at least that will not bag at the knees.

”

“You’re at the wrong place,” said Cerberus. “This is the gate that leads to the infernal regions, while it is a passport to Heaven that you have handed me.”

“I know it,” said the departed shade wearily, “but it allows a stopover here; you see, I’m from Galveston and I have got to make the change gradually.”

“Madagascar is the home,” read the manager, “of an enormous bird called the epyornis, that lays an egg 15½ by 9½ in. in size, weighing from ten to twelve pounds. These eggs—”

“Never mind reading any more,” said Mark Twain. “We will not go to Madagascar.”

“Too late!” cried the general as he fell senseless from his horse.

“I knew it,” said Bowie Knife Bill, folding his arms with a silent smile, “but what surprises me is how he ever got this far alive.”

“Go away and leave me alone.

I’m walking on the bottom. You’ll run your boat aground in a minute.

I’ll wade out when I get ready and go up to a barber shop and get dusted off. The ground’s damp a little, but I ain’t afraid of catching cold.”

I dislike being in love with one who has neither chic, naivete nor front teeth, but fate has willed it so. You personally repel me, but I can not tear you from my heart.

You are in my thoughts by day and nightmares by night.

“Your form reminds me of a hatrack, but when I press you to my heart I feel strange thrills of joy.

“

Your form reminds me of a hatrack, but when I press you to my heart I feel strange thrills of joy.

I can no more tell you why I love you than I can tell why a barber can rub a man’s head fifteen minutes without touching the spot that itches. Speak, Gabrielle, and tell me what is this spell you have woven around me!”

“Your form reminds me of a hatrack, but when I press you to my heart I feel strange thrills of joy.

I can no more tell you why I love you than I can tell why a barber can rub a man’s head fifteen minutes without touching the spot that itches.

Speak, Gabrielle, and tell me what is this spell you have woven around me!”

“Yes,” said the beautiful girl, with eyes shining with enthusiasm. “The test was a complete success.

I detest that odious Judson, and I’m going to begin studying for the stage right away.

”

He smelled of gin and his whiskers resembled the cylinder of a Swiss music box.

He walked into a toy shop on Main Street yesterday and leaned sorrowfully against the counter.

“It’s plain you don’t know much about married men,” said the jeweler. “

That idiot of a clerk actually saved the pin for him and he had to buy it.

”

“You don’t know her. I’ve done all I can. I’ve taken out an accident policy for $10,000 good for two hours, and I expect her here in fifteen minutes.

Tell all the boys goodbye for me, and if you meet a lady on the stairs as you go down keep close to the wall.

”

The man and the woman went into an empty room and set the rocking-horse down. He took out his knife, ripped open the front of the horse, and took out a roll of bills. He counted them and said: “

It’s a cold day when I fail without a rake-off.

Eight thousand five hundred dollars, but that auctioneer came very near busting up the game.”

He is dead and I am satisfied.

I think he is the largest and fattest mosquito I ever saw.

What a terrible state of affairs it would be if we could read each other’s minds! It is safe to say that if such were the case, most of us would be afraid to think above a whisper.

As an illustration, a case might be cited that occurred in Houston. Some months ago a very charming young lady came to this city giving exhibitions in mind reading, and proved herself to be marvelously gifted in that respect.

You should not waste any time in selecting a man.

Try the milkman first, as he generally comes before it is very light.

As the milkman will no doubt refuse you, be prepared to give the postman a shock. Do not be too abrupt in proposing, as a rude shock of this nature will often cause a timid man to stampede, causing great loss of confidence and bric-a-brac.

After getting a victim to stand, speak gently to him until he ceases to quiver in his limbs and roll his eyes. Do not pat his chest, or rub his nose, as men will sometimes kick at this treatment.

Bear in mind the fact that 1900 is not leap year, and keep between him and the door.

Approach the subject gradually, allowing him no time to pray and remove the cigars from his vest pocket.

At this stage he will mutter incoherently, answer at random, and try to climb up the chimney.

When his pulse gets to 195, and he begins to babble of green fields and shows only the whites of his eyes, strike him on the point of the chin, propose, chloroform him, and telephone for a minister.

‘Will some gentleman kindly loan me a hat?’ Then I’m going to stand up and give him mine, and it’ll make me feel good for a week.

I haven’t been called a gentleman in so long.

I expect I’ll whoop right out hard when he takes the hat. Excuse me now. I’ve got to be ready and get my hat in first.

A policeman standing on the corner heard a loud yell of despair, and turning, saw a man throw up his arms and then disappear from sight. Before the policeman could call someone who could swim the man had gone for the third and last time.

Mr. Jeremiah Q. Dilworthy had fallen into the sidewalk.

“She wants to hear about Jack the Giant Killer,” said the sporting editor, “but doesn’t seem to greet our poor efforts with much hilarity.

Do you speak English, or only railroad?

”

“It simply made Paderewski’s fortune. That head of hair he wears will make him a millionaire yet.

I never hear him bang down hard on the bass keys of a piano, but I think of a lion roaring in a South African forest, and I’ll bet he does, too.

”

“

I understand DeWolf Hopper is going to dramatize the incident, and will produce it next season, appearing as a kangaroo.

“Coxey was caught on the edge of a little stream which he refused to enter, and the natives dragged him before an English justice of the peace who released him the next day. The prince took the whole thing as a good joke.

“That’s the last of the lot.

After all, the pursuit of revenge gives more pleasure than its attainment. I have robbed my existence of its aim.

”

The ragged man replied sadly and reproachfully: “

Did I not pay my last dollar for refreshments while telling it to you? Have I asked you for anything?

”

“What is this?” he asked.

“It was the apple of Life,” said the Spirit. “It is now the apple of Success.”

At last she turns, conquered.

He has refused to treat to oysters.

… beholds with understanding eyes can see beneath the thin veil of the commonplace, the romance, the tragedy and the broad comedy that is being played upon the world’s stage by the actors great and little who tread the boards of the Theater of the Universe.

Life is neither tragedy nor comedy. It is a mingling of both.

High above us omnipotent hands pull the strings that choke our laughter with sobs and cause strange sounds of mirth to break in upon our deepest grief. We are marionettes that dance and cry, scarce at our own wills;

Life is neither tragedy nor comedy. It is a mingling of both. High above us omnipotent hands pull the strings that choke our laughter with sobs and cause strange sounds of mirth to break in upon our deepest grief.

We are marionettes that dance and cry, scarce at our own wills; and at the end, the flaring lights are out, we are laid to rest in our wooden boxes, and down comes the dark night to cover the scene of our brief triumph.

We elbow heroes on the streets as grand as any the poets have sung;

We are marionettes that dance and cry, scarce at our own wills; and at the end, the flaring lights are out, we are laid to rest in our wooden boxes, and down comes the dark night to cover the scene of our brief triumph.

We elbow heroes on the streets as grand as any the poets have sung; in the faces of obscure women and prosy men a student of his kind can see the imprints of all the passions, both good and bad, that have illuminated the pages of song and story.

There is good in all, and we are none all good. The scholar in his library, the woodcutter in the forest, my lady in her boudoir and the painted, hard-eyed denizen of the byways—we are all from the same clay.

in the faces of obscure women and prosy men a student of his kind can see the imprints of all the passions, both good and bad, that have illuminated the pages of song and story.

There is good in all, and we are none all good.

The scholar in his library, the woodcutter in the forest, my lady in her boudoir and the painted, hard-eyed denizen of the byways—we are all from the same clay.

And the hands of fate pull the strings, and we caper and pirouette; and some go up and some go down and haphazard chance or else an obscure divinity pulls us this way and that, and where are we left?

Blind and chattering on the brink of an eternal unknowableness.

We spring from a common root. The king and the bricklayer are equal except as to environs; the queen and the milkmaid may sit side by side with pail and crown on the ragged edge of destiny;

“ ‘

Thermopylae had her messenger of defeat, but the Alamo had a thousand.

’

“Now, my dear sir, I am not wealthy, and I can not afford to pay for high lineage and moldy ancestors with my board.

Corned beef goes further with me than a coronet, and when I am cold a coat-of-arms does not warm me.

I am desperate and hungry, and I hate everybody who can trace their ancestors farther back than the late Confederate Reunion.

“Now, my dear sir, I am not wealthy, and I can not afford to pay for high lineage and moldy ancestors with my board. Corned beef goes further with me than a coronet, and when I am cold a coat-of-arms does not warm me.

I am desperate and hungry, and I hate everybody who can trace their ancestors farther back than the late Confederate Reunion.

I want to find a boarding house whose proprietress was left while an infant in a basket at a livery stable, whose father was an unnaturalized dago from the fifth ward, and whose grandfather was never placed upon the map.

But the man with the Ray neglected to mention the fact that the photographs he had taken showed that Reuben’s head was full of deep and abiding love for Reuben and Ruth’s showed her to be passionately enamored of Ruth.

The moral is that the proprietor of the Ray probably knew his business.

“That’s whatever,” said the colonel reflectively. “It is for a fact.

But you might state, in order to do justice to our community and town, which is, as it were, the Athens of Texas, that the motion made by the deceased was in the direction of his hip pocket.

Shall we all liquor?”

The history of matrimony gives color to the belief that, to whichever one of the ladies the gentleman might unite himself, he would be lucky if he escaped with only marrying her.

Getting married is the easiest part of the affair. It is what comes afterward that makes a man sometimes wish a wolf had carried him into the forest when he was a little boy.

It takes only a little nerve, a black coat, from five to ten dollars, and a girl, for a man to get married. Very few men are lucky enough to escape with only marrying a woman.

“Oh, dang it all,” said Mr. Simmons, “I didn’t mean anything. I’ve played some on the ranch with the boys of nights for grains of corn. Deal ’em out.”

The old story of the hawk and the pigeon has been told so often that the details are apt to weary.

From a stake of 10 cents they rose to 50 cents and a dollar. Mr. Simmons won, of course. He had taken the bead purse out of his bag and therefrom abstracted certain silver dollars, and later on, $25 in bills.

The girls in the neighborhood all envied Kathleen her good luck, for Fergus was a fine-looking young man, and his business was prospering.

He could drink more whiskey, tell funnier jokes and sing “The Wearin’ of the Green” so you could hear it farther on a still night than could any other young man of their acquaintance.

So, dark-haired Kathleen was happy, bending over her work with rosy cheeks and smiling lips, while, alas! already the serpent was at work that was to enter her Eden.

“I have first,” he said, “a duty to perform.” He knelt before the whiskey keg, closed his mouth over the faucet and turned on the handle.

Sing, happy birds, in the green trees, but your songs make not half the melody that ripples in the glad heart of little Kathleen.

When Fergus arose from the keg, he was the same old Fergus once more. He gathered his bride to his heart, and Mr. O’Malley fired both barrels of his gun into the ceiling with joy. Fergus was rescued.

A dank fresh smell arose from bursting buds and wild flowers. We five sat in the chiaroscuro of the live oaks and cypresses, and babbled as most men and all women will when Night, the tongue loosener, succeeds the discrete Day.

Night should be held responsible for poets, breach of promise suits, betrayed secrets and dull stories.

The man who will not tell more than he knows in the moonlight of a spring night is a rarity. Four of us were more or less hardened to moonlight and roses;

“Love? Little one! Oh, love is undoubtedly a species of mild insanity. An overbalance of the brain that leads to an abnormal state.

It is as much a disease as measles, but as yet, sentimentalists refuse to hand it over to us doctors of medicine for treatment.

”

Mr. Flint then fell dead.

Alas! messieurs, life is full of disappointments!

Cyrus is not of a jealous disposition, and I now have that great toe in a bottle of alcohol on my writing desk. We are married now, and I will never taken another trip to the South.

The Southern people are too impulsive.

She has descended, borrowed our clothes, and is our good friend and demands equal rights. We no longer express our admiration by midnight serenades and sonnets.

We slap her on the back and feel we have gained a good comrade.

But we feel like inserting the following want ad in every paper in the land:

There was no happier couple in all Houston than George W. St. Bibbs and his wife before the shadow of the tempter crossed their path.

It is remarkable how the tempter always comes up so his shadow will fall across one’s path, isn’t it?

It seems as if a tempter who knew his business would either approach on the other side or select a cloudy day for crossing people’s paths. But, we digress.

Somebody—who it was doesn’t make any difference—has said something like the following: “

There is something grand in the grief of the Common People, but there is no sadder sight on earth than that of a Philistine enjoying himself.

”

He occupies all the vacant seats in the car with his accomplices, and lets his accursed good nature spray over the rest of the passengers. He is so infernally happy that he wants everybody, to the brakeman on the rear car, to know it.

He is so devilish agreeable, so perniciously jolly and so abominably entertaining that people who were born with or have acquired brains love him most vindictively.

People who become enamored of the Sunday excursionist are apt to grow insanely jealous, and have been known to rise up and murder him when a stranger enters the car and he proceeds to repeat his funny remarks for the benefit of a fresh audience.

It ripples naturally and conforms readily to the size of the car. She puts on the male Sunday excursionist’s hat, and he puts on hers, and if the other passengers are feeling worse than usual, they sing “The Swanee River.”

There is enough woe and sorrow in the world without augmenting it in this way.

Men who have braved the deepest troubles and emerged unscathed from the heaviest afflictions have gone down with a shriek of horror and despair before the fatal hilarity of the Sunday excursionist. There is no escape from his effects.

… added his handiwork to the list of casualties along the Spanish Main by his famous manipulation of the shoe market, and his unparalleled feat of elevating that despised and useless weed product, the cockleburr, from its obscurity to be a valuable product in international commerce.

The trouble began, as trouble often begins instead of ending, with a romance.

There was a man named Hemstetter, who came to the little Southern town where Johnny lived, to open a general store. His family consisted of one daughter called Rosine, a name that atoned much for “Hemstetter.”

Que Sea su Juez Dios

It is characteristic of this buoyant people that they pursue no man beyond the grave.

“Let God be his judge!”—Even with the hundred thousand unfound, though greatly coveted, the hue and cry went no further than that.

Far beyond the common woman was she endowed with intrepid rashness, with a love for the pursuit of adventure to the brink of danger, and with desire for the pleasures of life.

Her spirit was one to chafe under any curb; she was Eve after the fall, but before the bitterness of it was felt.

She wore life as a rose in her bosom.

Her spirit was one to chafe under any curb; she was Eve after the fall, but before the bitterness of it was felt.

She wore life as a rose in her bosom.

Of the legion of men who had been at her feet it was said that but one was so fortunate as to engage her fancy. To President Miraflores, the brilliant but unstable ruler of Anchuria, she yielded the key to her resolute heart.

Coralio reclined, in the midday heat, like some vacuous beauty lounging in a guarded harem.

The town lay at the sea’s edge on a strip of alluvial coast. It was set like a little pearl in an emerald band. Behind it, and seeming almost to topple, imminent, above it, rose the sea-following range of the Cordilleras.

Then, sitting upright, he saw her float steadily past and on. Scarcely a mile of sea had separated her from the shore. He had seen the frequent flash of her polished brass work and the stripes of her deck-awnings—so much, and no more.

Like a ship on a magic lantern slide the Idalia had crossed the illuminated circle of the consul’s little world, and was gone.

Save for the tiny cloud of smoke that was left hanging over the brim of the sea, she might have been an immaterial thing, a chimera of his idle brain.

By ten o’clock the streets were deserted. The oil lamps that had burned, a sickly yellow, at random corners, had been extinguished by some economical civic agent.

Coralio lay sleeping calmly between toppling mountains and encroaching sea like a stolen babe in the arms of its abductors.

Somewhere over in that tropical darkness—perhaps already threading the profundities of the alluvial lowlands—the high adventurer and his mate were moving toward land’s end. The game of Fox-in-the-Morning should be coming soon to its close.

I have said before that women turned to look at him in the streets. He was the viking sort of man, big, good-looking, and with an air of kindly truculence. She was dark and proud, glowing or pale as her mood moved her.

I do not know if Eve were light or dark, but if such a woman had stood in the garden I know that the apple would have been eaten.

This woman was to be Goodwin’s fate, and he did not know it; but he must have felt the first throes of destiny, for, as he faced her, the knowledge of what report named her turned bitter in his throat.

But Pink Dawson was there, of course, talking about his 400-acre orchard, and the three-mile alfalfa tract, and the 200-acre pasture. So Johnny shook hands with Rosine as coolly as if he were only going to run up to Montgomery for a couple of days.

They had the royal manner when they chose, those Atwoods.

“If you happen to strike anything in the way of a good investment down there, Johnny,” said Pink Dawson, “just let me know, will you? I reckon I could lay my hands on a few extra thousands ’most any time for a profitable deal.”

“It’s all right,” said Johnny from the hammock that he had set up as the official reclining place. “If anything turns up that has to be done I’ll let you fellows do it.

You can’t expect a Democrat to work during his first term of holding office.

”

“ ’Tis contrary to art and philosophy to give you the information,” said Keogh, calmly. “The art of narrative consists in concealing from your audience everything it wants to know until after you expose your favourite opinions on topics foreign to the subject.

A good story is like a bitter pill with the sugar coating inside of it.

I will begin, if you please, with a horoscope located in the Cherokee Nation; and end with a moral tune on the phonograph.

The government knows it; the people know it; the boodlers know it; the foreign investors know it. I make the government keep its faith. If a man is promised a job he gets it. If outside capital buys a concession it gets the goods.

I run a monopoly of square dealing here. There’s no competition.

If Colonel Diogenes were to flash his lantern in this precinct he’d have my address inside of two minutes. There isn’t big money in it, but it’s a sure thing, and lets a man sleep of nights.’

You’d never guess in the world how I got my pull. It’s the only graft of its kind on earth. I’ll put you wise. You remember the old top-liner in the copy book—“Honesty is the Best Policy”? That’s it.

I’m working honesty for a graft. I’m the only honest man in the republic.

The government knows it; the people know it; the boodlers know it; the foreign investors know it. I make the government keep its faith. If a man is promised a job he gets it. If outside capital buys a concession it gets the goods.

“I thought I could do it, but I couldn’t,” he muttered to himself after a time. “

A gentleman can’t blackmail the man that he drinks with.

”

Spilled milk draws few tears from an Anchurian administration.

Many are its lacteal sources; and the clocks’ hands point forever to milking time. Even the rich cream skimmed from the treasury by the bewitched Miraflores did not cause the newly-installed patriots to waste time in unprofitable regrets.

Prosperity was expected to attend the reign of Losada, the new president. The ousted officeholders and military favourites organized a new “Liberal” party, and began to lay their plans for a re-succession.

Thus the game of Anchurian politics began, like a Chinese comedy, to unwind slowly its serial length.

Here and there Mirth peeps for an instant from the wings and illumines the florid lines.

Thereafter El Nacional turned out with the other coast craft and became a wage-earner. She worked with the lighters freighting bananas and oranges out to the fruit steamers that could not approach nearer than a mile from the shore.

Surely a self-supporting navy deserves red letters in the budget of any nation.

After earning enough at freighting to keep himself and his crew in provisions for a week Felipe would anchor the navy and hang about the little telegraph office, looking like one of the chorus of an insolvent comic opera troupe besieging the manager’s den.

“Not yet, it seems, Señor el Almirante—poco tiempo!”

Outside in the shade of the lime-trees the crew chewed sugar cane or slumbered, well content to serve a country that was contented with so little service.

One day in the early summer the revolution predicted by the collector flamed out suddenly. It had long been smouldering.

At the answer the admiral would plump himself down with a great rattling of scabbard to await the infrequent tick of the little instrument on the table.

“They will come,” would be his unshaken reply; “I am the admiral.”

“Well said,” cried Don Sabas. Advancing to the mast he lowered the flag to the deck, where lay its too loyal supporter.

Thus ended the Minister of War’s little piece of after-dinner drollery, and by the same hand that began it.

Suddenly Don Sabas gave a great cry of joy, and ran down the slanting deck to the side of Colonel Rafael. Across his arm he carried the flag of the extinguished navy.

He followed after the others, and stood with them upon the deck of the Salvador. The sailors that steadied El Nacional shoved her off. The jabbering Caribs hauled away at the rigging; the sloop headed for the shore.

And Herr Grunitz’s collection of naval flags was still the finest in the world.

“I didn’t know you had ever lent your sword to an oppressed people,” murmured Atwood, from the grass.

“I did,” said Clancy; “and they turned it into a ploughshare.”

“What country was so fortunate as to secure your aid?” airily inquired Blanchard.

I could hear the heavy boxes bein’ dumped into the hold. I judged that cargo must consist of at least 2,000 Winchesters. Me and the brown man drank the bottle of stuff, and he called the steward to bring another.

When you amalgamate a Clancy with the contents of a bottle you practically instigate secession.

I had heard a good deal about these revolutions in them tropical localities, and I begun to want a hand in it.

’Twas yet a while before daybreak when I saw the lights of Port Barrios about a mile away. I stopped the handcar there and walked to the town. I stepped inside the corporations of that town with care and hesitations.

I was not afraid of the army of Guatemala, but me soul quaked at the prospect of a hand-to-hand struggle with its employment bureau.

’Tis a country that hires its help easy and keeps ’em long. Sure I can fancy Missis America and Missis Guatemala passin’ a bit of gossip some fine, still night across the mountains.

Surely, I say, if the ship captains view me, they shall throw me again to those Guatemala. Those things are not good. Guatemala will shoot General De Vega. Therefore, I am hide and remain silent. Life itself is glorious.

Liberty, it is pretty good; but so good as life I do not think.

’

Blythe stepped from the platform with the air of a prince leaving his canopied couch. He never quite lost that air, even at the lowest point of his fall.

It is clear that the college of good breeding does not necessarily maintain a chair of morals within its walls.

Blythe shook out his wry clothing, and moved slowly up the Calle Grande through the hot sand. He moved without a destination in his mind. The little town was languidly stirring to its daily life. Golden-skinned babies tumbled over one another in the grass.

And then, my dear Goodwin—excuse me—I saw you sneak back and pluck that ripe and juicy valise from the orange tree. I followed you, and saw you take it to your own house.

A hundred-thousand-dollar crop from one orange tree in a season about breaks the record of the fruit-growing industry.

“Being a gentleman at that time, of course, I never mentioned the incident to anyone.

“Political economy isn’t your strong point,” said the consul, impudently. “

You can’t create a demand. But you can create a necessity for a demand.

That’s what I am going to do.”

The first plunge of his unshod foot into the cool grass struck a concealed mine.

Don Ildefonso fell like a crumpled cathedral, crying out that he had been fatally bitten by a deadly scorpion.

Everywhere were the shoeless citizens hopping, stumbling, limping, and picking from their feet the venomous insects that had come in a single night to harass them.

Coming out, he swaggered down the street with impunity, reviling loudly the bugs of the devil. The suffering ones sat up or stood upon one foot and beheld the immune barber. Men, women and children took up the cry: “Zapatos! zapatos!”

The necessity for the demand had been created. The demand followed.

That day Mr. Hemstetter sold three hundred pairs of shoes.

… me,” Keogh used to say, “in the way of a business proposition is something diversified that looks like a longer shot than it is—something in the way of a genteel graft that isn’t worked enough for the correspondence schools to be teaching it by mail.

I take the long end; but I like to have at least as good a chance to win as a man learning to play poker on an ocean steamer, or running for governor of Texas on the Republican ticket.

And when I cash in my winnings, I don’t want to find any widows’ and orphans’ chips in my stack.”

And when I cash in my winnings, I don’t want to find any widows’ and orphans’ chips in my stack.”

The grass-grown globe was the green table on which Keogh gambled.

The games he played were of his own invention. He was no grubber after the diffident dollar. Nor did he care to follow it with horn and hounds.

Rather he loved to coax it with egregious and brilliant flies from its habitat in the waters of strange streams. Yet Keogh was a business man; and his schemes, in spite of their singularity, were as solidly set as the plans of a building contractor.

In Arthur’s time Sir William Keogh would have been a Knight of the Round Table. In these modern days he rides abroad, seeking the Graft instead of the Grail.

Three days after Johnny’s departure, two small schooners appeared off Coralio. After some delay a boat put off from one of them, and brought a sunburned young man ashore. This young man had a shrewd and calculating eye;

You see a man doing nothing but loafing around making snapshots, and you know right away he reads up well in ‘Bradstreet.’ You notice these old millionaire boys—soon as they get through taking everything else in sight they go to taking photographs.

People are more impressed by a kodak than they are by a title or a four-carat scarf-pin.

” So Keogh strolled blandly about Coralio, snapping the scenery and the shrinking señoritas, while White posed conspicuously in the higher regions of art.

“You don’t understand, Billy,” said White, with an uneasy laugh. “Some of us fellows who try to paint have big notions about Art. I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint.

I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.

And I wanted ’em to go away and ask, ‘What else has he done?’ And I didn’t want ’em to find a thing; not a portrait nor a magazine cover nor an illustration nor a drawing of a girl—nothing but the picture.

“Wrong,” said Keogh with shining eyes. “It’s a slung-shot. It’s a can of dynamite. It’s a gold mine. It’s a sight-draft on your president man for twenty thousand dollars—yes, sir—twenty thousand this time, and no spoiling the picture. No ethics of art in the way.

Art! You with your smelly little tubes! I’ve got you skinned to death with a kodak.

Take a look at that.”

There is little consecutiveness along the Spanish Main. Things happen there intermittently.

Even Time seems to hang his scythe daily on the branch of an orange tree while he takes a siesta and a cigarette.

There is little consecutiveness along the Spanish Main. Things happen there intermittently.

Even Time seems to hang his scythe daily on the branch of an orange tree while he takes a siesta and a cigarette.

After the ineffectual revolt against the administration of President Losada, the country settled again into quiet toleration of the abuses with which he had been charged. In Coralio old political enemies went arm-in-arm, lightly eschewing for the time all differences of opinion.

And then, by twos and threes, would come visiting young caballeros and occupy the prim line of chairs set against the wall of this room. They were there to besiege the heart of “La Santita.”

Their method (which is not proof against intelligent competition) consisted of expanding the chest, looking valorous, and consuming a gross or two of cigarettes.

Even saints delicately oranged prefer to be wooed differently.

They were there to besiege the heart of “La Santita.” Their method (which is not proof against intelligent competition) consisted of expanding the chest, looking valorous, and consuming a gross or two of cigarettes.

Even saints delicately oranged prefer to be wooed differently.

Doña Pasa would tide over the vast chasms of nicotinized silence with music from her guitar, while she wondered if the romances she had read about gallant and more—more contiguous cavaliers were all lies.

My man is of no such blood. Let him drink of the wine. When he has taken sufficient of it to drown one of your flaccitos he will come home to me more of a man than one thousand of your pobrecitos.

My hair he smooths and braids; to me he sings; he himself removes my zapatos, and there, there, upon each instep leaves a kiss.

He holds—Oh, you will never understand! Blind ones who have never known a man.”

“No, no,” said Dicky. “This is merely the result of a little private affair of mine, a digression from the regular line of business.

They say for a complete life a man must know poverty, love and war. But they don’t go well together, capitán mio.

No; there is no failure in my business. The little shop is doing very well.”

One day, while she was lying with the fever burning brightly in her checks, she said suddenly:

“Papa, I wish I could do something good for a whole lot of children!”

“What would you like to do, dear?” asked the Commissioner. “Give them a party?”

Many of them were reputable men of good business character. Some of them could walk into the most august councils of the State and say: “Gentlemen, we would like to have this, and that, and matters go thus.”

But, next to a three years’ drought and the bollworm, the Actual Settler hated the Land-shark.

The land-shark haunted the Land Office, where all the land records were kept, and hunted “vacancies”—that is, tracts of unappropriated public domain, generally invisible upon the official maps, but actually existing “upon the ground.”

Once the “revenues” had dragged him from his lair, fighting silently and desperately like a terrier, and he had been sent to state’s prison for two years. Released, he popped back into his hole like an angry weasel.

Fortune, passing over many anxious wooers, made a freakish flight into Blackjack’s bosky pockets to smile upon Pike and his faithful partner.

One day a party of spectacled, knickerbockered, and altogether absurd prospectors invaded the vicinity of the Garvey’s cabin. Pike lifted his squirrel rifle off the hooks and took a shot at them at long range on the chance of their being revenues.

… mountainside, he pointed out to her how a small cannon—doubtless a thing not beyond the scope of their fortune in price—might be planted so as to command and defend the sole accessible trail to the cabin, to the confusion of revenues and meddling strangers forever.

But Adam reckoned without his Eve.

These things represented to him the applied power of wealth, but there slumbered in his dingy cabin an ambition that soared far above his primitive wants. Somewhere in Mrs. Garvey’s bosom still survived a spot of femininity unstarved by twenty years of Blackjack.

Why, the major wanted to know, could they not be filed and paid in a lump sum at some convenient period—say when the “Anecdotes and Reminiscences” had been published and paid for? Miss Lydia would calmly go on with her sewing and say,

“We’ll pay as we go as long as the money lasts, and then perhaps they’ll have to lump it.”

Most of Mrs. Vardeman’s boarders were away during the day, being nearly all department clerks and business men; but there was one of them who was about the house a great deal from morning to night.

“Major Talbot,” said Hargraves, with a winning smile, “I wish you would understand me. I want you to know that I never dreamed of insulting you.

In my profession, all life belongs to me. I take what I want, and what I can, and return it over the footlights.

Now, if you will, let’s let it go at that. I came in to see you about something else. We’ve been pretty good friends for some months, and I’m going to take the risk of offending you again.

In one of the cattle cars, half buried in excelsior, Chicken lay at ease. Beside him in his nest was a quart bottle of very poor whisky and a paper bag of bread and cheese.

Mr. Ruggles, in his private car, was on his trip south for the winter season.

For a week that car was trundled southward, shifted, laid over, and manipulated after the manner of rolling stock, but Chicken stuck to it, leaving it only at necessary times to satisfy his hunger and thirst.

Going up to it, Chicken read the letters at the top, S. A. 90. Laredo was nearly as far to the south. He was almost a hundred miles from any town. Coyotes began to yelp in the mysterious sea around him. Chicken felt lonesome.

He had lived in Boston without an education, in Chicago without nerve, in Philadelphia without a sleeping place, in New York without a pull, and in Pittsburg sober, and yet he had never felt so lonely as now.

Suddenly through the intense silence, he heard the whicker of a horse. The sound came from the side of the track toward the east, and Chicken began to explore timorously in that direction.

Few people in the country drained by the Rio Bravo would have cared thus to invade alone the camp of Bud King. But this fell bird swooped fearlessly upon them and demanded to be fed.

Hospitality in the prairie country is not limited. Even if your enemy pass your way you must feed him before you shoot him.

You must empty your larder into him before you empty your lead. So the stranger of undeclared intentions was set down to a mighty feast.

So was every man in the bank. There was something so icy and swift, so impersonal and uncompromising about this man that his very presence seemed an accusation.

He looked to be a man who would never make nor overlook an error.

Mr. Nettlewick first seized the currency, and with a rapid, almost juggling motion, counted it by packages. Then he spun the sponge cup toward him and verified the count by bills.

“ ‘Why not?’ I answered him. ‘They’re welcome, and so are you. And come to my house, the same as ever.’

You see, Mr. Nettlewick, you can’t make a friend of a thief, but neither can you make a thief of a friend, all at once.

”

“Lead the way,” said Doctor James, setting his foot upon the step, “if you want me as a doctor.

As an auditor I’m not open to engagements.

”

There was an exploring magnetism in his steadfast, luminous brown eves; a latent authority in the impassive, even priestly, tranquillity of his smooth countenance that outwardly fitted him for the part of confidant and consoler.

Sometimes, at his first professional visit, women would tell him where they hid their diamonds at night from the burglars.

With the ease of much practice, Doctor James’s unroving eyes estimated the order and quality of the room’s furnishings. The appointments were rich and costly. The same glance had secured cognizance of the lady’s appearance. She was small and scarcely past twenty.

Teddy must have left so hurriedly that morning that he had, for once, forgotten to transfer it to its resting-place by day.

Even managers, who are notoriously wily and cunning, are sometimes caught up with.

Octavia slid the gray glove into the bosom of her summery morning gown. It was hers. Men who put themselves within a strong barbed-wire fence, and remember Hammersmith balls only by the talk of miners about sluice-boxes, should not be allowed to possess such articles.

Between them they slew the centipede.

Thus was he rewarded for his agency toward the recovery of things lost at the Hammersmiths’ ball.

It seems that Teddy, in due course, remembered the glove, and when he returned to the house at sunset made a secret but exhaustive search for it. Not until evening, upon the moonlit eastern gallery, did he find it.

In those days the cattlemen were the anointed.

They were the grandees of the grass, kings of the kine, lords of the lea, barons of beef and bone.

They might have ridden in golden chariots had their tastes so inclined. The cattleman was caught in a stampede of dollars. It seemed to him that he had more money than was decent.

Not so circumscribed in expedient for the reduction of surplus wealth were those lairds of the lariat who had womenfolk to their name.

In the breast of the rib-sprung sex the genius of purse lightening may slumber through years of inopportunity, but never, my brothers, does it become extinct.

So, out of the chaparral came Long Bill Longley from the Bar Circle Branch on the Frio—a wife-driven man—to taste the urban joys of success. Something like half a million dollars he had, with an income steadily increasing.

“Of course, you don’t know Tom Merwin,” said Longley, almost genially. “Yes, I know about that loan. It hasn’t any security except Tom Merwin’s word.

Somehow, I’ve always found that when a man’s word is good it’s the best security there is.

Oh, yes, I know the Government doesn’t think so. I guess I’ll see Tom about that note.”

“The dispositions of woman,” said Jeff Peters, after various opinions on the subject had been advanced, “run, regular, to diversions.

What a woman wants is what you’re out of. She wants more of a thing when it’s scarce.

She likes to have souvenirs of things that never happened. She likes to be reminded of things she never heard of. A one-sided view of objects is disjointing to the female composition.

I’ve held ’em spellbound with music, oratory, sleight of hand, and prevarications, while I’ve sold ’em jewelry, medicine, soap, hair tonic, and junk of other nominations. And during my travels, as a matter of recreation and expiation, I’ve taken cognisance some of women.

It takes a man a lifetime to find out about one particular woman; but if he puts in, say, ten years, industrious and curious, he can acquire the general rudiments of the sex.

One lesson I picked up was when I was working the West with a line of Brazilian diamonds and a patent fire kindler just after my trip from Savannah down through the cotton belt with Dalby’s Anti-explosive Lamp Oil Powder.

They earn their own living in stores, restaurants, factories, and offices. They’re chummy and honest and free and tender and sassy, and they look life straight in the eye. They’ve met man face to face, and discovered that he’s a poor creature.

They’ve dropped to it that the reports in the Seaside Library about his being a fairy prince lack confirmation.

“Mame was that sort. She was full of life and fun, and breezy; she passed the repartee with the boarders quick as a wink; you’d have smothered laughing. I am disinclined to make excavations into the insides of a personal affection.

“Mame was that sort. She was full of life and fun, and breezy; she passed the repartee with the boarders quick as a wink; you’d have smothered laughing. I am disinclined to make excavations into the insides of a personal affection.

I am glued to the theory that the diversions and discrepancies of the indisposition known as love should be as private a sentiment as a toothbrush.

’Tis my opinion that the biographies of the heart should be confined with the historical romances of the liver to the advertising pages of the magazines. So, you’ll excuse the lack of an itemised bill of my feelings toward Mame.

you’d have smothered laughing. I am disinclined to make excavations into the insides of a personal affection. I am glued to the theory that the diversions and discrepancies of the indisposition known as love should be as private a sentiment as a toothbrush.

’Tis my opinion that the biographies of the heart should be confined with the historical romances of the liver to the advertising pages of the magazines.

So, you’ll excuse the lack of an itemised bill of my feelings toward Mame.

“ ‘Jeff,’ she says, ‘I’m sorry you spoke. I like you as well as any of them, but there isn’t a man in the world I’d ever marry, and there never will be. Do you know what a man is in my eye?

He’s a tomb. He’s a sarcophagus for the interment of Beefsteakporkchopsliver’nbaconhamandeggs.

He’s that and nothing more. For two years I’ve watched men eat, eat, eat, until they represent nothing on earth to me but ruminant bipeds. They’re absolutely nothing but something that goes in front of a knife and fork and plate at the table.

They’re fixed that way in my mind and memory. I’ve tried to overcome it, but I can’t. I’ve heard girls rave about their sweethearts, but I never could understand it.

A man and a sausage grinder and a pantry awake in me exactly the same sentiments.

I went to a matinee once to see an actor the girls were crazy about. I got interested enough to wonder whether he liked his steak rare, medium, or well done, and his eggs over or straight up. That was all. No, Jeff;

The manager fined me all my salary; but salary wasn’t what I was after. ’Twas that girl. I’d give my life for her, but I’d endanger my immortal soul for a beef stew.

Hunger is a horrible thing, Jeff. Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man’s starving!

’

’Twas a rebuke to the poets and a slap at the best-paying element of fiction.

An empty stomach is a sure antidote to an overfull heart.

“I was naturally anxious to know how far Mame was infatuated with Collier and his stratagems. I went inside the Unparalleled Exhibition, and there she was. She looked surprised to see me, but unguilty.

“ ‘Jeff,’ says she, ‘it isn’t quite like you to talk that way. I don’t care to hear Ed Collier ridiculed.

A man may do ridiculous things, but they don’t look ridiculous to the girl he does ’em for.

That was one man in a hundred. He stopped eating just to please me. I’d be hard-hearted and ungrateful if I didn’t feel kindly toward him. Could you do what he did?’

In Texas you may travel a thousand miles in a straight line. If your course is a crooked one, it is likely that both the distance and your rate of speed may be vastly increased.

Clouds there sail serenely against the wind.

The whip-poor-will delivers its disconsolate cry with the notes exactly reversed from those of his Northern brother. Given a drought and a subsequently lively rain, and lo! from a glazed and stony soil will spring in a single night blossomed lilies, miraculously fair.

Still the interminable succession of stretches of brush, cactus, and mesquite. Hollow after hollow, slope after slope—all exactly alike—all familiar by constant repetition, and yet all strange and new. If he could only arrive somewhere.

The straight line is Art. Nature moves in circles.

A straightforward man is more an artificial product than a diplomatist is. Men lost in the snow travel in exact circles until they sink, exhausted, as their footprints have attested. Also, travellers in philosophy and other mental processes frequently wind up at their starting-point.

The straight line is Art. Nature moves in circles. A straightforward man is more an artificial product than a diplomatist is. Men lost in the snow travel in exact circles until they sink, exhausted, as their footprints have attested.

Also, travellers in philosophy and other mental processes frequently wind up at their starting-point.

It was when Sam Webber was fullest of contrition and good resolves that Mexico, with a heavy sigh, subsided from his regular, brisk trot into a slow complacent walk. They were winding up an easy slope covered with brush ten or twelve feet high.

The most notable thing about Time is that it is so purely relative.

A large amount of reminiscence is, by common consent, conceded to the drowning man; and it is not past belief that one may review an entire courtship while removing one’s gloves.

Shaken rudely by the uncompromising fact, he had suddenly found himself confronted by a thing he had never before faced—his own innermost, unmitigated, arid unbedecked self.

He saw all the garbs of pretence and egoism that he had worn now turn to rags of folly.

He shuddered at the thought that to others, before now, the garments of his soul must have appeared sorry and threadbare. Vanity and conceit? These were the joints in his armor. And how free from either she had always been—But why—

Somehow, though five times thus rejected, his heart was not so heavy when he left. She had not denied that she loved.

Upon what shallow waters can the bark of passion remain afloat!

Or, shall we play the doctrinaire, and hint that at thirty-four the tides of life are calmer and cognizant of many sources instead of but one—as at four-and-twenty?

Grandemont rose to his feet.

In their time all the Charleses had been proven, and they were gallant losers.

“Serve dinner,” he said calmly. And then he checked Absalom’s movement to obey, for something clicked the gate latch and was coming down the walk toward the house. Something that shuffled its feet and muttered to itself as it came.

And of the proud and stubborn thing in his blood that had kept him silent through all those years, clouding the honour of one, though he knew it not, and keeping apart two loving hearts.

“What a thing is love!” you may say. And if I grant it, you shall say, with me: “What a thing is pride!”

On a couch in the reception chamber Victor lay, with a dawning understanding in his heavy eyes and peace in his softened countenance.

“The ghost of a Revolutionary ancestor wouldn’t be a bad idea,” agreed Mrs. Bellmore; “but you know how arbitrary and inconsiderate ghosts can be.

Maybe, like love, they are ‘engendered in the eye.’ One advantage of those who see ghosts is that their stories can’t be disproved.

By a spiteful eye, a Revolutionary knapsack might easily be construed to be a hod. Dear Mrs. Kinsolving, think no more of it. I am sure it was a knapsack.”

“Shan’t get into them,” said Mrs. Bellmore, with a prettily suppressed yawn; “too stiff and wrinkly. Is that you, Felice? Prepare my bath, please. Do you dine at seven at Clifftop, Mrs. Kinsolving? So kind of you to run in for a chat before dinner!

I love those little touches of informality with a guest. They give such a home flavour to a visit.

So sorry; I must be dressing. I am so indolent I always postpone it until the last moment.”

For others, he talked so little that it was irritating, and he seemed either very shy or very deep. Terence interested Mrs. Bellmore, because she was not sure which it was. She intended to study him a little longer, unless she forgot the matter.

If he was only shy, she would abandon him, for shyness is a bore. If he was deep, she would also abandon him, for depth is precarious.

On the afternoon of the third day of her visit, Terence hunted up Mrs. Bellmore, and found her in a nook actually looking at an album.

“I believe so; one of those old chaps in raglan vests and golf trousers.

I don’t care a continental for a Continental, myself.

But the mother has set her heart on pomp and heraldry and pyrotechnics, and I want her to be happy.”

Out of the wilderness had come a painter.

Genius, whose coronations alone are democratic, had woven a chaplet of chaparral for the brow of Lonny Briscoe.

Art, whose divine expression flows impartially from the fingertips of a cowboy or a dilettante emperor, had chosen for a medium the Boy Artist of the San Saba. The outcome, seven feet by twelve of besmeared canvas, stood, gilt-framed, in the lobby of the Capitol.

The bill was introduced, went to the second reading, and then Senator Mullens spoke for it dryly, tediously, and at length. Senator Kinney then arose, and the welkin seized the bellrope preparatory to ringing.

Oratory was at that time a living thing; the world had not quite come to measure its questions by geometry and the multiplication table.

It was the day of the silver tongue, the sweeping gesture, the decorative apostrophe, the moving peroration.

“For Art’s sake, son,” he said, fractiously, “don’t spend any more money for paint.

It isn’t a picture at all. It’s a gun.

You hold up the state with it, if you like, and get your two thousand, but don’t get in front of any more canvas. Live under it. Buy a couple of hundred ponies with the money—I’m told they’re that cheap—and ride, ride, ride.

Bright-beady of eye, bony of cheek and jaw, scarred, toughened, broken and reknit, indestructible, grisly, gladiatorial as a hornet, he was a type neither new nor unfamiliar. Raidler was the product of a different soil.

Six feet two in height, miles broad, and no deeper than a crystal brook, he represented the union of the West and South.

Few accurate pictures of his kind have been made, for art galleries are so small and the mutoscope is as yet unknown in Texas.

But McGuire reclined upon his spine, seeing nothing but a desert, and receiving the cattleman’s advances with sullen distrust. “W’at’s he up to?” was the burden of his thoughts; “w’at kind of a gold brick has the big guy got to sell?”

McGuire was only applying the measure of the streets he had walked to a range bounded by the horizon and the fourth dimension.

A week before, while riding the prairies, Raidler had come upon a sick and weakling calf deserted and bawling. Without dismounting he had reached and slung the distressed bossy across his saddle, and dropped it at the ranch for the boys to attend to.

“Get up and dress.

I can stand a rattlesnake, but I hate a liar.

Do I have to tell you again?” He caught McGuire by the neck and stood him on the floor.

The lady turned upon him a cordial look.

Woman, however wedded to plots, must ever thus bow to rash courage.

The big man stroked his upturned moustache.

That set him thinking of Yvonne, and he wondered if he had not been too hasty. Why should he leave her and his home because a few hot words had come between them?

Was love so brittle a thing that jealousy, the very proof of it, could break it?

Mornings always brought a cure for the little heartaches of evening. There was yet time for him to return home without anyone in the sweetly sleeping village of Vernoy being the wiser. His heart was Yvonne’s;

Why should he leave her and his home because a few hot words had come between them? Was love so brittle a thing that jealousy, the very proof of it, could break it?

Mornings always brought a cure for the little heartaches of evening.

There was yet time for him to return home without anyone in the sweetly sleeping village of Vernoy being the wiser. His heart was Yvonne’s; there where he had lived always he could write his poems and find his happiness.

The boy, being a poet by nature, but not furnished with an outlet in the way of writing, spent his time in slumber.

The wolves lost no time in discovering that poetry and sleep are practically the same; so the flock steadily grew smaller.

Yvonne’s ill temper increased at an equal rate. Sometimes she would stand in the yard and rail at David through his high window. Then you could hear her as far as the double chestnut tree above Père Gruneau’s blacksmith forge.

“I could not have missed it,” said Monsieur Bril, with a sigh. “I read every word.

Live your poetry, man; do not try to write it any more.

”

I have reached here the goal of all my ambitions. I am entirely happy and contented. Here I shall remain for the remainder of my days. You see this robe that I wear?” Bellchambers caressingly touched the straight-hanging garment: “

At last I have found something that will not bag at the knees.

I have attained—”

Jimmy took it in a tired kind of way. He had served nearly ten months of a four year sentence. He had expected to stay only about three months, at the longest.

When a man with as many friends on the outside as Jimmy Valentine had is received in the “stir” it is hardly worth while to cut his hair.

“Now, Valentine,” said the warden, “you’ll go out in the morning. Brace up, and make a man of yourself. You’re not a bad fellow at heart. Stop cracking safes, and live straight.”

A young lady crossed the street, passed him at the corner and entered a door over which was the sign, “The Elmore Bank.”

Jimmy Valentine looked into her eyes, forgot what he was, and became another man.

She lowered her eyes and coloured slightly. Young men of Jimmy’s style and looks were scarce in Elmore.

Agatha’s mother, frantic now, beat the door of the vault with her hands. Somebody wildly suggested dynamite. Annabel turned to Jimmy, her large eyes full of anguish, but not yet despairing.

To a woman nothing seems quite impossible to the powers of the man she worships.

“Can’t you do something, Ralph—try, won’t you?”

Uncle Bushrod stood motionless, still embracing the precious satchel. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving in thanks to the Master above for the salvation of the Weymouth honour. He knew Mr. Robert would return when he said he would.

The Weymouths never lied.

Nor now, thank the Lord! could it be said that they embezzled the money in banks.

One of us would want to sit by the fireside and read, and maybe nurse neuralgia or rheumatism of evenings, while the other would be crazy for balls and theatres and late suppers. No, my dear friend.

While it isn’t exactly January and May, it’s a clear case of October and pretty early in June.

”

These things came about through a fatal resemblance of the river Cooloosa to the Hudson, as set forth and expounded by a Northern tourist.

Okochee felt that New York should not be allowed to consider itself the only alligator in the swamp, so to speak.

And then that harmless, but persistent, individual so numerous in the South—the man who is always clamoring for more cotton mills, and is ready to take a dollar’s worth of stock, provided he can borrow the dollar—that man added his deadly work to the tourist’s …

Along the picturesque heights above the lake would rise in beauty the costly villas and the splendid summer residences of capital. The naphtha launch of the millionaire would spit among the romantic coves; the verdured hills would take formal shapes of terrace, lawn, and park.

Money would be spent like water in Okochee, and water would be turned into money.

The fate of the good town is quickly told. Capital decided not to invest. Of all the great things promised, the scenery alone came to fulfilment.

The sunsets gilded the dreamy draws and coves with a minting that should charm away heartburning. Okochee, true to the instinct of its blood and clime, was lulled by the spell.

It climbed out of the arena, loosed its suspender, sat down again on the post-office stoop, and took a chew.

It consoled itself by drawling sarcasms at the city council which was not to blame, causing the fathers, as has been said, to seek back streets and figure perspiringly on the sinking fund and the appropriation for interest due.

Mrs. Blaylock reclined at ease.

Few royal ladies have held their royal prerogative with the serene grace of the petted Southern woman.

The Colonel, with an air as gallant and assiduous as in the days of his courtship, and J. Pinkney Bloom, with a ponderous agility half professional and half directed by some resurrected, unnamed, long-forgotten sentiment, formed a diversified but attentive court.

He drew eight one-hundred-dollar bills from his money belt and planked them down on the counter. Mr. Cooly showed signs of future promise, for he already had the deed spread out, and was reaching across the counter for the ink bottle.

Never before or since was such quick action had in Cold Branch.

“Your name, please?” asked the lawyer.

He kicked me a chair, with the same old humorous, profound smile on his seasoned countenance. It had been eight months since we had met, but his greeting was such as men pass from day to day.

Time is Jeff’s servant, and the continent is a big lot across which he cuts to his many roads.

For a while we skirmished along the edges of unprofitable talk which culminated in that unquiet problem of the Philippines.

He was a graduate of one of them Eastern football colleges that have been so successful in teaching the Indian to use the gridiron instead of burning his victims at the stake.

As an Anglo-Saxon, John Tom was copper-colored in spots. As an Indian, he was one of the whitest men I ever knew.

As a Cherokee, he was a gentleman on the first ballot. As a ward of the nation, he was mighty hard to carry at the primaries.

Ransie Bilbro was stricken to dumb perplexity. There had been no previous hint of alimony.

Women were always bringing up startling and unlooked-for issues.

Justice Benaja Widdup felt that the point demanded judicial decision. The authorities were also silent on the subject of alimony. But the woman’s feet were bare. The trail to Hogback Mountain was steep and flinty.

“Nobody never said they did. I reckon I better start on now to brother Ed’s.”

“Nobody can’t wind that old clock.”

“Want me to go back along ’ith you in the cart and wind it fur you, Ranse?”

and I fished these up, and we fell to talking about home and the flag and Hail Columbia and home-fried potatoes; and the drivel we contributed would have sickened any man enjoying those blessings. But at that time we were out of ’em.

You can’t appreciate home till you’ve left it, money till it’s spent, your wife till she’s joined a woman’s club, nor Old Glory till you see it hanging on a broomstick on the shanty of a consul in a foreign town.

“And sitting there me and Maximilian Jones, scratching at our prickly heat and kicking at the lizards on the floor, became afflicted with a dose of patriotism and affection for our country.

The recruit was received cordially by the rangers. Still, they observed him shrewdly and with suspended judgment.

Picking a comrade on the border is done with ten times the care and discretion with which a girl chooses a sweetheart.

On your “side-kicker’s” nerve, loyalty, aim, and coolness your own life may depend many times.

Tobin hammers his neck, and the women squeal, and by presence of mind I drag the little man out of the way before the police comes.

Tobin is always in an ugly mood when enjoying himself.

On the boat going back, when the man calls “Who wants the good-looking waiter?”

There was a painless stage of incubation that lasted twenty-five years, and then it broke out on me, and people said I was It.

But they called it humor instead of measles.

The employees in the store bought a silver inkstand for the senior partner on his fiftieth birthday. We crowded into his private office to present it.

With devilish cunning I encouraged her to talk. Unsuspecting, she laid her heart bare. Upon the cold, conspicuous, common, printed page I offered it to the public gaze.

A literary Judas, I kissed her and betrayed her.

For pieces of silver I dressed her sweet confidences in the pantalettes and frills of folly and made them dance in the market place.

But, no. He chimed truly. I gave a long sigh of happiness.

Never have I known a man’s talk to be as magnificently dull as Peter’s was. Compared with it the Dead Sea is a geyser.

Never a sparkle or a glimmer of wit marred his words. Commonplaces as trite and as plentiful as blackberries flowed from his lips no more stirring in quality than a last week’s tape running from a ticker.

I routed out another young M.D. who roomed on the floor above, and sent him for old Doctor Gales, two squares away.

Tom Hopkins has too much money to be attended by rising young practitioners alone.

When Gales came we put Tom through as expensive a course of treatment as the resources of the profession permit.

A great gar plunged with a loud splash into the water hole. A little brown rabbit skipped around a bunch of catclaw and sat twitching his whiskers and looking humorously at Givens. The pony went on eating grass.

It is well to be reasonably watchful when a Mexican lion sings soprano along the arroyos at sundown.

The burden of his song may be that young calves and fat lambs are scarce, and that he has a carnivorous desire for your acquaintance.

Her eyes were sweet—oh, sweet and pleading with gracious penitence. “I would hate anyone who would kill my kitten. And how daring and kind of you to risk being shot when you tried to save him! How very few men would have done that!”

Victory wrested from defeat! Vaudeville turned into drama! Bravo, Ripley Givens!

It was now twilight. Of course Miss Josefa could not be allowed to ride on to the ranch-house alone. Givens resaddled his pony in spite of that animal’s reproachful glances, and rode with her.

The original cause of the trouble was about twenty years in growing.

At the end of that time it was worth it.

If the Frio Kid ever did a kindly act or felt a throb of generosity in his heart it was once at such a time and season, and this is the way it happened.

One who has been crossed in love should never breathe the odour from the blossoms of the ratama tree. It stirs the memory to a dangerous degree.

One December in the Frio country there was a ratama tree in full bloom, for the winter had been as warm as springtime. That way rode the Frio Kid and his satellite and co-murderer, Mexican Frank.

On the third day of my compulsory idleness I crawled out near the grub wagon, and reclined helpless under the conversational fire of Judson Odom, the camp cook.

Jud was a monologist by nature, whom Destiny, with customary blundering, had set in a profession wherein he was bereaved, for the greater portion of his time, of an audience.

Therefore, I was manna in the desert of Jud’s obmutescence.

Jud was a monologist by nature, whom Destiny, with customary blundering, had set in a profession wherein he was bereaved, for the greater portion of his time, of an audience.

Therefore, I was manna in the desert of Jud’s obmutescence.

Betimes I was stirred by invalid longings for something to eat that did not come under the caption of “grub.” I had visions of the maternal pantry “deep as first love, and wild with all regret,” and then I asked:

It was Saturday night, and the boss laid twelve begrimed and begrudged dollars in his hand. Ikey dabbled discreetly in water, donned coat, hat and collar with its frazzled tie and chalcedony pin, and set forth in pursuit of his ideals.

For each of us, when our day’s work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.

Behold Ikey as he ambles up the street beneath the roaring “El” between the rows of reeking sweatshops.

Billy McMahan grasped it unhesitatingly, shook it and smiled.

Made mad now by the gods who were about to destroy him, Ikey threw away his scabbard and charged upon Olympus.

“Have a drink with me, Billy,” he said familiarly, “you and your friends?”

His head was in the clouds; the star was drawing his wagon. Compared with what he had achieved the loss of wages and the bray of women’s tongues were slight affairs.

He had shaken the hand of Billy McMahan.

Billy McMahan had a wife, and upon her visiting cards was engraved the name “Mrs. William Darragh McMahan.” And there was a certain vexation attendant upon these cards; for, small as they were, there were houses in which they could not be inserted.

There is no Tenderloin. There never was.

That is, none that you could run a tapeline around. The word really implies a condition or a quality—much as you would say “reprehensibility” or “cold feet.”

“That was the best I could do on the wickedest corner in New York. So I walks over where it’s more righteous, hopin’ there might be somethin’ doin’ among the Pharisees.

Everything, so far as I could see, was as free from guile as a hammock at a Chautauqua picnic.

The people just walked up and down, speakin’ of chrysanthemum shows and oratorios, and enjoyin’ the misbegotten reputation of bein’ the wickedest rakes on the continent.”

But on the day before Mrs. Maloney had found the book in her room and had carried it away, declaring sharply that it would not do for servants to read at night; they lost sleep and did not work briskly the next day.

Can one only eleven years old, living away from one’s mamma, and never having any time to play, live entirely deprived of Grimm? Just try it once and you will see what a difficult thing it is.

Lena’s home was in Texas, away up among the little mountains on the Pedernales River, in a little town called Fredericksburg. They are all German people who live in Fredericksburg.

“Woman!” he roared at his wife, “why did you let that child go away? It is your fault if she comes home to us no more.”

Everyone knew that it was Peter Hildesmuller’s fault, so they paid no attention to his words.

A moment afterward a strange, faint voice was heard to call: “Mamma!”

“Ma wasn’t sick to amount to anything. Sam was at the depot, and said she just had a little spell, and got all right soon after they telegraphed. So I took the next train back. I’m just dying for a cup of coffee.”

Nobody heard the click and rattle of the cogwheels as the third-floor front of the Frogmore flats buzzed its machinery back into the Order of Things.

A band slipped, a spring was touched, the gear was adjusted and the wheels revolve in their old orbit.

Thus the good ship of business is kept afloat; whereas if the element that supports her were allowed to mingle freely in her hold we might be swamped—ha, ha, ha!”

The law is dry. Good jokes are few.

Surely it might be permitted Lawyer Gooch to mitigate the bore of briefs, the tedium of torts and the prosiness of processes with even so light a levy upon the good property of humour.

“I am,” answered Lawyer Gooch, without circumlocution. He never circumlocuted when dealing with a woman.

Women circumlocute. Time is wasted when both sides in debate employ the same tactics.

“As a lawyer, sir,” began the lady, “you may have acquired some knowledge of the human heart.

Burney stayed on. He knew of no other job.

At first he did not realize that tobacco had got to be his father and mother, his confessor and sweetheart, and wife and child.

For three days he managed to fill his pipe from the other men’s sacks, and then they shut him off, one and all.

“You like-a smoke while we wait?” he asked.

Burney clutched it and snapped off the end as a terrier bites at a rat. He laid it to his lips like a long-lost sweetheart.

When the smoke began to draw he gave a long, deep sigh, and the bristles of his gray-red moustache curled down over the cigar like the talons of an eagle. Slowly the red faded from the whites of his eyes.

We said our farewells and boarded a home-bound car. We had a rabbit on upper Broadway, and then I parted with Rivington on a street corner.

“Well, anyhow,” said he, braced and recovered, “it couldn’t have happened anywhere but in little old New York.”

Which to say the least, was typical of Rivington.

Johnny attended a private school and had had trouble with his teacher. As has been said, there was an excellent editorial against corporal punishment in that morning’s issue, and no doubt it had its effect.

After this can anyone doubt the power of the press?

Chalmers tore this letter into a thousand bits and began to wear out his expensive rug by striding back and forth upon it.

Thus an animal from the jungle acts when it is caged, and thus a caged man acts when he is housed in a jungle of doubt.

By and by the restless mood was overcome. The rug was not an enchanted one. For sixteen feet he could travel along it; three thousand miles was beyond its power to aid.

By and by the restless mood was overcome.

The rug was not an enchanted one. For sixteen feet he could travel along it; three thousand miles was beyond its power to aid.

Phillips appeared. He never entered; he invariably appeared, like a well-oiled genie.

answered the guest. “New York’s as full of cheap Haroun al Raschids as Baghdad is of fleas. I’ve been held up for my story with a loaded meal pointed at my head twenty times. Catch anybody in New York giving you something for nothing!

They spell curiosity and charity with the same set of building blocks.

Lots of ’em will stake you to a dime and chop-suey; and a few of ’em will play Caliph to the tune of a top sirloin;

“It wasn’t long till they put me out of business.

People don’t want their secret meannesses shown up in a picture. They can smile and twist their own faces and deceive you, but the picture can’t.

I couldn’t get an order for another picture, and I had to give up. I worked as a newspaper artist for a while, and then for a lithographer, but my work with them got me into the same trouble.

Now, the man manager (I still quote Sully) is a Caesar without a Brutus.

He is an autocrat without responsibility, a player who imperils no stake of his own.

His office is to enact, to reverberate, to boom, to expand, to out-coruscate—profitably, if he can. Bill-paying and growing gray hairs over results belong to his principals.

“It is quite simple,” he said, holding up his finger. “You see that knot? That is to prevent my forgetting. It is, therefore, a forget-me-knot.

A forget-me-not is a flower. It was a sack of flour that I was to send home!

”

“Nice breakfast that was you had this morning.”

Always on the lookout for the detective’s remarkable feats of deduction, I saw Jolnes’s eye flash for an instant upon a long yellow splash on the shirt bosom and a smaller one upon the chin of Rheingelder⁠—both undoubtedly made by the yolk of an egg.

“Oh, dot is some of your detectiveness,” said Rheingelder, shaking all over with a smile. “Vell, I pet you trinks und cigars all round dot you cannot tell vot I haf eaten for breakfast.”

“In his breast pocket,” said the great detective, “something large and oval made a protuberance.

Good liquor is scarce on trains, and it is a long journey from New York to Fairfax County.

”

“Again, I must bow to you,” I said. “And tell me this, so that my last shred of doubt will be cleared away; why did you decide that he was from Virginia?”

“It was very faint, I admit,” answered Shamrock Jolnes, “but no trained observer could have failed to detect the odour of mint in the car.”

This was what I had been led to expect by all writers who have evolved romances of literary New York.

Something was decidedly wrong with tradition. I could not assume the blame, so I fixed it upon the sparrows.

I began to hate them with intensity and heat.

And it is certain that she looked at Chandler, with his animated but self-possessed manner and his kindling and frank blue eyes, with something not far from admiration in her own charming face.

Then it was that the Madness of Manhattan, the frenzy of Fuss and Feathers, the Bacillus of Brag, the Provincial Plague of Pose seized upon Towers Chandler.

He was on Broadway, surrounded by pomp and style, and there were eyes to look at him. On the stage of that comedy he had assumed to play the one-night part of a butterfly of fashion and an idler of means and taste.

That was always an ominous act. Another symptom alarming to those who were familiar with the different stages of his doldrums was his increasing politeness and a tendency to use formal phrases. A husky softness succeeded the usual penetrating drawl in his tones.

A dangerous courtesy marked his manners.

Later, his smile became crooked, the left side of his mouth slanting upward, and Quicksand got ready to stand from under.

Not yet was Calliope’s melancholy at the danger point. He would seat himself at the window of the room he occupied over Silvester’s tonsorial parlours and there chant lugubrious and tuneless ballads until morning, accompanying the noises by appropriate maltreatment of a jangling guitar.

More magnanimous than Nero, he would thus give musical warning of the forthcoming municipal upheaval that Quicksand was scheduled to endure.

A quiet, amiable man was Calliope Catesby at other times—quiet to indolence, and amiable to worthlessness. At best he was a loafer and a nuisance; at worst he was the Terror of Quicksand. His ostensible occupation was something subordinate in the real estate line;

Glass fell like hail; dogs vamosed; chickens flew, squawking; feminine voices shrieked concernedly to youngsters at large. The din was perforated at intervals by the staccato of the Terror’s guns, and was drowned periodically by the brazen screech that Quicksand knew so well.

The occasions of Calliope’s low spirits were legal holidays in Quicksand.

All along the main street in advance of his coming clerks were putting up shutters and closing doors. Business would languish for a space.

Miss Martha was forty, her bankbook showed a credit of two thousand dollars, and she possessed two false teeth and a sympathetic heart.

Many people have married whose chances to do so were much inferior to Miss Martha’s.

Two or three times a week a customer came in in whom she began to take an interest. He was a middle-aged man, wearing spectacles and a brown beard trimmed to a careful point.

Had she been too bold? Would he take offense? But surely not. There was no language of edibles.

Butter was no emblem of unmaidenly forwardness.

For a long time that day her mind dwelt on the subject. She imagined the scene when he should discover her little deception.

“I will do the work as usual, then,” said the young lady, “until someone comes to fill the place.” And she went to her desk at once and hung the black turban hat with the gold-green macaw wing in its accustomed place.

He who has been denied the spectacle of a busy Manhattan broker during a rush of business is handicapped for the profession of anthropology.

The poet sings of the “crowded hour of glorious life.” The broker’s hour is not only crowded, but the minutes and seconds are hanging to all the straps and packing both front and rear platforms.

He who has been denied the spectacle of a busy Manhattan broker during a rush of business is handicapped for the profession of anthropology. The poet sings of the “crowded hour of glorious life.”

The broker’s hour is not only crowded, but the minutes and seconds are hanging to all the straps and packing both front and rear platforms.

And this day was Harvey Maxwell’s busy day. The ticker began to reel out jerkily its fitful coils of tape, the desk telephone had a chronic attack of buzzing.

There are two rows of tables in the room, six in each row. On each table is a caster-stand, containing cruets of condiments and seasons. From the pepper cruet you may shake a cloud of something tasteless and melancholy, like volcanic dust.

From the salt cruet you may expect nothing.

Though a man should extract a sanguinary stream from the pallid turnip, yet will his prowess be balked when he comes to wrest salt from Bogle’s cruets.

The name of the other waitress was Tildy. Why do you suggest Matilda? Please listen this time—Tildy—Tildy.

Tildy was dumpy, plain-faced, and too anxious to please to please.

Repeat the last clause to yourself once or twice, and make the acquaintance of the duplicate infinite.

The blunt nose was loyal to the short Grecian. She was Aileen’s friend; and she was glad to see her rule hearts and wean the attention of men from smoking potpie and lemon meringue.

But deep below our freckles and hay-coloured hair the unhandsomest of us dream of a prince or a princess, not vicarious, but coming to us alone.

There was a morning when Aileen tripped in to work with a slightly bruised eye; and Tildy’s solicitude was almost enough to heal any optic.

Among the customers at Bogle’s was a young man named Seeders, who worked in a laundry office.

Mr. Seeders was thin and had light hair, and appeared to have been recently rough-dried and starched.

He was too diffident to aspire to Aileen’s notice; so he usually sat at one of Tildy’s tables, where he devoted himself to silence and boiled weakfish.

Tildy looked up and saw him, gasped, and pressed the mustard spoon against her heart. A red hair-bow was in her hair; she wore Venus’s Eighth Avenue badge, the blue bead necklace with the swinging silver symbolic heart.

Mr. Seeders was flushed and embarrassed. He plunged one hand into his hip pocket and the other into a fresh pumpkin pie.

“Miss Tildy,” said he, “I want to apologise for what I done the other evenin’. Tell you the truth, I was pretty well tanked up or I wouldn’t of done it. I wouldn’t do no lady that away when I was sober.

Most people would say, if their opinion was asked for, that holding up a train would be a hard job. Well, it isn’t; it’s easy.

I have contributed some to the uneasiness of railroads and the insomnia of express companies, and the most trouble I ever had about a holdup was in being swindled by unscrupulous people while spending the money I got.

Beginning with the first one, we placed a man at each door and ordered the passengers to stand between the seats with their hands up.

If you want to find out what cowards the majority of men are, all you have to do is rob a passenger train.

I don’t mean because they don’t resist—I’ll tell you later on why they can’t do that—but it makes a man feel sorry for them the way they lose their heads.

It looks as big to him as the Mississippi River. That’s just the way with the passenger. He thinks there are a hundred men yelling and shooting outside, when maybe there are only two or three.

And the muzzle of a forty-five looks like the entrance to a tunnel.

The passenger is all right, although he may do mean little tricks, like hiding a wad of money in his shoe and forgetting to dig-up until you jostle his ribs some with the end of your six-shooter; but there’s no harm in him.

If the train robber gets away they swear out a warrant against John Doe et al. and travel hundreds of miles and sign vouchers for thousands on the trail of the fugitives, and the Government foots the bills.

So, with them, it is a question of mileage rather than courage.

I will give one instance to support my statement that the surprise is the best card in playing for a holdup.

It is hardly likely that a goddess may die.

Then Eastre, the old Saxon goddess of spring, must be laughing in her muslin sleeve at people who believe that Easter, her namesake, exists only along certain strips of Fifth Avenue pavement after church service.

“Say,” said Mr. McQuirk, setting his hat on one side, “is everybody kiddin’ me about gentle Spring?

There ain’t any more spring in the air than there is in a horsehair sofa in a Second Avenue furnished room.

For me the winter underwear yet and the buckwheat cakes.”

These men are all victims to Circe. Not willingly do they become flunkeys to Fido, bell boys to bull terriers, and toddlers after Towzer.

Modern Circe, instead of turning them into animals, has kindly left the difference of a six-foot leash between them.

Every one of those dogmen has been either cajoled, bribed, or commanded by his own particular Circe to take the dear household pet out for an airing.

With my own eyes I seen you stand off both the Tillotson boys in Prairie View with the brass faucet out of a molasses barrel. And I seen you rope and tie the wildest steer on Little Powder in 39½.”

“I did, didn’t I?” said the other, with a temporary gleam in his eye. “But that was before I was dogmatized.”

“Does Misses Telfair—” began Jim.

… to you, a handkerchief is dropped for you, a brick is dropped upon you, the elevator cable or your bank breaks, a table d’hôte or your wife disagrees with you, and Fate tosses you about like cork crumbs in wine opened by an un-feed waiter.

The City is a sprightly youngster, and you are red paint upon its toy, and you get licked off.

John Hopkins sat, after a compressed dinner, in his glove-fitting straight-front flat. He sat upon a hornblende couch and gazed, with satiated eyes, at Art Brought Home to the People in the shape of “The Storm” tacked against the wall. Mrs.

A familiar note in the lady’s voice drew a more especial attention from Corny. It was pitched in a key well known to him. The soft electric shone upon her face. Sisters of sorrow have no quarters fixed for them.

In the index to the book of breaking hearts you will find that Broadway follows very soon after the Bowery.

This lady’s face was sad, and her voice was attuned with it. They waited, as if for the carriage. Corny waited too, for it was out of doors, and he was never tired of accumulating and profiting by knowledge of gentlemanly conduct.

I sat an hour by sun, in the editor’s room of the Montopolis Weekly Bugle. I was the editor.

The saffron rays of the declining sunlight filtered through the cornstalks in Micajah Widdup’s garden-patch, and cast an amber glory upon my pastepot. I sat at the editorial desk in my non-rotary revolving chair, and prepared my editorial against the oligarchies.

“ ’Tis a lie,” said he, “like nine tenths of what ye call history. ’Tis a Gentile I am, and no Jew.

I am after footing it out of Jerusalem, my son; but if that makes me a Jew, then everything that comes out of a bottle is babies’ milk.

Ye have my name on the card ye hold;

Obedient at last, he raised himself from my dishevelled desk, and permitted me to half lift him to the floor.

The gale of his grief had blown away his words; his freshet of tears had soaked away the crust of his grief.

Reminiscence died in him—at least, the coherent part of it.

So when Montopolis’s oldest inhabitant (some ninety score years younger than Michob Ader) dropped in to acquire promulgation in print, I siphoned his perpetual trickle of reminiscence in the direction of the uninterpreted maker of shoes.

Uncle Abner was the Complete History of Montopolis, bound in butternut.

“O’Bader,” he quavered, “come here in ’69. He was the first shoemaker in the place. Folks generally considers him crazy at times now. But he don’t harm nobody. I s’pose drinkin’ upset his mind—yes, drinkin’ very likely done it. It’s a powerful bad thing, drinkin’.

How much more magnificent, impressive, and spectacular, then, was the scene at public functions when the General would lead forth the silver-haired relic of former greatness, like some rare and fragile waxwork figure, and trumpet his pristine eminence to his fellow citizens!

General Deffenbaugh was the Voice of Elmville. Some said he was Elmville.

At any rate, he had no competitor as the Mouthpiece.

thus was he presented to strangers and to the lawyers who made the circuit of the courts; and so the Daily Banner referred to him in print.

To be “the son of” was his doom.

What ever he should accomplish would have to be sacrificed upon the altar of this magnificent but fatal parental precedence.

“Why, didn’t I marry him? Jack comes in tanked up; and I’m here, ain’t I? Who else has he got a right to beat? I’d just like to catch him once beating anybody else!

Sometimes it’s because supper ain’t ready; and sometimes it’s because it is.

Jack ain’t particular about causes. He just lushes till he remembers he’s married, and then he makes for home and does me up.

That’d give ’em some interest in life. What I want is a masterful man that slugs you when he’s jagged and hugs you when he ain’t jagged.

Preserve me from the man that ain’t got the sand to do neither!

”

Mrs. Fink went up to her flat and had a little cry.

It was a meaningless cry, the kind of cry that only a woman knows about, a cry from no particular cause, altogether an absurd cry; the most transient and the most hopeless cry in the repertory of grief.

Why had Martin never thrashed her? He was as big and strong as Jack Cassidy. Did he not care for her at all? He never quarrelled; he came home and lounged about, silent, glum, idle.

He was as big and strong as Jack Cassidy. Did he not care for her at all? He never quarrelled; he came home and lounged about, silent, glum, idle. He was a fairly good provider, but he ignored the spices of life.

Mrs. Fink’s ship of dreams was becalmed.

Her captain ranged between plum duff and his hammock. If only he would shiver his timbers or stamp his foot on the quarterdeck now and then! And she had thought to sail so merrily, touching at ports in the Delectable Isles!

Mr. Fink came home at 7. He was permeated with the curse of domesticity. Beyond the portals of his cozy home he cared not to roam, to roam.

He was the man who had caught the street car, the anaconda that had swallowed its prey, the tree that lay as it had fallen.

“Like the supper, Mart?” asked Mrs. Fink, who had striven over it.

After supper he gathered his newspapers to read. He sat in his stocking feet.

Arise, some new Dante, and sing me the befitting corner of perdition for the man who sitteth in the house in his stockinged feet.

Sisters of Patience who by reason of ties or duty have endured it in silk, yarn, cotton, lisle thread or woollen—does not the new canto belong?

Mr. Fink lit his pipe and peacefully rubbed an ankle with a stockinged toe.

He reposed in the state of matrimony like a lump of unblended suet in a pudding.

This was his level Elysium—to sit at ease vicariously girdling the world in print amid the wifely splashing of suds and the agreeable smells of breakfast dishes departed and dinner ones to come. Many ideas were far from his mind;

She wore a dinner gown made of a stuff that the spiders must have woven, and of a color that a twilight sky must have contributed. A light coat with many admirably unnecessary capes and adorably inutile ribbons floated downward from her shoulders.

Fine feathers do make fine birds; and the only reproach in the saying is for the man who refuses to give up his earnings to the ostrich-tip industry.

“Big Jim” Dougherty was troubled. There was a being at his side whom he did not know. He thought of the sober-hued plumage that this bird of paradise was accustomed to wear in her cage, and this winged revelation puzzled him.

Quick, witty, charming, full of light and ready talk, she received the experienced attack of the Honorable Patrick on the field of repartee and surprised, vanquished, delighted him.

She unfolded her long-closed petals and around her the room became a garden.

They tried to include “Big Jim” in the conversation, but he was without a vocabulary.

You take a white bulldog with a Bourke Cockran air of independence about him and a rubber plant and there you have the fauna and flora of a flat.

What the shamrock is to Ireland the rubber plant is to the dweller in flats and furnished rooms.

We get moved from one place to another so quickly that the only way we can get our picture taken is with a kinetoscope. We are the vagrant vine and the flitting fig tree. You know the proverb:

What the shamrock is to Ireland the rubber plant is to the dweller in flats and furnished rooms. We get moved from one place to another so quickly that the only way we can get our picture taken is with a kinetoscope.

We are the vagrant vine and the flitting fig tree.

You know the proverb: “Where the rubber plant sits in the window the moving van draws up to the door.”

We get moved from one place to another so quickly that the only way we can get our picture taken is with a kinetoscope. We are the vagrant vine and the flitting fig tree.

You know the proverb: “Where the rubber plant sits in the window the moving van draws up to the door.”

We are the city equivalent to the woodbine and the honeysuckle. No other vegetable except the Pittsburg stogie can withstand as much handling as we can.

A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.

Therefore let us have the moral first and be done with it. All is not gold that glitters, but it is a wise child that keeps the stopper in his bottle of testing acid.

A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience. Therefore let us have the moral first and be done with it.

All is not gold that glitters, but it is a wise child that keeps the stopper in his bottle of testing acid.

Where Broadway skirts the corner of the square presided over by George the Veracious is the Little Rialto. Here stand the actors of that quarter, and this is their shibboleth:

“Ay, señor,” he said, with a sigh, “duty makes a call. But, señor, the señoras of your Estados Unidos—how beauties! For exemplification, take you la Madame O’Brien—que magnifica! She is one goddess—one Juno—what you call one ox-eyed Juno.”

Now Mr. Kelley was a wit; and better men have been shriveled by the fire of their own imagination.

“Sure!” he said with a grin; “but you mean a peroxide Juno, don’t you?”

Mrs. O’Brien heard, and lifted an auriferous head. Her businesslike eye rested for an instant upon the disappearing form of Mr. Kelley.

Except in street cars one should never be unnecessarily rude to a lady.

When the gallant Colombian and his escort arrived at the Broadway address, they were held in an anteroom for half an hour, and then admitted into a well-equipped office where a distinguished looking man, with a smooth face, wrote at a desk.

As for conveying adequate conception of the engaging charm of that prairie evening, despair waits upon it.

It is a bold chronicler who will undertake the description of a Texas night in the early spring.

An inventory must suffice.

“Very well,” I answered, without giving him a clue to my suspicions; “I will go with you to your rooms and see that you do the thing properly.

I suppose that every author must be a valet to his own hero.

”

“My dear fellow,” said Van Sweller, politely, but with a stubborn tightening of his lips, “I’m sorry it doesn’t please you, but there’s no help for it.

Even a character in a story has rights that an author cannot ignore.

The hero of a story of New York social life must dine at ⸻ at least once during its action.”

Van Sweller countermanded the order for his dinner, and arose to accompany me. He could scarcely do less.

A fictitious character is but poorly equipped for resisting a hungry but live author who comes to drag him forth from a restaurant.

All he said was: “You were just in time; but I think you are making a mistake. You cannot afford to ignore the wishes of the great reading public.”

Gillian went to his club. There he hunted out one whom he called Old Bryson.

Old Bryson was calm and forty and sequestered.

He was in a corner reading a book, and when he saw Gillian approaching he sighed, laid down his book and took off his glasses.

They gaze with equal interest and absorption at a chorus girl or at a man painting a liver pill sign. They will form as deep a cordon around a man with a clubfoot as they will around a balked automobile.

They have the furor rubberendi.

They are optical gluttons, feasting and fattening on the misfortunes of their fellow beings. They gloat and pore and glare and squint and stare with their fishy eyes like goggle-eyed perch at the book baited with calamity.

The wedding of William Pry and Violet Seymour was set for June 10. The Big Church in the Middle of the Block was banked high with flowers. The populous tribe of Rubberers the world over is rampant over weddings.

They are the pessimists of the pews.

They are the guyers of the groom and the banterers of the bride.

The populous tribe of Rubberers the world over is rampant over weddings. They are the pessimists of the pews. They are the guyers of the groom and the banterers of the bride.

They come to laugh at your marriage, and should you escape from Hymen’s tower on the back of death’s pale steed they will come to the funeral and sit in the same pew and cry over your luck.

Rubber will stretch.

They come to laugh at your marriage, and should you escape from Hymen’s tower on the back of death’s pale steed they will come to the funeral and sit in the same pew and cry over your luck.

Rubber will stretch.

The church was lighted. A grosgrain carpet lay over the asphalt to the edge of the sidewalk. Bridesmaids were patting one another’s sashes awry and speaking of the Bride’s freckles. Coachmen tied white ribbons on their whips and bewailed the space of time between drinks.

At the end of the six years no murder trial, coaching party, automobile accident or cotillion was complete in which the name of Robert Walmsley did not figure.

Tailors waylaid him in the street to get a new wrinkle from the cut of his unwrinkled trousers.

Hyphenated fellows in the clubs and members of the oldest subpoenaed families were glad to clap him on the back and allow him three letters of his name.

She towered in her own atmosphere, serene, chaste, prideful, wading in no fountains, dining no monkeys, breeding no dogs for bench shows. She was a Van Der Pool.

Fountains were made to play for her; monkeys were made for other people’s ancestors; dogs, she understood, were created to be companions of blind persons and objectionable characters who smoked pipes.

This was the Matterhorn that Robert Walmsley accomplished.

“Why have I not been shown your mother’s letters?” asked Alicia.

There was always something in her voice that made you think of lorgnettes, of accounts at Tiffany’s, of sledges smoothly gliding on the trail from Dawson to Forty Mile, of the tinkling of pendant prisms on your grandmothers’ chandeliers, of snow lying on a convent roof; of a police sergeant refusing bail.

“Your mother,” continued Alicia, “invites us to make a visit to the farm. I have never seen a farm. We will go there for a week or two, Robert.”

New York was empty. Two hundred thousand of its people were away for the summer.

Three million eight hundred thousand remained as caretakers and to pay the bills of the absentees. But the two hundred thousand are an expensive lot.

The New Yorker sat at a roof-garden table, ingesting solace through a straw. His panama lay upon a chair. The July audience was scattered among vacant seats as widely as outfielders when the champion batter steps to the plate. Vaudeville happened at intervals.

“I!” said the New Yorker. “

I was never farther west than Eighth Avenue.

I had a brother who died on Ninth, but I met the cortege at Eighth. There was a bunch of violets on the hearse, and the undertaker mentioned the incident to avoid mistake. I cannot say that I am familiar with the West.”

Superfluous, watchful, pneumatically moving waiters hover near, supplying every want before it is expressed.

The temperature is perpetual April.

The ceiling is painted in water colors to counterfeit a summer sky across which delicate clouds drift and do not vanish as those of nature do to our regret.

“I’ve been saving up out of my wages for a year just for this vacation.

I wanted to spend one week like a lady if I never do another one.

I wanted to get up when I please instead of having to crawl out at seven every morning; and I wanted to live on the best and be waited on and ring bells for things just like rich folks do.

… the invention of street cars and breach-of-promise suits, and our Constitution is being found more and more unconstitutional every day, so the code of our firemen must be considered in the lead, with the Golden Rule and Jeffries’s new punch trying for place and show.

The Constitution says that one man is as good as another; but the Fire Department says he is better.

This is a too generous theory, but the law will not allow itself to be construed otherwise. All of which comes perilously near to being a paradox, and commends itself to the attention of the S.P.C.A.

“ ‘Would you mind asking ’em which?’ says I. ‘

A week don’t amount to much after you’re dead, but it seems a real nice long spell while you are alive.

’

I am disposed to be lenient with the arts and sciences; and I find time to instigate a cordiality for the more human works of nature, such as romance and the atmosphere and grass and poetry and the Seasons.

I never skin a sucker without admiring the prismatic beauty of his scales.

I never sell a little auriferous beauty to the man with the hoe without noticing the beautiful harmony there is between gold and green. And that’s why I liked this scheme; it was so full of outdoor air and landscapes and easy money.

This is the way we worked our scheme. First, I figured it out by a kind of a proverb.

The best grafts in the world are built up on copybook maxims and psalms and proverbs and Esau’s fables.

They seem to kind of hit off human nature. Our peaceful little swindle was constructed on the old saying: “The whole push loves a lover.”

If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson.

Cosmopolitan they call it. You bet. So’s a piece of flypaper.

You listen close when they’re buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. “Little old New York’s good enough for us”—that’s what they sing.

You’d think New York people was all wise; but no. They don’t get a chance to learn. Everything’s too compressed.

Even the hayseeds are baled hayseeds.

But what else can you expect from a town that’s shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

It’s no place for an honest grafter with a small capital.

There’s too big a protective tariff on bunco.

Even when Giovanni sells a quart of warm worms and chestnut hulls he has to hand out a pint to an insectivorous cop.

“You have not,” says I, “for I’ve been watching you. The moisture you see is apple juice.

You can’t expect one man to act as a human cider-press and an art connoisseur too.

”

The shareholders of the Golconda Gold Bond and Investment Company can’t hardly believe it. They almost grabs the money out of Buck’s hands.

Some of the women keep on crying, for it’s a custom of the sex to cry when they have sorrow, to weep when they have joy, and to shed tears whenever they find themselves without either.

The old women’s fingers shake when they stuff the skads in the bosom of their rusty dresses.

“What more do you want?” says Buck. “Slap ’em on. The chill season is just opening up in the Hackensack low grounds.

What’s hair, anyway, if you have to shake it off?

”

“Oh, I reckon you’d have ended up about the same,” said Bob Tidball, cheerfully philosophical. “

It ain’t the roads we take; it’s what’s inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.

”

The expression on Dodson’s face changed in an instant to one of cold ferocity mingled with inexorable cupidity.

The soul of the man showed itself for a moment like an evil face in the window of a reputable house.

Truly Bob Tidball was never to “hit the breeze” again. The deadly .45 of the false friend cracked and filled the gorge with a roar that the walls hurled back with indignant echoes.

Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side.

Homeless, they have a hundred homes.

They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever—transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They sing “Home, Sweet Home” in ragtime; they carry their lares et penates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat;

and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath.

A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.

The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file, soft-shod, through his mind, while there drifted into the room furnished sounds and furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering and incontinent, slack laughter;

Dempsey’s lodgers except the things that were not mysterious. One of Mr. Kipling’s poems is addressed to “Ye who hold the unwritten clue to all save all unwritten things.” The same “readers” are invited to tackle the foregoing assertion.

Mr. Brunelli, being impressionable and a Latin, fell to conjugating the verb “amare,” with Katy in the objective case, though not because of antipathy.

She talked it over with her mother.

When you get rounded up in a bunch you lose your nerve. Get you in crowds and you’re easy. Ask the ‘L’ road guards and George B. Cortelyou and the tintype booths at Coney Island.

Divided you stand, united you fall. E pluribus nihil.

Whenever one of your mobs surrounds a man and begins to holler, ‘Lynch him!’ he says to himself, ‘Oh, dear, I suppose I must look pale to please the boys, but I will, forsooth, let my life insurance premium lapse tomorrow.

“Sit down,” said the Prince calmly. “I do not accept your addition.

Women are the natural enemies of clocks, and, therefore, the allies of those who would seek liberation from these monsters that measure our follies and limit our pleasures.

If you will so far confide in me I would ask you to relate to me your story.”

The burglar stepped inside the window quickly, and then he took his time.

A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before taking anything else.

The house was a private residence.

“Lay still,” said the burglar in conversational tone.

Burglars of the third type do not hiss.

The citizen in the bed looked at the round end of the burglar’s pistol and lay still.

In The Big City a man will disappear with the suddenness and completeness of the flame of a candle that is blown out.

All the agencies of inquisition—the hounds of the trail, the sleuths of the city’s labyrinths, the closet detectives of theory and induction—will be invoked to the search. Most often the man’s face will be seen no more.

“Certainly not,” said Juggins pleasantly. “I will tell you how I did it. You remember the description of Mrs. Snyder?

Did you ever know a woman like that who wasn’t paying weekly instalments on an enlarged crayon portrait of herself?

The biggest factory of that kind in the country is just around the corner. I went there and got her address off the books. That’s all.”

It is more single-minded, perhaps, than that of a follower of any other calling. From the high, swaying seat of his hansom he looks upon his fellow-men as nomadic particles, of no account except when possessed of migratory desires.

He is Jehu, and you are goods in transit.

Be you President or vagabond, to cabby you are only a Fare, he takes you up, cracks his whip, joggles your vertebrae and sets you down.

Helpless, ridiculous, confined, bobbing like a toy mandarin, you sit like a rat in a trap—you, before whom butlers cringe on solid land—and must squeak upward through a slit in your peripatetic sarcophagus to make your feeble wishes known.

Then, in a cab, you are not even an occupant; you are contents.

You are a cargo at sea, and the “cherub that sits up aloft” has Davy Jones’s street and number by heart.

“ ‘Mr. Bridger,’ said he, ‘I’m a Kentuckian, and I’ve seen a great deal of both men and animals.

And I never yet saw a man that was overfond of horses and dogs but what was cruel to women.

’ ”

“A friend of mine, Mr. Terry O’Sullivan,” was Maggie’s formula of introduction. She led him around the room, presenting him to each new-arriving Clover Leaf.

Almost was she pretty now, with the unique luminosity in her eyes that comes to a girl with her first suitor and a kitten with its first mouse.

“Maggie Toole’s got a fellow at last,” was the word that went round among the paper-box girls. “Pipe Mag’s floorwalker”—thus the Give and Takes expressed their indifferent contempt.

“Say, Mag,” he said, “I’ll see you home. And how about next Saturday night? Will you come to the hop with me if I call around for you?”

It was remarkable how quickly Maggie’s eyes could change from dull to a shining brown.

“With you, Dempsey?” she stammered. “Say—will a duck swim?”

At the hazard of wearying you this tale of vehement emotions must be prefaced by a discourse on geometry.

Nature moves in circles; Art in straight lines.

The natural is rounded; the artificial is made up of angles. A man lost in the snow wanders, in spite of himself, in perfect circles; the city man’s feet, denaturalized by rectangular streets and floors, carry him ever away from himself.

The consequence is that Nature, being more adaptive than Art, tries to conform to its sterner regulations. The result is often a rather curious product—for instance: A prize chrysanthemum, wood alcohol whiskey, a Republican Missouri, cauliflower au gratin, and a New Yorker.

Nature is lost quickest in a big city. The cause is geometrical, not moral.

The straight lines of its streets and architecture, the rectangularity of its laws and social customs, the undeviating pavements, the hard, severe, depressing, uncompromising rules of all its ways—even of its recreation and sports—coldly exhibit a sneering defiance of the curved line of Nature.

But an hour went by and Cal did not appear. Perhaps he was waiting in ambush, to shoot him from a door or a window. Sam kept a sharp eye on doors and windows for a while.

About noon the city tired of playing with its mouse and suddenly squeezed him with its straight lines.

Sam Folwell stood where two great, rectangular arteries of the city cross. He looked four ways, and saw the world hurled from its orbit and reduced by spirit level and tape to an edged and cornered plane.

Sam leaned against the sharp corner of a stone building. Those faces passed him by thousands, and none of them were turned toward him. A sudden foolish fear that he had died and was a spirit, and that they could not see him, seized him.

And then the city smote him with loneliness.

A fat man dropped out of the stream and stood a few feet distant, waiting for his car. Sam crept to his side and shouted above the tumult into his ear:

At Dry Lake, where their routes diverged, they reined up for a parting cigarette. For miles they had ridden in silence save for the soft drum of the ponies’ hoofs on the matted mesquite grass, and the rattle of the chaparral against their wooden stirrups.

But in Texas discourse is seldom continuous. You may fill in a mile, a meal, and a murder between your paragraphs without detriment to your thesis.

So, without apology, Webb offered an addendum to the conversation that had begun ten miles away.

“King” McAllister had bequeathed to his daughter many of his strong characteristics—his resolution, his gay courage, his contumacious self-reliance, his pride as a reigning monarch of hoofs and horns. Allegro and fortissimo had been McAllister’s temp and tone.

In Santa they survived, transposed to the feminine key.

Substantially, she preserved the image of the mother who had been summoned to wander in other and less finite green pastures long before the waxing herds of kine had conferred royalty upon the house.

“A husband,” said Santa cordially. “The Seco has done well. Mr. Yeager is one of the best stockmen in the West.”

The dropping out of a prince-consort rarely disorganises a monarchy.

Queen Santa had appointed as mayordomo of the ranch a trusty subject, named Ramsay, who had been one of her father’s faithful vassals.

Or did she file the letter, in her business way, retaining her royal balance and strength?

Wonder, if you will; but royalty is sacred; and there is a veil.

But this much you shall learn:

We brought along the Chinaman and the cuckoo clock and Buckle and the Instructor with us from Denver; and they made the cabin seem like home at once.

Never believe it when they tell you riches don’t bring happiness.

If you could have seen old Mack sitting in his rocking-chair with his blue-yarn sock feet up in the window and absorbing in that Buckle stuff through his specs you’d have seen a picture of content that would have made Rockefeller jealous.

Listen, Rebosa. Old Mack ain’t the man you want. He was twenty-ywo when you was née Reed, as the papers say. This bursting into bloom won’t last with him. He’s all ventilated with oldness and rectitude and decay.

Old Mack’s down with a case of Indian summer.

He overlooked his bet when he was young; and now he’s suing Nature for the interest on the promissory note he took from Cupid instead of the cash. Rebosa, are you bent on having this marriage occur?”

I made up my mind right away what to do. I’d save old Mack if I could.

To have a good, seasoned, ineligible man like that turn chicken for a girl that hadn’t quit eating slate pencils and buttoning in the back was more than I could look on with easiness.

“Rebosa,” says I, earnest, drawing upon my display of knowledge concerning the feminine intuitions of reason—“ain’t there a young man in Pina—a nice young man that you think a heap of?”

As Caesar had his Brutus, every bed of charity must have its toll of a bath, every loaf of bread its compensation of a private and personal inquisition.

Wherefore it is better to be a guest of the law, which though conducted by rules, does not meddle unduly with a gentleman’s private affairs.

Soapy, having decided to go to the Island, at once set about accomplishing his desire. There were many easy ways of doing this. The pleasantest was to dine luxuriously at some expensive restaurant;

With the young woman playing the clinging ivy to his oak Soapy walked past the policeman overcome with gloom.

He seemed doomed to liberty.

At the next corner he shook off his companion and ran. He halted in the district where by night are found the lightest streets, hearts, vows and librettos. Women in furs and men in greatcoats moved gaily in the wintry air.

Soapy walked eastward through a street damaged by improvements. He hurled the umbrella wrathfully into an excavation. He muttered against the men who wear helmets and carry clubs.

Because he wanted to fall into their clutches, they seemed to regard him as a king who could do no wrong.

At length Soapy reached one of the avenues to the east where the glitter and turmoil was but faint. He set his face down this toward Madison Square, for the homing instinct survives even when the home is a park bench.

At length Soapy reached one of the avenues to the east where the glitter and turmoil was but faint.

He set his face down this toward Madison Square, for the homing instinct survives even when the home is a park bench.

But on an unusually quiet corner Soapy came to a standstill. Here was an old church, quaint and rambling and gabled.

He abandoned it and staked others one by one. Luck had kissed her hand to him. Never afterward did he turn up enough dust in Yellowhammer to pay his bar bill. But his thousand invited guests were mostly prospering, and Cherokee smiled and congratulated them.

Yellowhammer was made up of men who took off their hats to a smiling loser; so they invited Cherokee to say what he wanted.

“Me?” said Cherokee, “oh, grubstakes will be about the thing. I reckon I’ll prospect along up in the Mariposas. If I strike it up there I will most certainly let you all know about the facts.

“Seems like Cherokee would ramble down to Yellowhammer and see his friends,” said another, slightly aggrieved. “But that’s the way.

Prosperity is the finest cure there is for lost forgetfulness.

”

True adventurers have never been plentiful. They who are set down in print as such have been mostly business men with newly invented methods. They have been out after the things they wanted—golden fleeces, holy grails, lady loves, treasure, crowns and fame.

The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate.

A fine example was the Prodigal Son—when he started back home.

at every corner handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure are slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and follow them.

We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs.

We pass on;

For one moment he hesitated; then he seemed to see the contumelious sneer of the African juggler of cards; and then he walked straight to the green door and knocked against it.

Moments like those that passed before his knock was answered measure the quick breath of true adventure.

What might not be behind those green panels! Gamesters at play; cunning rogues baiting their traps with subtle skill; beauty in love with courage, and thus planning to be sought by it; danger, death, love, disappointment, ridicule—any of these might respond to that temerarious rap.

It lies on a low spur of the Cumberland range of mountains on a little tributary of the Clinch River. Lakelands proper is a contented village of two dozen houses situated on a forlorn, narrow-gauge railroad line.

You wonder whether the railroad lost itself in the pine woods and ran into Lakelands from fright and loneliness, or whether Lakelands got lost and huddled itself along the railroad to wait for the cars to carry it home.

You wonder again why it was named Lakelands. There are no lakes, and the lands about are too poor to be worth mentioning.

Half a mile from the village stands the Eagle House, a big, roomy old mansion run by Josiah Rankin for the accommodation of visitors who desire the mountain air at inexpensive rates.

The Eagle House is delightfully mismanaged.

It is full of ancient instead of modern improvements, and it is altogether as comfortably neglected and pleasingly disarranged as your own home. But you are furnished with clean rooms and good and abundant fare: yourself and the piny woods must do the rest.

Who was he? Mounted Policeman O’Roon. The badge and the honor of his comrade were in his hands. If Ellsworth Remsen, ten-millionaire and Knickerbocker, had just rescued pomegranate blossoms and Scotch cap from possible death, where was Policeman O’Roon? Off his beat, exposed, disgraced, discharged.

Love had come, but before that there had been something that demanded precedence⁠—the fellowship of men on battlefields fighting an alien foe.

Remsen touched his cap, looked between the chestnut’s ears, and took refuge in vernacularity.

He skips out somewhere, and when they find him he pretends to have lost his memory—don’t know his own name, and won’t even recognize the strawberry mark on his wife’s left shoulder.

Aphasia! Tut! Why can’t they stay at home and forget?

”

It was a piquant and sparkling cup that the great island city held up to my lips. I drank of it gratefully.

The keys of Manhattan belong to him who is able to bear them. You must be either the city’s guest or its victim.

The following few days were as gold and silver. Edward Pinkhammer, yet counting back to his birth by hours only, knew the rare joy of having come upon so diverting a world full-fledged and unrestrained.

But most of all he was a poet. In all his life he never wrote a line of verse; he lived his poetry.

His Odyssey would have been a Limerick, had it been written.

But, to linger with the primary proposition, Raggles was a poet.

Mr. and Mrs. Larrabee began housekeeping in a flat.

It was a lonesome flat⁠—something like the A sharp way down at the left-hand end of the keyboard.

And they were happy; for they had their Art, and they had each other.

During all of the next week the Larrabees had an early breakfast. Joe was enthusiastic about some morning-effect sketches he was doing in Central Park, and Delia packed him off breakfasted, coddled, praised and kissed at 7 o’clock.

Art is an engaging mistress.

It was most times 7 o’clock when he returned in the evening.

Like the irresponsible black waterbugs on summer ponds, they crawl and circle and hustle about idiotically without aim or purpose. They do not even move with the admirable intelligence of ants, for ants always know when they are going home.

The ant is of a lowly station, but he will often reach home and get his slippers on while you are left at your elevated station.

Man, then, to the housetopped philosopher, appears to be but a creeping, contemptible beetle. Brokers, poets, millionaires, bootblacks, beauties, hod-carriers and politicians become little black specks dodging bigger black specks in streets no wider than your thumb.

Daisy’s other suitor followed Joe by several months. He came to board in the house where she lived. His name was Dabster, and he was a philosopher. Though young, attainments stood out upon him like continental labels on a Passaic (NJ) suitcase.

Knowledge he had kidnapped from cyclopedias and handbooks of useful information; but as for wisdom, when she passed he was left sniffling in the road without so much as the number of her motor car.

He could and would tell you the proportion of water and muscle-making properties of peas and veal, the shortest verse in the Bible, the number of pounds of shingle nails required to fasten 256 shingles laid four inches to the weather, the population of Kankakee, …

And they did. Miss Merriam became Miss Rosa McRamsey. And she graced the transition.

Beauty is only skin-deep, but the nerves lie very near to the skin.

Nerve—but just here will you oblige by perusing again the quotation with which this story begins?

Miss Mer—er—McRamsey was exquisitely beautiful. The Earl of Hitesbury had been very attentive to her since he dropped in to have a look at America. At the charity bazaar the affair was supposed to be going to be pulled off to a finish.

An earl is as good as a duke. Better. His standing may be lower, but his outstanding accounts are also lower.

Our ex-young-lady-cashier was assigned to a booth. She was expected to sell worthless articles to nobs and snobs at exorbitant prices. The proceeds of the bazaar were to be used for giving the poor children of the slums a Christmas din—Say!

Our ex-young-lady-cashier was assigned to a booth. She was expected to sell worthless articles to nobs and snobs at exorbitant prices. The proceeds of the bazaar were to be used for giving the poor children of the slums a Christmas din—

Say! did you ever wonder where they get the other 364?

Miss McRamsey—beautiful, palpitating, excited, charming, radiant—fluttered about in her booth. An imitation brass network, with a little arched opening, fenced her in.

Molly plunged her hands into the muff, overturned a row of the family infants and flew to the mirror.

Hint for the beauty column. To make bright eyes, rosy checks and a bewitching smile: Recipe⁠—one set Russian sables. Apply.

When they were alone Molly became aware of a small cake of the ice of common sense floating down the full tide of her happiness.

Molly calmed her doubts.

Sables are soothing.

Proud as a queen she went forth in the streets at the Kid’s side. In all that region of low-lying streets Russian sables had never been seen before.

“Back up, philosopher!” said Dan. “

The penny has no sorrow that the dollar cannot heal.

”

Montague Silver, the finest street man and art grafter in the West, says to me once in Little Rock: “If you ever lose your mind, Billy, and get too old to do honest swindling among grown men, go to New York.

In the West a sucker is born every minute; but in New York they appear in chunks of roe⁠—you can’t count ’em!

”

Your ‘Man About Town’ has done that. He is always on the scent of something new.

He is curiosity, impudence and omnipresence.

Hansoms were made for him, and gold-banded cigars; and the curse of music at dinner. There are not so many of him; but his minority report is adopted everywhere.

And every evening while she was getting supper she made him take me out on the end of a string for a walk.

If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone they’d never marry.

Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little almond cream on the neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an hour’s talk with the iceman, reading a package of old letters, a couple of pickles and two bottles of malt extract, one hour peeking through a hole in …

Then she would pounce upon me with a lot of that drivelling poodle palaver and kiss me on the nose—but what could I do?

A dog can’t chew cloves.

I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn’t. We looked so much alike that people noticed it when we went out;

She don’t kiss you. You don’t have to sit on her lap and listen to talk that would make the book of a musical comedy sound like the maxims of Epictetus. You ought to be thankful you’re not a dog.

Brace up, Benedick, and bid the blues begone.

”

But, of course, he couldn’t understand. Humans were denied the speech of animals.

The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.

In the flat across the hall from us lived a lady with a black-and-tan terrier. Her husband strung it and took it out every evening, but he always came home cheerful and whistling.

“Now, don’t say that,” said old Anthony, shocked. “

I bet my money on money every time.

I’ve been through the encyclopaedia down to Y looking for something you can’t buy with it; and I expect to have to take up the appendix next week. I’m for money against the field. Tell me something money won’t buy.”

Do you think she would listen to a declaration from me during that six or eight minutes under those circumstances? No. And what chance would I have in the theatre or afterward? None. No, dad, this is one tangle that your money can’t unravel.

We can’t buy one minute of time with cash; if we could, rich people would live longer.

There’s no hope of getting a talk with Miss Lantry before she sails.”

“Me?” said Kelly. “

I can lick the man that invented poverty.

”

four rounds—with her bridegroom. And he had been hers for three weeks; and the crook of her little finger could sway him more than the fist of any 142-pounder in the world.

Love, when it is ours, is the other name for self-abnegation and sacrifice. When it belongs to people across the airshaft it means arrogance and self-conceit.

The bride crossed her oxfords and looked thoughtfully at the distemper Cupids on the ceiling.

… after the formula of the recipe for the eternal hills, was there set forth to the hand and tooth of a long-suffering city, while the gods lay beside their nectar and homemade biscuits and smiled, and the dentists leaped for joy in their gold-leafy dens.

The eye of Binkley fixed a young man at his table with the Bohemian gleam, which is a compound of the look of the Basilisk, the shine of a bubble of Würzburger, the inspiration of genius and the pleading of a panhandler.

The young man sprang to his feet. “Hello, Bink, old boy!” he shouted. “Don’t tell me you were going to pass our table. Join us—unless you’ve another crowd on hand.”

With the Green Mountains’ external calm upon her she sat, her soul flaming in her with the fire of Andalusia. The tables were filled with Bohemia. The room was full of the fragrance of flowers—both mille and cauli.

Questions and corks popped; laughter and silver rang; champagne flashed in the pail, wit flashed in the pan.

Vandyke ruffled his long, black locks, disarranged his careless tie and leaned over to Madder.

“Don’t think of it, Vandy,” he replied. “

We are short, and Art is long.

”

The Easter hat, loosed from the saddle-thongs, lay there in its calico wrappings, a shapeless thing from its sojourn beneath the solid carcass of Road Runner. Then Pearson fainted and fell head long upon the poor hat again, crumpling it under his wounded shoulders.

It is hard to kill a cowpuncher.

In half an hour he revived—long enough for a woman to have fainted twice and tried ice-cream for a restorer. He got up carefully and found Road Runner who was busy with the nearby grass.

It was a day in March.

Never, never begin a story this way when you write one.

No opening could possibly be worse. It is unimaginative, flat, dry and likely to consist of mere wind. But in this instance it is allowable.

Sarah was crying over her bill of fare.

Think of a New York girl shedding tears on the menu card!

To account for this you will be allowed to guess that the lobsters were all out, or that she had sworn ice-cream off during Lent, or that she had ordered onions, or that she had just come from a Hackett matinee.

And then, all these theories being wrong, you will please let the story proceed.

The gentleman who announced that the world was an oyster which he with his sword would open made a larger hit than he deserved. It is not difficult to open an oyster with a sword.

But did you ever notice anyone try to open the terrestrial bivalve with a typewriter? Like to wait for a dozen raw opened that way?

And then the almanac lied, and said that spring had come.

Spring comes when it comes.

The frozen snows of January still lay like adamant in the crosstown streets. The hand-organs still played “In the Good Old Summertime,” with their December vivacity and expression. Men began to make thirty-day notes to buy Easter dresses. Janitors shut off steam.

As he opened the door of his room he received a surprise.

Instead of the usual stove-lid or potato-masher for him to dodge, came only words.

Mr. McCaskey reckoned that the benign May moon had softened the breast of his spouse.

He was playin’ on the sidewalk only this mornin’—or was it Wednesday? I’m that busy with work, ’tis hard to keep up with dates. But I’ve looked the house over from top to cellar, and it’s gone he is. Oh, for the love av Hiven—”

Silent, grim, colossal, the big city has ever stood against its revilers.

They call it hard as iron; they say that no pulse of pity beats in its bosom; they compare its streets with lonely forests and deserts of lava. But beneath the hard crust of the lobster is found a delectable and luscious food.

Silent, grim, colossal, the big city has ever stood against its revilers. They call it hard as iron; they say that no pulse of pity beats in its bosom; they compare its streets with lonely forests and deserts of lava.

But beneath the hard crust of the lobster is found a delectable and luscious food.

Perhaps a different simile would have been wiser. Still, nobody should take offence. We would call no one a lobster without good and sufficient claws.

But beneath the hard crust of the lobster is found a delectable and luscious food. Perhaps a different simile would have been wiser. Still, nobody should take offence. We would call no one a lobster without good and sufficient claws.

No calamity so touches the common heart of humanity as does the straying of a little child. Their feet are so uncertain and feeble; the ways are so steep and strange.

Major Griggs hurried down to the corner, and up the avenue into Billy’s place. “Gimme a rye-high,” he said to the servitor. “Haven’t seen a bowlegged, dirty-faced little devil of a six-year-old lost kid around here anywhere, have you?”

She detested the policeman and objected earnestly to the arrangement. She pointed out, not unreasonably, that she might have been allowed to fall asleep over one of St. George Rathbone’s novels on the third floor, but she was overruled.

Raspberries and cops were not created for nothing.

The burglar got into the house without much difficulty; because we must have action and not too much description in a 2,000-word story.

She pointed out, not unreasonably, that she might have been allowed to fall asleep over one of St. George Rathbone’s novels on the third floor, but she was overruled. Raspberries and cops were not created for nothing.

The burglar got into the house without much difficulty; because we must have action and not too much description in a 2,000-word story.

In the dining room he opened the slide of his dark lantern. With a brace and centrebit he began to bore into the lock of the silver-closet.

“I’m sorry,” said Tommy, sympathetically. “But I can’t help myself any more than you can.

It’s one of the canons of household fiction that no burglar shall be successful.

The burglar must be foiled by a kid like me, or by a young lady heroine, or at the last moment by his old pal, Red Mike, who recognizes the house as one in which he used to be the coachman.

Prithee, smite the poet in the eye when he would sing to you praises of the month of May.

It is a month presided over by the spirits of mischief and madness. Pixies and flibbertigibbets haunt the budding woods: Puck and his train of midgets are busy in town and country.

In came Mrs. Widdup.

She was comely to the eye, fair, flustered, forty and foxy.

“Higgins is out, sir,” she said, with a smile suggestive of vibratory massage. “He went to post a letter. Can I do anything for you, sir?”

He took his dose and then Mrs. Widdup’s hand. She blushed.

Oh, yes, it can be done. Just hold your breath and compress the diaphragm.

“Mrs. Widdup,” said Mr. Coulson, “the springtime’s full upon us.”

But if he drops a penny in one of the machines run by the Madam Eve’s Daughters’ Amalgamated Association and the pineapple chewing gum don’t fall out when he pulls the lever you can hear him kick to the superintendent four blocks away.

Man is the hardest proposition a woman has to go up against.

He’s the low-grade one, and she has to work overtime to make him pay. Two times out of five she’s salted. She can’t put in crushers and costly machinery. He’d notice ’em and be onto the game.

“I kind of took to him. For this reason, I met him on Broadway one night when I was out of heart, luck, tobacco and place.

He was all silk hat, diamonds and front. He was all front. If you had gone behind him you would have only looked yourself in the face.

I looked like a cross between Count Tolstoy and a June lobster. I was out of luck. I had—but let me lay my eyes on that dealer again.

“God knows,” said Greenbrier sadly, “and I know. The East has gobbled you up.

You was venison, and now you’re veal.

You put me in mind of a japonica in a window. You’ve been signed, sealed and diskivered. Requiescat in hoc signo. You make me thirsty.”

Bright shone the lights o’er fair women and br—let it go, anyhow—brave men. The orchestra played charmingly. Hardly had a tip from a diner been placed in its hands by a waiter when it would burst forth into soniferousness.

The more beer you contributed to it the more Meyerbeer it gave you. Which is reciprocity.

Merritt put forth exertions on the dinner. Greenbrier was his old friend, and he liked him. He persuaded him to drink a cocktail.

“Me?” said the Captain. “

I’d marry the Empress of China for one bowl of chop suey.

I’d commit murder for a plate of beef stew. I’d steal a wafer from a waif. I’d be a Mormon for a bowl of chowder.”

The newsboys’ shouts were the notes of singing birds; that garden was the pleasance of the Capulets; the janitor was an ogre; himself a knight, ready with sword, lance or lute.

Thus does romance show herself amid forests of brick and stone when she gets lost in the city, and there has to be sent out a general alarm to find her again.

At four in the afternoon Ravenel looked out across the garden. In the window of his hopes were set four small vases, each containing a great, full-blown rose—red and white.

And now Ravenel smiled.

The lover smiles when he thinks he has won. The woman who loves ceases to smile with victory.

He ends a battle; she begins hers. What a pretty idea to set the four roses in her window for him to see! She must have a sweet, poetic soul. And now to contrive the meeting.

“All cities,” said Aurelia, judicially, “say the same thing.

When they get through saying it there is an echo from Philadelphia.

So, they are unanimous.”

I walked up to Broadway. I saw a cop on the corner.

The cops take kids up, women across, and men in.

I went up to him.

“Pennsylvania pinks? Oh, that refers to a coin-raising scheme of the Keystoners. They burn the soles of old women’s feet to make them tell where their money’s hid.”

Caligula’s words in business was always few and bitter.

“You see them mountains,” said he, pointing. “And you seen that colonel man that owns railroads and cuts more ice when he goes to the post-office than Roosevelt does when he cleans ’em out.

I went up to Atlanta on the train and laid in a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar supply of the most gratifying and efficient lines of grub that money could buy. I always was an admirer of viands in their more palliative and revised stages.

Hog and hominy are not only inartistic to my stomach, but they give indigestion to my moral sentiments.

And I thought of Colonel Jackson T. Rockingham, president of the Sunrise & Edenville Tap Railroad, and how he would miss the luxury of his home fare as is so famous among wealthy Southerners.

Her eyes met those of Mrs. James Williams.

Between two ticks of a watch they exchanged their life’s experiences, histories, hopes and fancies.

And all, mind you, with the eye, before two men could have decided whether to draw steel or borrow a match.

Thus does one sister of the plain gold band know another who stands in the enchanted light that shines but once and briefly for each one. By rice and satin bows does mere man become aware of weddings.

But bride knoweth bride at the glance of an eye.

And between them swiftly passes comfort and meaning in a language that man and widows wot not of.

“Tragic, my eye!” said my friend, irreverently. “

In Shakespeare’s day he might have sputtered out some high-cockalorum nonsense of that sort, because in those days they ordered ham and eggs in blank verse and discharged the cook with an epic.

But not for B’way in the summer of 1905!”

Dear Reader: It was summertime. The sun glared down upon the city with pitiless ferocity.

It is difficult for the sun to be ferocious and exhibit compunction simultaneously.

The heat was—oh, bother thermometers!—who cares for standard measures, anyhow? It was so hot that—

… called loudly for cold beef and beer in the restaurant, protesting that roast pullet and Burgundy was really too heavy for such weather, blushed when he met your eye, for you had heard him all winter calling, in modest tones, for the same ascetic viands.

Soup, pocketbooks, shirt waists, actors and baseball excuses grew thinner.

Yes, it was summertime.

What then was he before Katherine?

A trembler, with no word to say for himself, a stone without blarney, the dumbest lover that ever babbled of the weather in the presence of his divinity.

There came to Kenealy’s two sunburned men, Riley and McQuirk. They had conference with Kenealy; and then they took possession of a back room which they filled with bottles and siphons and jugs and druggist’s measuring glasses.

Men in accurate clothes, with faces like those carved on cherry stones by the old salts in sailors’ homes, turned and stared at Dulcie as she sped, unheeding, past them.

Manhattan, the night-blooming cereus, was beginning to unfold its dead-white, heavy-odoured petals.

Dulcie stopped in a store where goods were cheap and bought an imitation lace collar with her fifty cents. That money was to have been spent otherwise—fifteen cents for supper, ten cents for breakfast, ten cents for lunch.

and five cents was to be squandered for licorice drops—the kind that made your cheek look like the toothache, and last as long. The licorice was an extravagance—almost a carouse—but what is life without pleasures?

Dulcie lived in a furnished room.

There is this difference between a furnished room and a boardinghouse. In a furnished room, other people do not know it when you go hungry.

Dulcie lived in a furnished room. There is this difference between a furnished room and a boardinghouse.

In a furnished room, other people do not know it when you go hungry.

Dulcie went up to her room—the third floor back in a West Side brownstone-front. She lit the gas. Scientists tell us that the diamond is the hardest substance known. Their mistake. Landladies know of a compound beside which the diamond is as putty.

Dulcie went up to her room—the third floor back in a West Side brownstone-front. She lit the gas. Scientists tell us that the diamond is the hardest substance known. Their mistake.

Landladies know of a compound beside which the diamond is as putty.

They pack it in the tips of gas-burners; and one may stand on a chair and dig at it in vain until one’s fingers are pink and bruised. A hairpin will not remove it; therefore let us call it immovable.

Twice she had been to Coney Island and had ridden the hobbyhorses.

’Tis a weary thing to count your pleasures by summers instead of by hours.

Piggy needs but a word. When the girls named him, an undeserving stigma was cast upon the noble family of swine. The words-of-three-letters lesson in the old blue spelling book begins with Piggy’s biography. He was fat;

Ives did not wince.

When you are in the ring you are not surprised when your adversary taps you on the ribs.

“I followed the candy man that time,” said Ives, irrelevantly, “and gave him five dollars at the corner of Broadway.”

“Yer’d make a dandy magazine cover,” he said, grudgingly. “Beautiful or not is for them that cares. It’s not my line. If yer lookin’ for bouquets apply elsewhere between nine and twelve. I think we’ll have rain.”

Truly, fascinating a candy man is like killing rabbits in a deep snow; but the hunter’s blood is widely diffused.

Mademoiselle tugged a great coil of hair from Sidonie’s hands and let it fall out the window.

You would not dare to interrupt her description of their advantages and of the merits of the gentleman who had occupied them for eight years. Then you would manage to stammer forth the confession that you were neither a doctor nor a dentist.

Mrs. Parker’s manner of receiving the admission was such that you could never afterward entertain the same feeling toward your parents, who had neglected to train you up in one of the professions that fitted Mrs. Parker’s parlours.

Next you ascended one flight of stairs and looked at the second-floor-back at $8. Convinced by her second-floor manner that it was worth the $12 that Mr.

Hoover. Tune the pipes to the tragedy of tallow, the bane of bulk, the calamity of corpulence. Tried out, Falstaff might have rendered more romance to the ton than would have Romeo’s rickety ribs to the ounce.

A lover may sigh, but he must not puff.

To the train of Momus are the fat men remanded. In vain beats the faithfullest heart above a 52-inch belt. Avaunt, Hoover! Hoover, forty-five, flush and foolish, might carry off Helen herself; Hoover, forty-five, flush, foolish and fat is meat for perdition.

Women’s rights societies have been laboring for many years after equality with man. With what result? When they sit on a bench they must twist their ankles together and uncomfortably swing their highest French heels clear of earthly support.

Begin at the bottom, ladies. Get your feet on the ground, and then rise to theories of mental equality.

Hastings Beauchamp Morley was carefully and neatly dressed. That was the result of an instinct due to his birth and breeding. It is denied us to look further into a man’s bosom than the starch on his shirt front;

but he smiled pityingly at a hundred grimy, unfortunate ones who had no more, and who would have no more when the sun’s first rays yellowed the tall paper-cutter building on the west side of the square. But Morley would have enough by then.

Sundown had seen his pockets empty before; but sunrise had always seen them lined.

First he went to the house of a clergyman off Madison Avenue and presented a forged letter of introduction that holily purported to issue from a pastorate in Indiana. This netted him $5 when backed up by a realistic romance of a delayed remittance.

With a solitary dime in his pocket, he stood on the curb watching with confident, cynical, smiling eyes the tides of people that flowed past him. Into that stream he must cast his net and draw fish for his further sustenance and need.

Good Izaak Walton had not the half of his self-reliance and bait-lore.

A joyful party of four—two women and two men—fell upon him with cries of delight. There was a dinner party on—where had he been for a fortnight past?—what luck to thus run upon him!

“Oh,” said Morley, “you have your wish already. I am satisfied.

I think good luck follows me like a dog.

I am for yonder bright hotel across the square for the night. And what a moon that is lighting up the city tonight. I think no one enjoys the moonlight and such little things as I do. Well, a good night to you.”

Wall Street speculators, driving home in their carriages, love to point out these men to their visiting friends and tell them of this rather famous lounging-place of the “crooks.”

On Wall Street the speculators never use the file blades of their knives.

Vuyning was delighted when one of this company stepped forth and addressed him as he was passing.

“Thanks,” said Conant. “I suppose the check will be round on Thursday, as usual.”

The morals of this story have somehow gotten mixed. You can take your choice of “Stay on the Farm” or “Don’t Write Poetry.”

“The riddle? Why, it was this: ‘What kind of a hen lays the longest?’ Think of that! What kind of a hen lays the longest? Ain’t it like a Dutchman to risk a man’s happiness on a fool proposition like that? Now, what’s the use?

What I don’t know about hens would fill several incubators.

You say you’re giving imitations of the old Arab guy that gave away—libraries in Baghdad. Well, now, can you whistle up a fairy that’ll solve this hen query, or not?”

“Nein!” said Hildebrant, shaking his head violently. “You haf not guessed der answer.”

Bill passed on and donned a bed-tick apron and bachelorhood.

In came the young man of the Arabian Night’s fiasco—pale, melancholy, hopeless.

Thus is truth held in disrepute. But in time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors.

But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches.

This preamble is to warn you off the grade crossing of a true story. Being that, it shall be told simply, with conjunctions substituted for adjectives wherever possible, and whatever evidences of style may appear in it shall be due to the linotype man.

I am not criticising the judgment of editors. They are mostly very fine men, but a man can be but one man, with individual opinions and tastes. I knew two associate editors of a magazine who were wonderfully alike in almost everything.

And yet one of them was very fond of Flaubert, while the other preferred gin.

Pettit brought me his returned manuscripts, and we looked them over together to find out why they were not accepted. They seemed to me pretty fair stories, written in a good style, and ended, as they should, at the bottom of the last page.

Now, the editors are wrong about that, of course.

Women do not read the love stories in the magazines. They read the poker-game stories and the recipes for cucumber lotion.

The love stories are read by fat cigar drummers and little ten-year-old girls. I am not criticising the judgment of editors. They are mostly very fine men, but a man can be but one man, with individual opinions and tastes.

Well (as the narrative style permits us to say infrequently), Pettit went to pieces. All those pains, those lover’s doubts, those heartburnings and tremors of which he had written so unconvincingly were his.

Talk about Shylock’s pound of flesh! Twenty-five pounds Cupid got from Pettit. Which is the usurer?

One night Pettit came to my room exalted. Pale and haggard but exalted. She had given him a jonquil.

“I see,” said old Pettit, as he took up his story and began tearing it into small strips. “I see the game now.

You can’t write with ink, and you can’t write with your own heart’s blood, but you can write with the heart’s blood of someone else.

You have to be a cad before you can be an artist. Well, I am for old Alabam and the Major’s store. Have you got a light, Old Hoss?”

… rags, some in clean white and beribboned, some wild and restless as young hawks, some gentle-faced and shrinking, some shrieking rude and sinful words, some listening, awed, but soon, grown familiar, to embrace—here were the children playing in the corridors of the House of Sin.

Above the playground forever hovered a great bird. The bird was known to humorists as the stork. But the people of Chrystie Street were better ornithologists. They called it a vulture.

A little girl of twelve came up timidly to the man reading and resting by the window, and said:

It’s mighty funny what kind of dreams one has sometimes.

Poets call them visions, but a vision is only a dream in blank verse.

I dreamed the rest of this story.

Through the open gates of the iron-railed, old, downtown park, where the elect once took the air, they strolled, and found a quiet bench.

There is this difference between the grief of youth and that of old age: youth’s burden is lightened by as much of it as another shares; old age may give and give, but the sorrow remains the same.

“He was my fiancé,” confided Miss Conway, at the end of an hour. “We were going to be married next spring. I don’t want you to think that I am stringing you, Mr. Donovan, but he was a real Count.

Now, girls, if you want to observe a young man hustle out after a pick and shovel, just tell him that your heart is in some other fellow’s grave.

Young men are grave-robbers by nature. Ask any widow.

Something must be done to restore that missing organ to weeping angels in crêpe de Chine. Dead men certainly get the worst of it from all sides.

Young men are grave-robbers by nature. Ask any widow. Something must be done to restore that missing organ to weeping angels in crêpe de Chine.

Dead men certainly get the worst of it from all sides.

“I’m awfully sorry,” said Mr. Donovan, gently. “No, we won’t walk back to the house just yet. And don’t say you haven’t no friends in this city, Miss Conway.

Over on the east side this ravager strode boldly, smiting his victims by scores, but his feet trod slowly through the maze of the narrow and moss-grown “places.”

Mr. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman.

A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy he smote;

“She has one chance in—let us say, ten,” he said, as he shook down the mercury in his clinical thermometer. “And that chance is for her to want to live.

This way people have of lining-up on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopeia look silly.

Your little lady has made up her mind that she’s not going to get well. Has she anything on her mind?”

“Well, it is the weakness, then,” said the doctor. “I will do all that science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish.

But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 percent from the curative power of medicines.

If you will get her to ask one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one in ten.”

She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a magazine story.

Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.

As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers and a monocle on the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low sound, several times repeated. She went quickly to the bedside.

But Johnsy did not answer.

The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey.

The fancy seemed to possess her more strongly as one by one the ties that bound her to friendship and to earth were loosed.

And the letter from Mr. Otter. Keep your eye on the letter from Mr. Otter. That is the clue. I desire that everything be made plain as we go.

Detective stories are so plentiful now that they do not sell.

And so we find Elsie, thus equipped, starting out in the world to seek her fortune. One trouble about the letter from Mr. Otter was that it did not bear the new address of the firm, which had moved about a month before.

“Goodness me!” exclaimed Elsie, with some impatience. “

The devil seems to have a cinch on all the business in New York.

What’s wrong about the place?”

Money talks. But you may think that the conversation of a little old ten-dollar bill in New York would be nothing more than a whisper.

Oh, very well! Pass up this sotto voce autobiography of an X if you like. If you are one of the kind that prefers to listen to John D’s checkbook roar at you through a megaphone as it passes by, all right.

Then he fell in love with a girl whom he met in a cheap restaurant, and his story begins.

The Rue Chartres, in New Orleans, is a street of ghosts.

It lies in the quarter where the Frenchman, in his prime, set up his translated pride and glory; where, also, the arrogant don had swaggered, and dreamed of gold and grants and ladies’ gloves.

And at the same time that he made the discovery, the secret of his banishment from the society of the good laid its finger in his face and told him it must not be.

Man is too thoroughly an egoist not to be also an egotist; if he love, the object shall know it.

During a lifetime he may conceal it through stress of expediency and honour, but it shall bubble from his dying lips, though it disrupt a neighbourhood. It is known, however, that most men do not wait so long to disclose their passion.

“Sir,” said the priest, “do you owe me nothing? Be quiet.

It seems so often that Heaven lets fall its choicest gifts into hands that must be taught to hold them.

Listen again. You forgot that repentant sin must not compromise, but look up, for redemption, to the purest and best. You went to her with the finespun sophistry that peace could be found in a mutual guilt;

“That ear,” says Hicks, “is the relic of true friendship.”

“No friendship is an accident,” said Telemachus; and I was silent.

“The only perfect case of true friendship I ever knew,” went on my host, “was a cordial intent between a Connecticut man and a monkey. The monkey climbed palms in Barranquilla and threw down coconuts to the man.

“

But in the case of human beings, friendship is a transitory art, subject to discontinuance without further notice.

“I had a friend once, of the entitlement of Paisley Fish, that I imagined was sealed to me for an endless space of time.

“Now, I give you my own recipe for inveigling a woman into that state of affairs when she can be referred to as ‘née Jones.’

Learn how to pick up her hand and hold it, and she’s yours.

It ain’t so easy. Some men grab at it so much like they was going to set a dislocation of the shoulder that you can smell the arnica and hear ’em tearing off bandages.

The trouble began in Laredo. It was the Llano Kid’s fault, for he should have confined his habit of manslaughter to Mexicans.

But the Kid was past twenty; and to have only Mexicans to one’s credit at twenty is to blush unseen on the Rio Grande border.

It happened in old Justo Valdos’s gambling house. There was a poker game at which sat players who were not all friends, as happens often where men ride in from afar to shoot Folly as she gallops.

There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it.

Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week.

… many reasons—Hendrik Hudson, the art schools, green goods, the stork, the annual dressmakers’ convention, the Pennsylvania Railroad, love of money, the stage, cheap excursion rates, brains, personal column ads, heavy walking shoes, ambition, freight trains—all these have had a hand in making up the population.

But every man Jack when he first sets foot on the stones of Manhattan has got to fight.

He has got to fight at once until either he or his adversary wins. There is no resting between rounds, for there are no rounds. It is slugging from the first. It is a fight to a finish.

You must be for or against—lover or enemy—bosom friend or outcast. And, oh, the city is a general in the ring. Not only by blows does it seek to subdue you. It woos you to its heart with the subtlety of a siren.

It is a combination of Delilah, green Chartreuse, Beethoven, chloral and John L. in his best days.

In other cities you may wander and abide as a stranger man as long as you please. You may live in Chicago until your hair whitens, and be a citizen and still prate of beans if Boston mothered you, and without rebuke.

We were going to be just the same fellows we had always been, and never let it master us. It has downed you, old man.

You have changed from a maverick into a butterick.

”

But she made no sign.

A husband who steps around the corner for twenty years and then drops in again should not expect to find his slippers laid out too conveniently near nor a match ready lighted for his cigar.

There must be expiation, explanation, and possibly execration. A little purgatory, and then, maybe, if he were properly humble, he might be trusted with a harp and crown. And so she made no sign that she knew or suspected.

But she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurrying, flying up the stairs toward the music and him who had forgotten, but who had known her for his in each of his two existences, and as she climbed up she sobbed, cried and sang: “Frank! Frank! Frank!”

Three mortals thus juggling with years as though they were billiard balls, and my friend, the reporter, couldn’t see anything funny in it!

that he was “on the water wagon.” The reason for Bob’s sudden attitude of hostility toward the “demon rum”—as the white ribboners miscall whiskey (see the “Bartender’s Guide”), should be of interest to reformers and saloon-keepers.

There is always hope for a man who, when sober, will not concede or acknowledge that he was ever drunk.

But when a man will say (in the apt words of the phrase-distiller), “I had a beautiful skate on last night,” you will have to put stuff in his coffee as well as pray for him.

The sideboard was stocked with Scotch and rye and a liqueur. They had their new friends in to dinner and all were laughing at nothing by 1 a.m. Some plastering fell in the room below them, for which Bob had to pay $4.50.

Thus they footed it merrily on the ragged frontiers of the country that has no boundary lines or government.

And soon Bob fell in with his cronies and learned to keep his foot on the little rail six inches above the floor for an hour or so every afternoon before he went home.

Mrs. Peters worked at sundry times, doing odd jobs of scrubbing and washing. Mr. Peters had a pure, unbroken record of five years without having earned a penny. And yet they clung together, sharing each other’s hatred and misery, being creatures of habit.

Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces; though there is some silly theory of gravitation.

Mrs. Peters reposed her 200 pounds on the safer of the two chairs and gazed stolidly out the one window at the brick wall opposite. Her eyes were red and damp.

The window was open upon its outlook of brick walls and drab, barren back yards. Except for the mildness of the air that entered it might have been midwinter yet in the city that turns such a frowning face to besieging spring.

But spring doesn’t come with the thunder of cannon. She is a sapper and a miner, and you must capitulate.

“I’ll try it,” said Mr. Peters to himself, making a wry face.

Fourth—Maggie Murphy with a new red feather in her old straw hat, happy and self-conscious, in the Grand Street turnout.

Of course, the rabbits do not count. Nor the Easter eggs, since the higher criticism has hard-boiled them.

The limited field of its pictorial possibilities proves that Easter, of all our festival days, is the most vague and shifting in our conception. It belongs to all religions, although the pagans invented it.

What it is you shall find out if you follow in the footsteps of Danny McCree.

Easter Sunday dawned as it should, bright and early, in its place on the calendar between Saturday and Monday.

At 5:24 the sun rose, and at 10:30 Danny followed its example. He went into the kitchen and washed his face at the sink. His mother was frying bacon.

He still clung to his pipe, although his sight had been taken from him two years before by a precocious blast of giant powder that went off without permission.

Very few blind men care for smoking, for the reason that they cannot see the smoke.

Now, could you enjoy having the news read to you from an evening newspaper unless you could see the colors of the headlines?

Danny wandered. The double, heavy incumbency of enjoying simultaneously a Sunday and a festival day was his.

The sorrows of the hand-toiler fit him easily. They are worn so often that they hang with the picturesque lines of the best tailor-made garments.

That is why well-fed artists of pencil and pen find in the griefs of the common people their most striking models. But when the Philistine would disport himself, the grimness of Melpomene, herself, attends upon his capers.

“Will that be you, lad?” he asked.

Danny flared into the rage of a strong man who is surprised at the outset of committing a good deed.

“Who pays the rent and buys the food that is eaten in this house?” he snapped, viciously. “Have I no right to come in?”

“Do you hear our lad readin’ to me?” he said. “

There is none finer in the land. My two eyes have come back to me again.

”

So, in such good company I may introduce an absinthe drip—one absinthe drip, dripped through a silver dripper, orderly, opalescent, cool, green-eyed—deceptive.

Kerner was a fool. Besides that, he was an artist and my good friend.

Now, if there is one thing on earth utterly despicable to another, it is an artist in the eyes of an author whose story he has illustrated. Just try it once. Write a story about a mining camp in Idaho. Sell it.

Enough! I hated Kerner, and one day I met him and we became friends. He was young and gloriously melancholy because his spirits were so high and life had so much in store for him. Yes, he was almost riotously sad. That was his youth.

When a man begins to be hilarious in a sorrowful way you can bet a million that he is dyeing his hair.

Kerner’s hair was plentiful and carefully matted as an artist’s thatch should be. He was a cigaretteur, and he audited his dinners with red wine. But, most of all, he was a fool.

“Wait here for me,” said I, rising; “I must speak to that man. Had you no answer for him?

Because you are a fool must you die like a mouse under his foot?

Could you not utter one squeak in your own defence?”

and we knew we was snowed in. We got in plenty of firewood before it got deep, and we had grub enough for two months, so we let the elements rage and cut up all they thought proper.

If you want to instigate the art of manslaughter just shut two men up in a eighteen by twenty-foot cabin for a month. Human nature won’t stand it.

When the first snowflakes fell me and Idaho Green laughed at each other’s jokes and praised the stuff we turned out of a skillet and called bread. At the end of three weeks Idaho makes this kind of a edict to me. Says he:

We played; and Idaho won. He picked up his book; and I took mine. Then each of us got on his side of the house and went to reading.

I never was as glad to see a ten-ounce nugget as I was that book.

And Idaho took at his like a kid looks at a stick of candy.

“Look on page 117,” says I, “at the remedy for suffocation by smoke or gas. Flaxseed in the outer corner of the eye, it says.

I don’t know whether it works as a smoke consumer or whether it hikes the compound gastro-hippopotamus nerve into action, but Herkimer says it, and he was called to the case first.

If you want to make it a consultation, there’s no objection.”

The recipe for suffocation says: ‘Get the patient into fresh air as quickly as possible, and place in a reclining position.’ The flaxseed remedy is for ‘Dust and Cinders in the Eye,’ on the line above. But, after all—”

“See here,” interrupts Mrs. Sampson, “I reckon I’ve got something to say in this consultation. That flaxseed done me more good than anything I ever tried.”

And then she raises up her head and lays it back on my arm again, and says: “Put some in the other eye, Sandy dear.”

In the evening Blinker went to one of his clubs, intending to dine. Nobody was there except some old fogies playing whist who spoke to him with grave politeness and glared at him with savage contempt.

Everybody was out of town. But here he was kept in like a schoolboy to write his name over and over on pieces of paper. His wounds were deep.

Blinker turned his back on the fogies, and said to the club steward who had come forward with some nonsense about cold fresh salmon roe:

The season of irresponsibility is at hand. Come, let us twine round our brows wreaths of poison ivy (that is for idiocy), and wander hand in hand with sociology in the summer fields.

Likely as not the world is flat.

The wise men have tried to prove that it is round, with indifferent success. They pointed out to us a ship going to sea, and bade us observe that, at length, the convexity of the earth hid from our view all but the vessel’s topmast.

The circumnavigators of the alleged globe may have sailed the rim of a watery circle back to the same port again.

The truly great return at the high tide of their attainments to the simplicity of a child.

The billionaire sits down at his mahogany to his bowl of bread and milk. When you reach the end of your career, just take down the sign “Goal” and look at the other side of it. You will find “Beginning Point” there.

The truly great return at the high tide of their attainments to the simplicity of a child. The billionaire sits down at his mahogany to his bowl of bread and milk.

When you reach the end of your career, just take down the sign “Goal” and look at the other side of it. You will find “Beginning Point” there.

It has been reversed while you were going around the track.

“Excuse me,” said Haywood, with the insulting politeness of his caste, “for mistaking you for a gentleman. I might have known better.”

“How might you have known better if you thought I was one?” said “Smoky,” unconsciously a logician.

“By your appearance,” said Haywood. “No gentleman is dirty, ragged and a liar.”

“A cad is a disagreeable person,” answered Haywood, “who lacks manners and doesn’t know his place. They sometimes play baseball.”

“I can tell you what a mollycoddle is,” said “Smoky.” “It’s a monkey dressed up by its mother and sent out to pick daisies on the lawn.”

“When you have the honour to refer to the members of my family,” said Haywood, with some dim ideas of a code in his mind, “you’d better leave the ladies out of your remarks.”

One afternoon I was reclining under the trees near the shore at Fishampton in the esteemed company of an eminent, bald-headed young sociologist.

By way of note it may be inserted that all sociologists are more or less bald, and exactly thirty-two. Look ’em over.

The sociologist was citing the Van Plushvelt case as the most important “uplift” symptom of a generation, and as an excuse for his own existence.

“Why, look what he has done to ‘Smoky,’ ” I replied.

“You will always be a fool,” said my friend, the sociologist, getting up and walking away.

… ingenious complacency of satisfaction and comfort in the mere act of breathing—something that seemed to claim for her a right as a perfect work of nature to exist and be admired equally with a rare flower or some beautiful, milk-white dove among its sober-hued companions.

She was dressed in a white waist and dark skirt⁠—that discreet masquerade of goose-girl and duchess.

“Vivienne,” said Hartley, looking at her pleadingly, “you did not answer my last letter. It was only by nearly a week’s search that I found where you had moved to.

Then he turned his head, and the hickory-nut cracked into a wide smile.

“Give back the money,” said he, “or I’ll have the cop after you for false pretenses. I thought you was the cop.”

“I want to talk to you, Bill,” I said. “When did you leave Oklahoma? Where is Reddy McGill now? Why are you selling those impossible contraptions on the street? How did your Big Horn goldmine pan out? How did you get so badly sunburned?

Let us look at the other. We often hear “shopgirls” spoken of. No such persons exist. There are girls who work in shops. They make their living that way. But why turn their occupation into an adjective? Let us be fair.

We do not refer to the girls who live on Fifth Avenue as “marriage-girls.”

Lou and Nancy were chums. They came to the big city to find work because there was not enough to eat at their homes to go around. Nancy was nineteen; Lou was twenty.

No furs protect her against the bitter spring air, but she wears her short broadcloth jacket as jauntily as though it were Persian lamb! On her face and in her eyes, remorseless type-seeker, is the typical shopgirl expression.

It is a look of silent but contemptuous revolt against cheated womanhood; of sad prophecy of the vengeance to come.

When she laughs her loudest the look is still there. The same look can be seen in the eyes of Russian peasants; and those of us left will see it some day on Gabriel’s face when he comes to blow us up.

The two waited on the corner for Dan. Dan was Lou’s steady company.

Faithful? Well, he was on hand when Mary would have had to hire a dozen subpoena servers to find her lamb.

“Ain’t you cold, Nance?” said Lou. “Say, what a chump you are for working in that old store for $8 a week! I made $18.50 last week. Of course ironing ain’t as swell work as selling lace behind a counter, but it pays.

Suffused in the aura of this high social refinement and good breeding, it was impossible for her to escape a deeper effect of it.

As good habits are said to be better than good principles, so, perhaps, good manners are better than good habits.

The teachings of your parents may not keep alive your New England conscience; but if you sit on a straight-back chair and repeat the words “prisms and pilgrims” forty times the devil will flee from you.

The heads, brown, black, flaxen, red, and yellow bob together; the answer is given; and the parry to the thrust is decided upon, to be used by each thereafter in passages-at-arms with the common enemy, man.

Thus Nancy learned the art of defense; and to women successful defense means victory.

The curriculum of a department store is a wide one. Perhaps no other college could have fitted her as well for her life’s ambition—the drawing of a matrimonial prize.

Well, I can’t stand a liar. Put everything together—I don’t like him; and that settles it. When I sell out it’s not going to be on any bargain day. I’ve got to have something that sits up in a chair like a man, anyhow.

Yes, I’m looking out for a catch; but it’s got to be able to do something more than make a noise like a toy bank.

”

It might be said that Lou furnished the color, Nancy the tone, and Dan the weight of the distraction-seeking trio. The escort, in his neat but obviously ready-made suit, his ready-made tie and unfailing, genial, ready-made wit never startled or clashed.

He was of that good kind that you are likely to forget while they are present, but remember distinctly after they are gone.

To Nancy’s superior taste the flavor of these ready-made pleasures was sometimes a little bitter: but she was young; and youth is a gourmand, when it cannot be a gourmet.

“That’s because you don’t know any.

The only difference between swells and other people is you have to watch ’em closer.

Don’t you think that red silk lining is just a little bit too bright for that coat, Lou?”

and she was studying man, the animal, both as to his habits and eligibility. Some day she would bring down the game that she wanted; but she promised herself it would be what seemed to her the biggest and the best, and nothing smaller.

Thus she kept her lamp trimmed and burning to receive the bridegroom when he should come.

But, another lesson she learned, perhaps unconsciously. Her standard of values began to shift and change. Sometimes the dollar-mark grew blurred in her mind’s eye, and shaped itself into letters that spelled such words as “truth” and “honor” and now and then just “kindness.”

“I’ve got the tickets for the show tonight,” he said, with a gallant show of lightness. “If you—”

Nancy admired pluck whenever she saw it.

“I’ll go with you, Dan,” she said.

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune fell blunted from the buckler of his armoured pride. With especial resignation did he suffer contumely and injury at the hands of bartenders.

Naturally, they were his enemies; and unnaturally, they were often his friends.

He had to take his chances with them.

The hour was eight o’clock. Homefarers and outgoers jostled Curly on the narrow stone sidewalk. Between the buildings to his left he looked down a cleft that proclaimed itself another thoroughfare. The alley was dark except for one patch of light.

Where there was light there were sure to be human beings.

Where there were human beings after nightfall in San Antonio there might be food, and there was sure to be drink. So Curly headed for the light.

Hot weinerwurst and sauerkraut were being served to purchasers of beer. Curly shuffled to the end of the bar, coughed hollowly, and told Schwegel that he was a Detroit cabinetmaker out of a job.

It followed as the night the day that he got his schooner and lunch.

“Was you acquainted maybe with Heinrich Strauss in Detroit?” asked Schwegel.

“I did,” said Yenna, with almost a sigh. “I told him after dinner when I thought he would be in a good humour.

Did you ever wake up a lion, Ranse, with the mistaken idea that he would be a kitten?

He almost tore the ranch to pieces. It’s all up. I love my daddy, Ranse, and I’m afraid—I’m afraid of him too. He ordered me to promise that I’d never marry a Truesdell. I promised. That’s all. What luck did you have?”

Vesey was the youngest reporter. He had a thirty-two-inch chest and wore a number fourteen collar; but his bright Scotch plaid suit gave him presence and conferred no obscurity upon his whereabouts.

He wore his hat in such a position that people followed him about to see him take it off, convinced that it must be hung upon a peg driven into the back of his head.

He was never without an immense, knotted, hardwood cane with a German-silver tip on its crooked handle. Vesey was the best photograph hustler in the office.

Someone explained, with the touch of half-familiar condescension that they always used toward him. Vesey reached out and took the cablegram from the M.E.’s hand.

Under the protection of some special Providence, he was always doing appalling things like that, and coming off unscathed.

“It’s a code,” said Vesey. “Anybody got the key?”

It was wonderful. And Calloway was wonderful in having made the new censor believe that his jargon of words meant no more than a complaint of the dearth of news and a petition for more expense money. And Vesey was wonderful.

And most wonderful of all are words, and how they make friends one with another, being oft associated, until not even obituary notices them do part.

On the second day following, the city editor halted at Vesey’s desk where the reporter was writing the story of a man who had broken his leg by falling into a coal-hole—Ames having failed to find a murder motive in it.

When you went there to dine you fumbled for an electric button and pressed it. A lookout slid open a panel in the door, looked at you suspiciously, and asked if you were acquainted with Senator Herodotus Q. McMilligan, of the Chickasaw Nation.

If you were, you were admitted and allowed to dine. If you were not, you were admitted and allowed to dine.

There you have one of the abiding principles of Bohemia. When André had accumulated $20,000 he moved uptown, near Broadway, in the fierce light that beats upon the thrown-down.

Mary was one of the princesses of Bohemia. In the first place, it was a royal and a daring thing to have been named Mary.

There are twenty Fifines and Heloises to one Mary in the Country of Elusion.

Now her gloves are tucked in. Miss Tooker has assumed a June poster pose; Mrs. Pothunter has bitten her lips to make the red show; Reeves has several times felt his coat to make sure that his latest poem is in the pocket.

The dinner was ordered. You know how the Bohemian feast of reason keeps up with the courses.

Humor with the oysters; wit with the soup; repartee with the entrée; brag with the roast; knocks for Whistler and Kipling with the salad; songs with the coffee; the slapsticks with the cordials.

Between Miss Adrian’s eyebrows was the pucker that shows the intense strain it requires to be at ease in Bohemia. Pat must come each sally, mot, and epigram. Every second of deliberation upon a reply costs you a bay leaf.

Humor with the oysters; wit with the soup; repartee with the entrée; brag with the roast; knocks for Whistler and Kipling with the salad; songs with the coffee; the slapsticks with the cordials.

Between Miss Adrian’s eyebrows was the pucker that shows the intense strain it requires to be at ease in Bohemia.

Pat must come each sally, mot, and epigram. Every second of deliberation upon a reply costs you a bay leaf. Fine as a hair, a line began to curve from her nostrils to her mouth. To hold her own not a chance must be missed.

For, plodding reader, the handwriting on the wall in the banquet hall of Bohemia is “Laisser faire.” The gray ghost that sometimes peeps through the rings of smoke is that of slain old King Convention.

Freedom is the tyrant that holds them in slavery.

As the dinner waned, hands reached for the pepper cruet rather than for the shaker of Attic salt. Miss Tooker, with an elbow to business, leaned across the table toward Grainger, upsetting her glass of wine.

For two hours the numbers of the great Jeremy rolled forth like the notes of an oratorio played on the violoncello. Mary sat gloating in the new sensation of racking physical discomfort that the wooden chair brought her.

Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect as the martyr’s.

Jeremy’s minor chords soothed her like the music of a tom-tom. “Why, oh why,” she said to herself, “does someone not write words to it?”

She lowered her eyes before the congregation—a hundred-eyed Cerberus that watched the gates through which her sins were fast thrusting her. Her soul was filled with a delirious, almost a fanatic joy. For she was out of the clutch of the tyrant, Freedom.

Dogma and creed pinioned her with beneficent cruelty, as steel braces bind the feet of a crippled child.

She was hedged, adjured, shackled, shored up, strait-jacketed, silenced, ordered. When they came out the minister stopped to greet them. Mary could only hang her head and answer “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” to his questions.

There! Mary has given it away. She has spoiled my climax.

For I was to have told you that Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live.

If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills. It is a hillside that you turn your head to peer at from the windows of the Through Express.

We exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and then beat them, sobbing, to sleep. Then we grovel in the dust of a million years, and ask God why. Thus we call out of the rattrap.

As for the children, no one understands them except old maids, hunchbacks, and shepherd dogs.

Now comes the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the Tatterdemalion, and the Twenty-fifth of December.

He set Betsy on the bar and addressed her loudly and humorously, seasoning his speech with exaggerated compliments and endearments, as one entertaining his lady friend. The loafers and bibbers around caught the farce of it, and roared. The bartender gave Fuzzy a drink.

Oh, many of us carry rag-dolls.

“One for the lady?” suggested Fuzzy impudently, and tucked another contribution to Art beneath his waistcoat.

Countless small, circular wrinkles running around his coat-sleeves and knees guaranteed the quality of his bone and muscle. His small, blue eyes, bathed in the moisture of altruism and wooziness, looked upon you kindly, yet without abashment.

He was whiskerly, whiskyly, fleshily formidable.

So, Black Riley temporized.

“Boys,” said he, “you are certainly damn true friends. Give me a week to think it over.”

The soul of a real artist is quenched with difficulty.

The boys carefully pointed out to him that advertisements were soulless, and that the deficiencies of the day might not be supplied by the morrow.

And then he went out of the present, and there came back to him out of some impossible, vanished, and irrevocable past a little, pure-white, transient, forgotten ghost—the spirit of noblesse oblige.

Upon a gentleman certain things devolve.

James opened the outer door. A stream of light went down the graveled walk to the iron gate. Black Riley, McCarthy, and “One-ear” Mike saw, and carelessly drew their sinister cordon closer about the gate.

“About ten the next morning I steps off the ties into a village that calls itself Atascosa City. I bought a thirty-cent breakfast and a ten-cent cigar, and stood on the Main Street jingling the three pennies in my pocket—dead broke.

A man in Texas with only three cents in his pocket is no better off than a man that has no money and owes two cents.

“One of luck’s favourite tricks is to soak a man for his last dollar so quick that he don’t have time to look it. There I was in a swell St.

There I was in a swell St. Louis tailor-made, blue-and-green plaid suit, and an eighteen-carat sulphate-of-copper scarf-pin, with no hope in sight except the two great Texas industries, the cotton fields and grading new railroads.

I never picked cotton, and I never cottoned to a pick, so the outlook had ultramarine edges.

“All of a sudden, while I was standing on the edge of the wooden sidewalk, down out of the sky falls two fine gold watches in the middle of the street. One hits a chunk of mud and sticks.

Maida had no umbrella nor overshoes. She had her purple dress and she walked abroad. Let the elements do their worst.

A starved heart must have one crumb during a year.

The rain ran down and dripped from her fingers.

And of all the girls I ever knew, you show the greatest sense and intelligence. There is nothing more healthful and invigorating than braving the weather as you are doing. May I walk with you?”

And Maida blushed and sneezed.

There is an answer. Transmigration! The soul of Sir Walter Raleigh has traveled from beneath his slashed doublet to a kindred home under Rooney’s visible plaid waistcoat. Rooney’s is twenty years ahead of the times. Rooney has removed the embargo.

Rooney has spread his cloak upon the soggy crossing of public opinion, and any Elizabeth who treads upon it is as much a queen as another.

Attend to the revelation of the secret. In Rooney’s ladies may smoke!

The unqualified desire of a man to buy clothes and build fires for a woman for a whole lifetime at first sight of her is not uncommon among that humble portion of humanity that does not care for Bradstreet or coats-of-arms or Shaw’s plays.

Love at first sight has occurred a time or two in high life; but, as a rule, the extempore mania is to be found among unsophisticated creatures such as the dove, the blue-tailed dingbat, and the ten-dollar-a-week clerk.

Poets, subscribers to all fiction magazines, and schatchens, take notice.

but, as a rule, the extempore mania is to be found among unsophisticated creatures such as the dove, the blue-tailed dingbat, and the ten-dollar-a-week clerk. Poets, subscribers to all fiction magazines, and schatchens, take notice.

With the exchange of the mysterious magnetic current came to each of them the instant desire to lie, pretend, dazzle and deceive, which is the worst thing about the hypocritical disorder known as love.

“Have another beer?” suggested Cork. In his circle the phrase was considered to be a card, accompanied by a letter of introduction and references.

Editor Westbrook at length yielded, though but half willingly. And in the half of him that consented lurked the vivisectionist that is in all of us. Let him who has not used the scalpel rise and stand in his place.

Pity ’tis that there are not enough rabbits and guinea-pigs to go around.

The two experimenters in Art left the Square and hurried eastward and then to the south until they arrived in the Gramercy neighborhood.

I went into Old Munich one afternoon when there were few customers, and sat at my usual table near the stairway. I was shocked and almost displeased to perceive that the glass cigar-case by the orchestra stand had been smashed to smithereens.

I did not like things to happen in Old Munich. Nothing had ever happened there before.

Waiter No. 18 came and breathed on my neck. I was his by right of discovery. Eighteen’s brain was built like a corral.

I did not shine as a shepherd. As a type Eighteen fitted nowhere. I did not find out if he had a nationality, family, creed, grievance, hobby, soul, preference, home, or vote.

He only came always to my table and, as long as his leisure would permit, let words flutter from him like swallows leaving a barn at daylight.

“How did the cigar-case come to be broken, Eighteen?” I asked, with a certain feeling of personal grievance.

Waiter No. 18 came and breathed on my neck. I was his by right of discovery.

Eighteen’s brain was built like a corral. It was full of ideas which, when he opened the gate, came huddling out like a flock of sheep that might get together afterward or might not.

I did not shine as a shepherd. As a type Eighteen fitted nowhere. I did not find out if he had a nationality, family, creed, grievance, hobby, soul, preference, home, or vote.

The Cisco Kid had killed six men in more or less fair scrimmages, had murdered twice as many (mostly Mexicans), and had winged a larger number whom he modestly forbore to count. Therefore a woman loved him.

The Kid was twenty-five, looked twenty; and a careful insurance company would have estimated the probable time of his demise at, say, twenty-six. His habitat was anywhere between the Frio and the Rio Grande.

The next morning he saddled his horse and rode alone to the Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, twenty miles away.

Six feet two, blond as a Viking, quiet as a deacon, dangerous as a machine gun, Sandridge moved among the Jacales, patiently seeking news of the Cisco Kid.

Far more than the law, the Mexicans dreaded the cold and certain vengeance of the lone rider that the ranger sought. It had been one of the Kid’s pastimes to shoot Mexicans “to see them kick”:

That sounded businesslike. Twice a week he rode over to the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, and directed Tonia’s slim, slightly lemon-tinted fingers among the intricacies of the slowly growing lariata.

A six-strand plait is hard to learn and easy to teach.

The ranger knew that he might find the Kid there at any visit. He kept his armament ready, and had a frequent eye for the pear thicket at the rear of the jacal.

While they fared the Kid sang. He knew but one tune and sang it, as he knew but one code and lived it, and but one girl and loved her. He was a single-minded man of conventional ideas.

He had a voice like a coyote with bronchitis, but whenever he chose to sing his song he sang it.

It was a conventional song of the camps and trail, running at its beginning as near as may be to these words:

Just then all that Sandridge could think of to do was to go outside and throw himself face downward in the dust by the side of his hummingbird, of whom not a feather fluttered.

He was not a caballero by instinct, and he could not understand the niceties of revenge.

A mile away the rider who had ridden past the wagon-shed struck up a harsh, untuneful song, the words of which began:

but wait till I tell you. We were down South, in Alabama—Bill Driscoll and myself—when this kidnapping idea struck us. It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, “during a moment of temporary mental apparition”; but we didn’t find that out till later.

There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course.

It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole.

We selected for our victim the only child of a prominent citizen named Ebenezer Dorset. The father was respectable and tight, a mortgage fancier and a stern, upright collection-plate passer and forecloser.

The kid was a boy of ten, with bas-relief freckles, and hair the colour of the cover of the magazine you buy at the newsstand when you want to catch a train.

Bill and me figured that Ebenezer would melt down for a ransom of two thousand dollars to a cent. But wait till I tell you.

The boy catches Bill neatly in the eye with a piece of brick.

“That will cost the old man an extra five hundred dollars,” says Bill, climbing over the wheel.

That boy put up a fight like a welterweight cinnamon bear; but, at last, we got him down in the bottom of the buggy and drove away. We took him up to the cave and I hitched the horse in the cedar brake.

“That will cost the old man an extra five hundred dollars,” says Bill, climbing over the wheel.

That boy put up a fight like a welterweight cinnamon bear; but, at last, we got him down in the bottom of the buggy and drove away.

We took him up to the cave and I hitched the horse in the cedar brake. After dark I drove the buggy to the little village, three miles away, where we had hired it, and walked back to the mountain.

They weren’t yells, or howls, or shouts, or whoops, or yawps, such as you’d expect from a manly set of vocal organs—they were simply indecent, terrifying, humiliating screams, such as women emit when they see ghosts or caterpillars.

It’s an awful thing to hear a strong, desperate, fat man scream incontinently in a cave at daybreak.

I jumped up to see what the matter was. Red Chief was sitting on Bill’s chest, with one hand twined in Bill’s hair. In the other he had the sharp case-knife we used for slicing bacon;

“King Herod,” says he. “You won’t go away and leave me here alone, will you, Sam?”

I went out and caught that boy and shook him until his freckles rattled.

“If you don’t behave,” says I, “I’ll take you straight home. Now, are you going to be good, or not?”

“You know, Sam,” says Bill, “I’ve stood by you without batting an eye in earthquakes, fire and flood—in poker games, dynamite outrages, police raids, train robberies and cyclones.

I never lost my nerve yet till we kidnapped that two-legged skyrocket of a kid. He’s got me going.

You won’t leave me long with him, will you, Sam?”

“You’d better keep him interested,” said I, “till we get the scheme going. Loosen up.”

Bill gets down on his all fours, and a look comes in his eye like a rabbit’s when you catch it in a trap.

“How far is it to the stockade, kid?” he asks, in a husky manner of voice.

When the kid found out we were going to leave him at home he started up a howl like a calliope and fastened himself as tight as a leech to Bill’s leg.

His father peeled him away gradually, like a porous plaster.

“How long can you hold him?” asks Bill.

“How long can you hold him?” asks Bill.

“I’m not as strong as I used to be,” says old Dorset, “but I think I can promise you ten minutes.”

“Enough,” says Bill. “In ten minutes I shall cross the Central, Southern and Middle Western States, and be legging it trippingly for the Canadian border.”

“Enough,” says Bill. “In ten minutes I shall cross the Central, Southern and Middle Western States, and be legging it trippingly for the Canadian border.”

And, as dark as it was, and as fat as Bill was, and as good a runner as I am, he was a good mile and a half out of Summit before I could catch up with him.

Standing on a pine box a head higher than his flock of goats, the Preacher exhorted whatever transient and shifting audience the north wind doled out to him. It was a slave market.

Fifteen cents bought you a man. You deeded him to Morpheus; and the recording angel gave you credit.

The preacher was incredibly earnest and unwearied.

In each end of it reclines an old lady Van Smuythe holding a black sunshade the size of a New Year’s Eve feather tickler. Before his downfall Thomas McQuade drove the Van Smuythe bays and was himself driven by Annie, the Van Smuythe lady’s maid.

But it is one of the saddest things about romance that a tight shoe or an empty commissary or an aching tooth will make a temporary heretic of any Cupid-worshiper.

And Thomas’s physical troubles were not few.

… lost lady’s maid than it was by the fancied presence of certain nonexistent things that his racked nerves almost convinced him were flying, dancing, crawling, and wriggling on the asphalt and in the air above and around the dismal campus of the Bed Line army.

Nearly four weeks of straight whisky and a diet limited to crackers, bologna, and pickles often guarantees a psycho-zoological sequel.

Thus desperate, freezing, angry, beset by phantoms as he was, he felt the need of human sympathy and intercourse.

Still, La Paz is a good sort of a pipe-dreamy old hole. And Mrs. Conant is here. When any of us feels particularly like jumping into the sea we rush around to her house and propose.

It’s nicer to be rejected by Mrs. Conant than it is to be drowned. And they say drowning is a delightful sensation.

”

Her eyes melted; she relaxed magnificently and swayed toward Merriam so suddenly that he had to jump to catch her.

Dear me! in such scenes how the talk runs into artificial prose.

But it can’t be helped. It’s the subconscious smell of the footlights’ smoke that’s in all of us. Stir the depths of your cook’s soul sufficiently and she will discourse in Bulwer-Lyttonese.

Dear me! in such scenes how the talk runs into artificial prose. But it can’t be helped. It’s the subconscious smell of the footlights’ smoke that’s in all of us.

Stir the depths of your cook’s soul sufficiently and she will discourse in Bulwer-Lyttonese.

Merriam and Mrs. Conant were very happy. He announced their engagement at the Hotel Orilla del Mar. Eight foreigners and four native Astors pounded his back and shouted insincere congratulations at him.

They were both very happy.

According to the strange mathematics of the god of mutual affinity, the shadows that clouded their pasts when united became only half as dense instead of darker.

They shut the world out and bolted the doors. Each was the other’s world. Mrs. Conant lived again. The remembering look left her eyes. Merriam was with her every moment that was possible.

“ ‘Captain,’ said he, ‘before we go any further, it’s no more than fair to tell you that I’m known from Baffin’s Bay to Terra del Fuego as “Bad-Luck” Kearny. And I’m It.

Everything I get into goes up in the air except a balloon. Every bet I ever made I lost except when I coppered it.

Every boat I ever sailed on sank except the submarines. Everything I was ever interested in went to pieces except a patent bombshell that I invented.

Twinkle, twinkle, little devil! You’re a lady, aren’t you?—dogging a man with your bad luck just because he happened to be born while your boss was floorwalker. Get busy and sink the ship, you one-eyed banshee.

Phoebe! H’m! Sounds as mild as a milkmaid. You can’t judge a woman by her name.

Why couldn’t I have had a man star? I can’t make the remarks to Phoebe that I could to a man. Oh, Phoebe, you be—blasted!’

Benavides was only the chip over the bug. I gave him the tip when to declare war and increase import duties and wear his state trousers. But that wasn’t what I wanted to tell you. How did I get to be It? I’ll tell you.

Because I’m the most gifted talker that ever made vocal sounds since Adam first opened his eyes, pushed aside the smelling-salts, and asked: ‘Where am I?’

“As you observe, I am about the ugliest man you ever saw outside the gallery of photographs of the New England early Christian Scientists. So, at an early age, I perceived that what I lacked in looks I must make up in eloquence.

“As you observe, I am about the ugliest man you ever saw outside the gallery of photographs of the New England early Christian Scientists.

So, at an early age, I perceived that what I lacked in looks I must make up in eloquence. That I’ve done.

I get what I go after. As the backstop and still small voice of old Benavides I made all the great historical powers-behind-the-throne, such as Talleyrand, Mrs. de Pompadour, and Loeb, look as small as the minority report of a Duma.

Looking handsome. Oh, what a mistake! It’s the larynx that the beauty doctors ought to work on.

It’s words more than warts, talk more than talcum, palaver more than powder, blarney more than bloom that counts⁠—the phonograph instead of the photograph.

But I was going to tell you.

My feelings were lacerated. He had poured gently upon me a story that I might have used. There was a little of the breath of life in it, and some of the synthetic atmosphere that passes, when cunningly tinkered, in the marts.

And, at the last it had proven to be a commercial pill, deftly coated with the sugar of fiction.

The worst of it was that I could not offer it for sale. Advertising departments and counting-rooms look down upon me. And it would never do for the literary. Therefore I sat upon a bench with other disappointed ones until my eyelids drooped.

“If readers can swallow so many proprietary automobiles,” I said to myself, “they ought not to strain at one of Tate’s Compound Magic Chuchula Bronchial Lozenges.”

And so if you see this story in print you will understand that business is business, and that if Art gets very far ahead of Commerce, she will have to get up and hustle.

I may as well add, to make a clean job of it, that you can’t buy the chuchula plant in the drug stores.

It was an alluvial town, called Soledad, where there was no harbour or future or recourse. Between steamers the town slept and drank rum. It only woke up when there were bananas to ship.

It was like a man sleeping through dinner until the dessert.

“When me and Liverpool got so low down that the American consul wouldn’t speak to us we knew we’d struck bed rock.

“

You ever been in a banana grove? It’s as solemn as a rathskeller at seven a.m.

It’s like being lost behind the scenes at one of these mushroom musical shows. You can’t see the sky for the foliage above you; and the ground is knee deep in rotten leaves;

“It is not,” said Jeff. “There are no relations between a trust and a policeman. My remark was an epitogram—an axis—a kind of mulct’em in parvo. What it means is that a trust is like an egg, and it is not like an egg.

If you want to break an egg you have to do it from the outside. The only way to break up a trust is from the inside.

Keep sitting on it until it hatches. Look at the brood of young colleges and libraries that’s chirping and peeping all over the country.

There was a kind of murderous and soulful look of gentle riotousness in his eye that I didn’t like. I watched him to see what turn the whiskey was going to take in him.

There are two times when you never can tell what is going to happen. One is when a man takes his first drink; and the other is when a woman takes her latest.

“In less than an hour Andy’s skate had turned to an ice yacht. He was outwardly decent and managed to preserve his aquarium, but inside he was impromptu and full of unexpectedness.

“ ‘Scientific demonstrations,’ says I. ‘

The triumph of mind over sarsaparilla.

The belief that there is no pain and sickness except what is produced when we ain’t feeling well. Declare yourself in arrears. Demonstrate.’

“

When a man swindles the public out of a certain amount he begins to get scared and wants to return part of it.

And if you’ll watch close and notice the way his charity runs you’ll see that he tries to restore it to the same people he got it from. As a hydrostatical case, take, let’s say, A.

“Now, wouldn’t you,” said Jeff, with an emphatic nod—“wouldn’t you have imagined that?

But a woman is an absolutely unreliable partner in any straight swindle. She’s liable to turn honest on you when you are depending upon her the most.

I tried ’em once.

“

This Mrs. Avery was a solace and a balm to the eyesight. She had hair the color of the back of a twenty dollar gold certificate, blue eyes and a system of beauty that would make the girl on the cover of a July magazine look like a cook on a Monongahela coal barge.

“She had on a low necked dress covered with silver spangles, and diamond rings and ear bobs. Her arms was bare; and she was using a desk telephone with one hand, and drinking tea with the other.

“About one hundred a day was what came in.

I never knew there was so many large hearted but indigent men in the country who were willing to acquire a charming widow and assume the burden of investing her money.

“Most of them admitted that they ran principally to whiskers and lost jobs and were misunderstood by the world, but all of ’em were sure that they were so chock full of affection and manly qualities that the widow would be making the bargain of …

“In about half an hour Andy spoke again.

I think there are times when Andy don’t exactly understand my system of ethics and moral hygiene.

“ ‘Jeff,’ says he, ‘some time when you have the leisure I wish you’d draw off a diagram and footnotes of that conscience of yours. I’d like to have it to refer to occasionally.’ ”

“Me and Andy never cared much to do business in New York. It was too much like pothunting.

Catching suckers in that town is like dynamiting a Texas lake for bass.

All you have to do anywhere between the North and East rivers is to stand in the street with an open bag marked, ‘Drop packages of money here. No checks or loose bills taken.’

“ ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’ says I. ‘

Are we any better than any other Holding Corporation?

’ ”

“

Andy had too much imagination to be honest.

He used to devise schemes of money-getting so fraudulent and high-financial that they wouldn’t have been allowed in the bylaws of a railroad rebate system.

“But Andy’s family tree was in different kind.

I don’t think he could have traced his descent any further back than a corporation.

“One summer while we was in the middle West, working down the Ohio valley with a line of family albums, headache powders and roach destroyer, Andy takes one of his notions of high and actionable financiering.

“ ‘That’s the voice of New York,’ goes on Andy. ‘

The town’s nothing but a head waiter. If you tip it too much it’ll go and stand by the door and make fun of you to the hat check boy.

When a Pittsburger wants to spend money and have a good time he stays at home. That’s where we’ll go to catch him.’

Miss Lynnette D’Armande turned her back on Broadway. This was but tit for tat, because Broadway had often done the same thing to Miss D’Armande.

Still, the “tats” seemed to have it, for the ex-leading lady of the “Reaping the Whirlwind” company had everything to ask of Broadway, while there was no vice-versa.

It’s girls from good homes that are honestly ambitious and work hard to rise in the profession, but never do get there. You hear a lot of sympathy sloshed around on chorus girls and their fifteen dollars a week.

Piffle! There ain’t a sorrow in the chorus that a lobster cannot heal.

“If there’s any tears to shed, let ’em fall for the actress that gets a salary of from thirty to forty-five dollars a week for taking a leading part in a bum show. She knows she’ll never do any better;

but in less than a month Arthur and I were engaged. He preached at a little one-night stand of a Methodist church. There was to be a parsonage the size of a lunch-wagon, and hens and honeysuckles when we were married.

Arthur used to preach to me a good deal about Heaven, but he never could get my mind quite off those honeysuckles and hens.

“No; I didn’t tell him I’d been on the stage. I hated the business and all that went with it; I’d cut it out forever, and I didn’t see any use of stirring things up.

There are few Caliphesses.

Women are Scheherazades by birth, predilection, instinct, and arrangement of the vocal cords.

The thousand and one stories are being told every day by hundreds of thousands of viziers’ daughters to their respective sultans. But the bowstring will get some of ’em yet if they don’t watch out.

Of course, I fell to it. And, to tell you the truth, I began to like old Maggie. It wasn’t all on account of the forty millions and what she could do for me. I was kind of lonesome in the world too.

Everybody’s got to have somebody they can explain to about the pain in their left shoulder and how fast patent-leather shoes wear out when they begin to crack.

And you can’t talk about such things to men you meet in hotels—they’re looking for just such openings.

“Aunt Maggie had had a sudden attack of the hedges. I guess everybody has got to go on a spree once in their life.

A man spends his on highballs, and a woman gets woozy on clothes.

But with forty million dollars—say, I’d like to have a picture of—but, speaking of pictures, did you ever run across a newspaper artist named Lathrop—a tall—oh, I asked you that before, didn’t I? He was mighty nice to me at the dinner.

“By the coke ovens of hell, it must be that ten thousand dollars! If I can get that squared, it’ll do the trick.”

Thus, by the commonest artifice of the trade, having gained your interest, the action of the story will now be suspended, leaving you grumpily to consider a sort of dull biography beginning fifteen years before.

When old Jacob was young Jacob he was a breaker boy in a Pennsylvania coal mine. I don’t know what a breaker boy is;

… of dying of overwork at nine, and leaving his helpless parents and brothers at the mercy of the union strikers’ reserve fund, he hitched up his galluses, put a dollar or two in a side proposition now and then, and at forty-five was worth $20,000,000.

There now! it’s over. Hardly had time to yawn, did you?

I’ve seen biographies that—but let us dissemble.

A. Rashid descending upon him. Eventually Jacob slipped the mantle under his collar, tied it in a neat four-in-hand, and became a licensed harrier of our Mesopotamian proletariat.

When a man’s income becomes so large that the butcher actually sends him the kind of steak he orders, he begins to think about his soul’s salvation.

Now, the various stages or classes of rich men must not be forgotten. The capitalist can tell you to a dollar the amount of his wealth. The trust magnate “estimates” it.

“If I could see folks made happier,” he said to himself—“If I could see ’em myself and hear ’em express their gratitude for what I done for ’em it would make me feel better.

This donatin’ funds to institutions and societies is about as satisfactory as dropping money into a broken slot machine.

”

She was a nice-looking, awkward, loud, rather bashful, brown-haired girl, with a sallow complexion, bright eyes, and a perpetual smile. She had a wholesome, Spraggins-inherited love for plain food, loose clothing, and the society of the lower classes.

She had too much health and youth to feel the burden of wealth.

She had a wide mouth that kept the peppermint-pepsin tablets rattling like hail from the slot-machine wherever she went, and she could whistle hornpipes. Keep this picture in mind; and let the artist do his worst.

She had a wide mouth that kept the peppermint-pepsin tablets rattling like hail from the slot-machine wherever she went, and she could whistle hornpipes. Keep this picture in mind; and let the artist do his worst.

Celia looked out of her window one day and gave her heart to the grocer’s young man.

The receiver thereof was at that moment engaged in conceding immortality to his horse and calling down upon him the ultimate fate of the wicked; so he did not notice the transfer.

“I’ll make you acquainted,” said Thomas McLeod. “It’s a strathspey—the first cousin to a hornpipe.”

If Celia’s whistling put the piccolos out of commission, Thomas McLeod’s surely made the biggest flutes hunt their holes. He could actually whistle bass.

When he stopped Celia was ready to jump into his delivery wagon and ride with him clear to the end of the pier and on to the ferryboat of the Charon line.

“I’ll practice that what-you-may-call-it,” said Celia. “I can whistle a fine second.”

The processes of courtship are personal, and do not belong to general literature.

They should be chronicled in detail only in advertisements of iron tonics and in the secret bylaws of the Woman’s Auxiliary of the Ancient Order of the Rat Trap.

Get the point? Of course I know as well as you do that Thomas is going to be the heir.

I might have concealed the name; but why always hold back your mystery till the end? I say, let it come near the middle so people can stop reading there if they want to.

After the detectives had trailed false clues about three thousand dollars—I mean miles—they cornered Thomas at the grocery and got his confession that Hugh McLeod had been his grandfather, and that there were no other heirs.

The true history of the Caliph Harun Al Rashid relates that toward the end of his reign he wearied of philanthropy, and caused to be beheaded all his former favorites and companions of his “Arabian Nights” rambles.

Happy are we in these days of enlightenment, when the only death warrant the caliphs can serve on us is in the form of a tradesman’s bill.

Before long I had become a regular and a welcome visitor at the Greene home. I shook my wild habits from me like a worn-out cloak. I trained for the conflict with the care of a prizefighter and the self-denial of a Brahmin.

As for Chloe Greene, I shall weary you with no sonnets to her eyebrow.

She was a splendidly feminine girl, as wholesome as a November pippin, and no more mysterious than a windowpane. She had whimsical little theories that she had deduced from life, and that fitted the maxims of Epictetus like princess gowns.

As for Chloe Greene, I shall weary you with no sonnets to her eyebrow.

She was a splendidly feminine girl, as wholesome as a November pippin, and no more mysterious than a windowpane.

She had whimsical little theories that she had deduced from life, and that fitted the maxims of Epictetus like princess gowns. I wonder, after all, if that old duffer wasn’t rather wise!

“Take less than half of what I said as a jest,” she went on. “And don’t think too lightly of the little things, Boy. Be a paladin if you must, but don’t let it show on you.

Most women are only very big children, and most men are only very little ones. Please us; don’t try to overpower us.

When we want a hero we can make one out of even a plain grocer the third time he catches our handkerchief before it falls to the ground.”

That evening I was taken down with pernicious fever. That is a kind of coast fever with improvements and high-geared attachments. Your temperature goes up among the threes and fours and remains there, laughing scornfully and feverishly at the cinchona trees and the coal-tar derivatives.

Pernicious fever is a case for a simple mathematician instead of a doctor.

It is merely this formula: Vitality + the desire to live − the duration of the fever = the result.

“

And yet you couldn’t fence him away from the girls with barbed wire.

You know that kind of young fellows—a kind of a mixture of fools and angels—they rush in and fear to tread at the same time; but they never fail to tread when they get the chance.

The colonel received them in his great library, where he spent most of his days.

The library had descended to him from his father. It contained ten thousand volumes, some of which had been published as late as the year 1861.

When the deputation arrived, Colonel Telfair was seated at his massive white-pine centre-table, reading Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. He arose and shook hands punctiliously with each member of the committee.

and it was for the colonel to cause The Rose of Dixie to blossom and flourish or to wilt in the balmy air of the land of flowers.

The staff of assistants and contributors that Editor-Colonel Telfair drew about him was a peach. It was a whole crate of Georgia peaches.

The first assistant editor, Tolliver Lee Fairfax, had had a father killed during Pickett’s charge. The second assistant, Keats Unthank, was the nephew of one of Morgan’s Raiders.

The girls who wrapped and addressed the magazines were members of old Southern families in Reduced Circumstances. The cashier was a scrub named Hawkins, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had recommendations and a bond from a guarantee company filed with the owners.

Even Georgia stock companies sometimes realize that it takes live ones to bury the dead.

Well, sir, if you believe me, The Rose of Dixie blossomed five times before anybody heard of it except the people who buy their hooks and eyes in Toombs City. Then Hawkins climbed off his stool and told on ’em to the stock company.

But in our talks together, and in our visits and conversation with May Martha, neither Goodloe Banks nor I could find out which one of us she preferred.

May Martha was a natural-born noncommittal, and knew in her cradle how to keep people guessing.

As I said, old man Mangum was absentminded.

But Lee and I established camp. Across the river were a dozen little mountains densely covered by cedar-brakes, but not one shaped like a packsaddle. That did not deter us. Appearances are deceptive.

A packsaddle, like beauty, may exist only in the eye of the beholder.

I and the grandson of the treasure examined those cedar-covered hills with the care of a lady hunting for the wicked flea. We explored every side, top, circumference, mean elevation, angle, slope, and concavity of every one for two miles up and down the river.

What followed you may guess—there was my wagon and team just across the river.

I’ve often wondered what good too much education is to a man if he can’t use it for himself.

If all the benefits of it are to go to others, where does it come in?

You see, a pony gets to know his rider mighty well, and it is not unlikely that cow ponies in pastures and at hitching racks had often guyed Sam’s pony for being ridden by a guitar player instead of by a rollicking, cussing, all-wool cowboy.

No man is a hero to his saddle-horse.

And even an escalator in a department store might be excused for tripping up a troubadour.

Namely: Barons, Troubadours, and Workers. Barons have no inclination to read such folderol as this; and Workers have no time: so I know you must be a Troubadour, and that you will understand Sam Galloway.

Whether we sing, act, dance, write, lecture, or paint, we are only troubadours; so let us make the worst of it.

The pony with the Dante Alighieri face, guided by the pressure of Sam’s knees, bore that wandering minstrel sixteen miles southeastward. Nature was in her most benignant mood. League after league of delicate, sweet flowerets made fragrant the gently undulating prairie.

There had been too many people, too much noise, argument, competition, confusion, at Rancho Altito. He had never conferred upon old man Ellison the favour of sojourning at his ranch; but he knew he would be welcome.

The troubadour is his own passport everywhere.

The Workers in the castle let down the drawbridge to him, and the Baron sets him at his left hand at table in the banquet hall. There ladies smile upon him and applaud his songs and stories, while the Workers bring boars’ heads and flagons.

I say barony because old man Ellison was the Last of the Barons. Of course, Mr. Bulwer-Lytton lived too early to know him, or he wouldn’t have conferred that sobriquet upon Warwick.

In life it is the duty and the function of the Baron to provide work for the Workers and lodging and shelter for the Troubadours.

Old man Ellison was a shrunken old man, with a short, yellow-white beard and a face lined and seamed by past-and-gone smiles. His ranch was a little two-room box house in a grove of hackberry trees in the lonesomest part of the sheep country.

You have read of Tommy Tucker in the works of the esteemed but often obscure Mother Goose. Tommy Tucker sang for his supper. No true troubadour would do that.

He would have his supper, and then sing for Art’s sake.

Sam Galloway’s repertoire comprised about fifty funny stories and between thirty and forty songs. He by no means stopped there. He could talk through twenty cigarettes on any topic that you brought up. And he never sat up when he could lie down;

Sam Galloway’s repertoire comprised about fifty funny stories and between thirty and forty songs. He by no means stopped there. He could talk through twenty cigarettes on any topic that you brought up.

And he never sat up when he could lie down; and never stood when he could sit.

I am strongly disposed to linger with him, for I am drawing a portrait as well as a blunt pencil and a tattered thesaurus will allow.

In the story papers it is always the quiet, mild-mannered man with light blue eyes and a low voice who turns out to be really dangerous; but in real life and in this story such is not the case.

Give me my choice between assaulting a large, loudmouthed rough-houser and an inoffensive stranger with blue eyes sitting quietly in a corner, and you will see something doing in the corner every time.

King James, as I intended to say earlier, was a fierce, two-hundred-pound, sunburned, blond man, as pink as an October strawberry, and with two horizontal slits under shaggy red eyebrows for eyes.

There is no more to be said, except that the title of the story is wrong. It should have been called “The Last of the Barons.”

There never will be an end to the troubadours; and now and then it does seem that the jingle of their guitars will drown the sound of the muffled blows of the pickaxes and trip hammers of all the Workers in the world.

Leading ladies have five husbands, paste diamonds, and figures no better than your own (madam) if they weren’t padded.

Chorus girls are inseparable from peroxide, Panhards and Pittsburg.

All shows walk back to New York on tan oxford and railroad ties. Irreproachable actresses reserve the comic-landlady part for their mothers on Broadway and their step-aunts on the road. Kyrle Bellew’s real name is Boyle O’Kelley.

Old Tom was tired of clubs, theatres, dinners, friends, music, money and everything.

That’s what makes a caliph⁠—you must get to despise everything that money can buy, and then go out and try to want something that you can’t pay for.

“I’ll take a little trot around town all by myself,” thought old Tom, “and try if I can stir up anything new.

“

A man asleep is certainly a sight to make angels weep.

What good is all his brain, muscle, backing, nerve, influence, and family connections? He’s at the mercy of his enemies, and more so of his friends. And he’s about as beautiful as a cab-horse leaning against the Metropolitan Opera House at 12:30 a.m.

… thirty years of prospecting had netted him was one daughter, nineteen years old, as per invoice, whom he was shipping East, charges prepaid, for Jerome to clothe, feed, educate, comfort, and cherish for the rest of her natural life or until matrimony should them part.

Old Jerome was a boardwalk.

Everybody knows that the world is supported by the shoulders of Atlas; and that Atlas stands on a rail-fence; and that the rail-fence is built on a turtle’s back. Now, the turtle has to stand on something;

It usually takes a hypotenuse a long time to discover that it is the longest side of a triangle.

But it’s a long line that has no turning.

Barbara was alone. Uncle Jerome and Nevada had gone to the theatre. Barbara had not cared to go. She wanted to stay at home and study in the study.

“Nobody writes me anything that everybody mightn’t read,” she said. “Go on, Barbara. Maybe Gilbert wants us to go out in his car again tomorrow.”

Curiosity can do more things than kill a cat; and if emotions, well recognized as feminine, are inimical to feline life, then jealousy would soon leave the whole world catless.

Barbara opened the letter, with an indulgent, slightly bored air.

and then a smile so small that it widened her mouth only the sixteenth part of an inch, and narrowed her eyes no more than a twentieth, flashed like an inspired thought across her face.

Since the beginning no woman has been a mystery to another woman.

Swift as light travels, each penetrates the heart and mind of another, sifts her sister’s words of their cunningest disguises, reads her most hidden desires, and plucks the sophistry from her wiliest talk like hairs from a comb, twiddling them sardonically between her thumb and …

So, then and there—according to the records—was the alliance formed by the only two who’s-who ladies in the world.

Then it was agreed that woman should forever remain as clear as a pane of glass⁠—though glass was yet to be discovered⁠—to other women, and that she should palm herself off on man as a mystery.

“Really, Nevada,” she said, with a little show of embarrassment, “you shouldn’t have insisted on my opening this. I—I’m sure it wasn’t meant for anyone else to know.”

If not so, then the assertion should do so, the real caliph having been a wit and a scholar and therefore a hater of puns.

How properly to alleviate the troubles of the poor is one of the greatest troubles of the rich.

But one thing agreed upon by all professional philanthropists is that you must never hand over any cash to your subject. The poor are notoriously temperamental;

If I could have a thousand years⁠—just one little thousand years⁠—more of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to true Romance to touch the hem of her robe.

Up from ships men come, and from waste places and forest and road and garret and cellar to maunder to me in strangely distributed words of the things they have seen and considered.

“High Jack seemed to take it hard. I guess he must have esteemed Miss Blue Feather quite highly. I could see that he’d referred the matter to the whiskey-jug. That was his weak point—and many another man’s.

I’ve noticed that when a man loses a girl he generally takes to drink either just before or just after it happens.

“From Washington we railroaded it to New Orleans, and there took a tramp steamer bound for Belize. And a gale pounded us all down the Caribbean, and nearly wrecked us on the Yucatan coast opposite a little town without a harbor called Boca de Coacoyula.

The nearer to Nature that the babbling of our lips comes, the better do we understand. Figuratively (let us say), some people are Bosoms, some are Hands, some are Heads, some are Muscles, some are Feet, some are Backs for burdens.

Hetty was a Shoulder.

Hers was a sharp, sinewy shoulder; but all her life people had laid their heads upon it, metaphorically or actually, and had left there all or half their troubles.

I must have looked as I felt, for I saw him on the row of seats opposite me, looking at me as if he understood. He was nice-looking, but oh, above everything else, he looked kind.

When one is tired or unhappy or hopeless, kindness counts more than anything else.

“When I got so miserable that I couldn’t fight against it any longer, I got up and walked slowly out the rear door of the ferryboat cabin. No one was there, and I slipped quickly over the rail and dropped into the water.

After he had tapped at the door and entered, Hetty began to peel and wash the onion at the sink. She gave a gray look at the gray roofs outside, and the smile on her face vanished by little jerks and twitches.

“But it’s us,” she said, grimly, to herself, “it’s us that furnished the beef.”

First, biography (but pared to the quick) must intervene.

I am for the inverted sugarcoated quinine pill⁠—the bitter on the outside.

The Carterets were, or was (Columbia College professors please rule), an old Virginia family. Long time ago the gentlemen of the family had worn lace ruffles and carried tinless foils and owned plantations and had slaves to burn.

Both of the cousins had forgotten Uncle Jake for the time. But now they heard the shuffling of his shoes as he came across the rug toward them from his seat in the corner.

“Young marster,” he said, “take yo’ watch.”

And without hesitation he laid the ancient timepiece in the hand of its rightful owner.

“It’s her!” said William Trotter, looking. “She’s come back! I’m obliged; but I can’t take the job. Thanks, just the same.

Ain’t it funny how we can’t do nothing for ourselves, but we can do wonders for the other fellow?

You was about to get me with your financial proposition; but we’ve all got our weak points. Timotea’s mine. And, say!” Trotter had turned to leave, but he retraced the step or two that he had taken.

I was interested but not surprised.

The big city is like a mother’s knee to many who have strayed far and found the roads rough beneath their uncertain feet.

At dusk they come home and sit upon the doorstep.

But they’ve both got to work together. I’ll bet,” he went on, with his dry smile, “she’ll get jelly beans with that nickel—she likes ’em.

What’s supply if there’s no demand for it?

”

Where to go for wisdom has become a question of serious import. The ancients are discredited; Plato is boilerplate; Aristotle is tottering; Marcus Aurelius is reeling; Aesop has been copyrighted by Indiana; Solomon is too solemn; you couldn’t get anything out of Epictetus with a pick.

The ant, which for many years served as a model of intelligence and industry in the school-readers, has been proven to be a doddering idiot and a waster of time and effort. The owl today is hooted at.

The ancients are discredited; Plato is boilerplate; Aristotle is tottering; Marcus Aurelius is reeling; Aesop has been copyrighted by Indiana; Solomon is too solemn; you couldn’t get anything out of Epictetus with a pick.

The ant, which for many years served as a model of intelligence and industry in the school-readers, has been proven to be a doddering idiot and a waster of time and effort.

The owl today is hooted at. Chautauqua conventions have abandoned culture and adopted diabolo. Graybeards give glowing testimonials to the venders of patent hair-restorers. There are typographical errors in the almanacs published by the daily newspapers. College professors have become—

“Phil,” she said, in the Telfair, sweet, thrilling tones, “why didn’t you tell me about it before? I thought it was sister you wanted all the time, until you telephoned to me a few minutes ago!”

I suppose Mack and I always will be hopeless amateurs. But, as the thing has turned out in my case, I’m mighty glad of it.

Nothing spectacular, you know, but just the sort you want for keeps. Well, I never was up to the flirtation business, either handkerchief, automobile, postage-stamp, or doorstep, and she wasn’t the kind to start anything.

She read a book and minded her business, which was to make the world prettier and better just by residing on it.

I kept on looking out of the side doors of my eyes, and finally the proposition got out of the Pullman class into a case of a cottage with a lawn and vines running over the porch.

I glanced downward and saw the bestseller. I picked it up and set it carefully farther along on the floor of the car, where the raindrops would not fall upon it.

And then, suddenly, I smiled, and seemed to see that life has no geographical metes and bounds.

“Good-luck to you, Trevelyan,” I said. “And may you get the petunias for your princess!”

Tripp was something in the mechanical department—I think he had something to do with the pictures, for he smelled of photographers’ supplies, and his hands were always stained and cut up with acids. He was about twenty-five and looked forty.

Half of his face was covered with short, curly red whiskers that looked like a doormat with the “welcome” left off.

He was pale and unhealthy and miserable and fawning, and an assiduous borrower of sums ranging from twenty-five cents to a dollar. One dollar was his limit.

“Well, Tripp,” said I, looking up at him rather impatiently, “how goes it?” He was looking today more miserable, more cringing and haggard and downtrodden than I had ever seen him.

He was at that stage of misery where he drew your pity so fully that you longed to kick him.

“Have you got a dollar?” asked Tripp, with his most fawning look and his doglike eyes that blinked in the narrow space between his high-growing matted beard and his low-growing matted hair.

She was a flawless beauty. Crying had only made her brilliant eyes brighter. When she crunched a gumdrop you thought only of the poetry of motion and envied the senseless confection.

Eve at the age of five minutes must have been a ringer for Miss Ada Lowery at nineteen or twenty.

I was introduced, and a gumdrop suffered neglect while she conveyed to me a naive interest, such as a puppy dog (a prize winner) might bestow upon a crawling beetle or a frog.

Down went the bright gold head upon dimpled, clasped hands on the table.

Such a beautiful April storm!

Unrestrainedly she sobbed. I wished I could have comforted her. But I was not George. And I was glad I was not Hiram—and yet I was sorry, too.

In those days Paloma was a new town on the line of the Southern Pacific. A reporter would have called it a “mushroom” town; but it was not.

Paloma was, first and last, of the toadstool variety.

The train stopped there at noon for the engine to drink and for the passengers both to drink and to dine. There was a new yellow-pine hotel, also a wool warehouse, and perhaps three dozen box residences.

There was a new yellow-pine hotel, also a wool warehouse, and perhaps three dozen box residences. The rest was composed of tents, cow ponies, “black-waxy” mud, and mesquite-trees, all bound round by a horizon. Paloma was an about-to-be city.

The houses represented faith; the tents hope; the twice-a-day train, by which you might leave, creditably sustained the role of charity.

The Parisian Restaurant occupied the muddiest spot in the town while it rained, and the warmest when it shone.

It is an exhaustive treatise, dealing first with the primitive conceptions of beauty—roundness and smoothness, I think they are, according to Burke. It is well said. Rotundity is a patent charm; as for smoothness—the more new wrinkles a woman acquires, the smoother she becomes.

Ileen was a strictly vegetable compound, guaranteed under the Pure Ambrosia and Balm-of-Gilead Act of the year of the fall of Adam.

She was a fruit-stand blonde—strawberries, peaches, cherries, etc. Her eyes were wide apart, and she possessed the calm that precedes a storm that never comes. But it seems to me that words (at any rate per) are wasted in an effort to describe the beautiful.

He spoke patronizingly and even disrespectfully of Broadway, Beacon Hill, Michigan, Euclid, and Fifth Avenues, and the St. Louis Four Courts.

Compared with him as a cosmopolite, the Wandering Jew would have seemed a mere hermit.

He had learned everything the world could teach him, and he would tell you about it.

Ileen was a girl of ideas. She was destined for higher things (if there can be anything higher) than taking in dollars all day through a barbed-wire wicket. She had read and listened and thought.

Her looks would have formed a career for a less ambitious girl; but, rising superior to mere beauty, she must establish something in the nature of a salon⁠—the only one in Paloma.

“Don’t you think that Shakespeare was a great writer?” she would ask, with such a pretty little knit of her arched brows that the late Ignatius Donnelly, himself, had he seen it, could scarcely have saved his Bacon.

but we would have been better pleased if Ileen had remained in her low rocking-chair face to face with us and let us gaze upon her. For she was no Adelina Patti—not even on the farewellest of the diva’s farewell tours.

She had a cooing little voice like that of a turtledove that could almost fill the parlor when the windows and doors were closed, and Betty was not rattling the lids of the stove in the kitchen.

She had a gamut that I estimate at about eight inches on the piano; and her runs and trills sounded like the clothes bubbling in your grandmother’s iron wash-pot.

C. Vincent Vesey was one of us. We discussed things while dogs barked at the moon that rose, as big as a five-cent piece or a flour barrel, over the chaparral.

And what we discussed was whether it is better to lie to a woman or to tell her the truth.

And as all of us were young then, we did not come to a decision.

And what we discussed was whether it is better to lie to a woman or to tell her the truth.

And as all of us were young then, we did not come to a decision.

Considering men in relation to money, there are three kinds whom I dislike: men who have more money than they can spend; men who have more money than they do spend; and men who spend more money than they have.

Of the three varieties, I believe I have the least liking for the first. But, as a man, I liked Spencer Grenville North pretty well, although he had something like two or ten or thirty millions—I’ve forgotten exactly how many.

I was press-agent that year for Binkly & Bing, the theatrical managers and producers.

Of course you know what a press-agent is. Well, he is not. That is the secret of being one.

Binkly was touring France in his new C. & N. Williamson car, and Bing had gone to Scotland to learn curling, which he seemed to associate in his mind with hot tongs rather than with ice.

North came to see me in my three rooms and bath, extra charge for light when used extravagantly or all night.

He slapped me on the back (I would rather have my shins kicked any day), and greeted me with outdoor obstreperousness and revolting good spirits.

He was insolently brown and healthy-looking, and offensively well dressed.

“And the next thing and the biggest thing I’ll do will be to buy that duck-farm next door. Few people understand ducks. I can watch ’em for hours.

They can march better than any company in the National Guard, and they can play ‘follow my leader’ better than the entire Democratic party.

Their voices don’t amount to much, but I like to hear ’em. They wake you up a dozen times a night, but there’s a homely sound about their quacking that is more musical to me than the cry of ‘Fresh strawber-rees!’

“And the next thing and the biggest thing I’ll do will be to buy that duck-farm next door.

Few people understand ducks.

I can watch ’em for hours. They can march better than any company in the National Guard, and they can play ‘follow my leader’ better than the entire Democratic party. Their voices don’t amount to much, but I like to hear ’em.