短篇小说

Tobin and me, the two of us, went down to Coney one day, for there was four dollars between us, and Tobin had need of distractions.

"Let's all go down and open a bottle of fizz on the Finance Committee," said the Chairman of the Executive Committee, Platform No. 2.

These are the directions for finding the I office of Carteret & Carteret, Mill Supplies and Leather Belting:

A favourite dodge to get your story read by the public is to assert that it is true, and then add that Truth is stranger than Fiction.

JUSTICE-OF-THE-PEACE Benaja Widdup sat in the door of his office smoking his elder-stem pipe. Halfway to the zenith the Cumberland range rose blue-gray in the afternoon haze. A speckled hen swaggered down the main street of the "settlement," cackling foolishly.

Twenty-five years ago the school children used to chant their lessons. The manner of their delivery was a singsong recitative between the utterance of an Episcopal minister and the drone of a tired sawmill. I mean no disrespect. We must have lumber and sawdust.

Vaudeville is intrinsically episodic and discontinuous. Its audiences do not demand denouements. Sufficient unto each "turn" is the evil thereof.

Let the story wreck itself on the spreading rails of the _Non Sequitur_ Limited, if it will; first you must take your seat in the observation car "_Raison d'tre_" for one moment. It is for no longer than to consider a brief essay on the subject--let us call it: "What's Around the Corner."

I am the richer by the acquaintance of four newspaper men. Singly, they are my encyclopedias, friends, mentors, and sometimes bankers.

As mathematics are--or is: thanks, old subscriber!--the only just rule by which questions of life can be measured, let us, by all means, adjust our theme to the straight edge and the balanced column of the great goddess Two-and-Two-Makes-Four.