diff --git a/src/epub/text/sociology-in-serge-and-straw.xhtml b/src/epub/text/sociology-in-serge-and-straw.xhtml index 29ecec9..111a1b8 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/sociology-in-serge-and-straw.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/sociology-in-serge-and-straw.xhtml @@ -77,7 +77,7 @@

I laughed loudly and vulgarly.

“What you want to do,” said I to the sociologist, “is to establish a reformatory for the Logical Vicious Circle. Or else I’ve got wheels. It looks to me as if things are running round and round in circles instead of getting anywhere.”

“What do you mean?” asked the man of progress.

-

“Why, look what he has done to ‘Smoky’,” I replied.

+

“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.

diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-diamond-of-kali.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-diamond-of-kali.xhtml index 1bc4a20..28145a4 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-diamond-of-kali.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-diamond-of-kali.xhtml @@ -13,7 +13,7 @@

“You might see General Ludlow,” he said, “and make a story out of this if you can. Diamond stories are a drug; but this one is big enough to be found by a scrubwoman wrapped up in a piece of newspaper and tucked under the corner of the hall linoleum. Find out first if the General has a daughter who intends to go on the stage. If not, you can go ahead with the story. Run cuts of the Kohinoor and J. P. Morgan’s collection, and work in pictures of the Kimberley mines and Barney Barnato. Fill in with a tabulated comparison of the values of diamonds, radium, and veal cutlets since the meat strike; and let it run to a half page.”

On the following day the reporter turned in his story. The Sunday editor let his eye sprint along its lines. “H’m!” he said again. This time the copy went into the wastebasket with scarcely a flutter.

The reporter stiffened a little around the lips; but he was whistling softly and contentedly between his teeth when I went over to talk with him about it an hour later.

-

“I don’t blame the ‘old man’,” said he, magnanimously, “for cutting it out. It did sound like funny business; but it happened exactly as I wrote it. Say, why don’t you fish that story out of the w.-b. and use it? Seems to me it’s as good as the tommyrot you write.”

+

“I don’t blame the ‘old man,’ ” said he, magnanimously, “for cutting it out. It did sound like funny business; but it happened exactly as I wrote it. Say, why don’t you fish that story out of the w.-b. and use it? Seems to me it’s as good as the tommyrot you write.”

I accepted the tip, and if you read further you will learn the facts about the diamond of the goddess Kali as vouched for by one of the most reliable reporters on the staff.

Gen. Marcellus B. Ludlow lives in one of those decaying but venerated old redbrick mansions in the West Twenties. The General is a member of an old New York family that does not advertise. He is a globetrotter by birth, a gentleman by predilection, a millionaire by the mercy of Heaven, and a connoisseur of precious stones by occupation.

The reporter was admitted promptly when he made himself known at the General’s residence at about eight thirty on the evening that he received the assignment. In the magnificent library he was greeted by the distinguished traveller and connoisseur, a tall, erect gentleman in the early fifties, with a nearly white moustache, and a bearing so soldierly that one perceived in him scarcely a trace of the National Guardsman. His weather-beaten countenance lit up with a charming smile of interest when the reporter made known his errand.

diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-door-of-unrest.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-door-of-unrest.xhtml index 9cbbc3b..420c728 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-door-of-unrest.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-door-of-unrest.xhtml @@ -42,7 +42,7 @@

“You’ll excuse me, sir,” he whined, “but sometimes I get a little mixed in my head. I am a very old man; and it is hard to remember everything.”

I knew that he was right, and that I should not try to reconcile him with Roman history; so I asked for news concerning other ancients with whom he had walked familiar.

Above my desk hung an engraving of Raphael’s cherubs. You could yet make out their forms, though the dust blurred their outlines strangely.

-

“Ye calls them ‘cher-rubs’,” cackled the old man. “Babes, ye fancy they are, with wings. And there’s one wid legs and a bow and arrow that ye call Cupid⁠—I know where they was found. The great-great-great-grandfather of thim all was a billy-goat. Bein’ an editor, sir, do ye happen to know where Solomon’s Temple stood?”

+

“Ye calls them ‘cher-rubs,’ ” cackled the old man. “Babes, ye fancy they are, with wings. And there’s one wid legs and a bow and arrow that ye call Cupid⁠—I know where they was found. The great-great-great-grandfather of thim all was a billy-goat. Bein’ an editor, sir, do ye happen to know where Solomon’s Temple stood?”

I fancied that it was in⁠—in Persia? Well, I did not know.

“ ’Tis not in history nor in the Bible where it was. But I saw it, meself. The first pictures of cher-rubs and cupids was sculptured upon thim walls and pillars. Two of the biggest, sir, stood in the adytum to form the baldachin over the Ark. But the wings of thim sculptures was intindid for horns. And the faces was the faces of goats. Ten thousand goats there was in and about the temple. And your cher-rubs was billy-goats in the days of King Solomon, but the painters misconstrued the horns into wings.

“And I knew Tamerlane, the lame Timour, sir, very well. I saw him at Keghut and at Zaranj. He was a little man no larger than yerself, with hair the colour of an amber pipe stem. They buried him at Samarkand. I was at the wake, sir. Oh, he was a fine-built man in his coffin, six feet long, with black whiskers to his face. And I see ’em throw turnips at the Imperor Vispacian in Africa. All over the world I have tramped, sir, without the body of me findin’ any rest. ’Twas so commanded. I saw Jerusalem destroyed, and Pompeii go up in the fireworks; and I was at the coronation of Charlemagne and the lynchin’ of Joan of Arc. And everywhere I go there comes storms and revolutions and plagues and fires. ’Twas so commanded. Ye have heard of the Wandering Jew. ’Tis all so, except that divil a bit am I a Jew. But history lies, as I have told ye. Are ye quite sure, sir, that ye haven’t a drop of whiskey convenient? Ye well know that I have many miles of walking before me.”