Of a fairy-haunted wood.
Here and there, in light and shade,
Ill-assorted couples strayed:
"Lord," said Puck, in elfish glee,
"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"_

_Now he sings the self-same tune
Underneath an older moon.
Life to him is, plain enough,
Still a game of blind man's buff.
If we listen we may hear
Puckish laughter always near,
And the elf's apostrophe,
"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"_

B. L. T.

Foreword

By Henry B. Fuller

Bert Leston Taylor (known the country over as "B. L. T.") was the first
of our day's "colyumists"--first in point of time, and first in point of
merit. For nearly twenty years, with some interruptions, he conducted "A
Line-o'-Type or Two" on the editorial page of the Chicago _Tribune_. His
broad column--broad by measurement, broad in scope, and a bit broad, now
and again, in its tone--cheered hundreds of thousands at the
breakfast-tables of the Middle West, and on its trains and trolleys. As
the "Column" grew in reputation, "making the Line" became almost a
national sport. Whoever had a happy thought, whoever could handily turn
a humorous paragraph or tune a pointed jingle, was only too glad to
attempt collaboration with B. L. T. Others, possessing no literary
knack, chanced it with brief reports on the follies or ineptitudes of
the "so-called human race." Some of them picked up their matter on their
travels--these were the "Gadders." Others culled oddities from the
provincial press, and so gave further scope to "The Enraptured
Reporter," or offered selected gems of _gaucherie_ from private
correspondence, and thus added to the rich yield of "The Second Post."
Still humbler helpers chipped in with queer bits of nomenclature,
thereby aiding the formation of an "Academy of Immortals"--an
organization fully officered by people with droll names and always
tending, as will become apparent in the following pages, to enlarge and
vary its roster.

All these contributors, as well as many other persons who existed
independently of the "Line," lived in the corrective fear of the
"Cannery," that capacious receptacle which yawned for the trite word and
the stereotyped phrase. Our language, to B. L. T., was an honest, living
growth: deadwood, whether in thought or in the expression of thought,
never got by, but was marked for the burning. The "Cannery," with its
numbered shelves and jars, was a deterrent indeed, and a