ake it home to hand down to
their children's children as the most treasured family possession.
As it is, I have gathered so many goat-feathers that half the
people introduce me as Ellis Butler Parker and the other half as
Butler Parker Ellis, and if there is a ton of hay growing on my
lawn nobody bothers to pick a pint. My father has to cut it and
rake it away.

Goat-feathers, you understand, are the feathers a man picks and
sticks all over his hide to make himself look like the village
goat. It often takes six days, three hours and eighteen minutes to
gather one goat-feather, and when a man has it and takes it home it
is about as useful and valuable to him as a stone-bruise on the
back of his neck. I have recently spent several days over a month
gathering one goat-feather, and as a reward I was grabbed and
chased after another that ate up two weeks and three days of my
time. Goat-feathers are the distractions, side lines and
deflections that take a man's attention from his own business and
keep him from getting ahead. They are the Greatest Thing in the
World--to make a man look like a goat.

I think I can claim, without fear of dispute, to have gathered more
goat-feathers in a fifty-year career, and to look more like a goat,
than any other man living, and not excepting Pooh Bah, who added
such a pleasing, goat-like character to Gilbert-and-Sullivan's
"Mikado." Pooh Bah, poor amateur! could boast only that he was
First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chief Justice, Commander-in-Chief,
Lord High Admiral, Master of the Buck Hounds, Groom of the Back
Stairs, Archbishop of Titipu, Lord Mayor, Lord Chamberlain,
Attorney-General, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Privy Purse, Private
Secretary, Lord High Auditor, First Commissioner of Police,
Paymaster General, Judge Ordinary, Master of the Rolls, Secretary
of State for the Home Department, Groom of the Second Floor Front,
and Registrar. I can beat that all to pieces.

When I wake in the morning as President of the Authors' League Fund
I can give some attention to my work as Publicity Manager of the
Liberty Loan Committee while preparing to devote an hour or two to
the Secretaryship of the Armenian Relief and the Treasurership of
the Volunteer Committee for the Fatherless Children of France,
before I consider my duties as Vice-President of the Flushing
Savings and Loan and as Vice-President, Director and Member of the
Discount Committee of the Flushing National Bank. As a Councill