or
and Member of the Executive Committee of the Authors' League, and
one of the Membership Committee of the City Club, Governor of the
Tuscarora Club and Publicity Manager for the Flushing Red Cross,
Flushing Red Cross Drive and Queensboro Red Cross Drive I can put
in a few hours of goat-feather gathering. Night may come without my
having to do any real work, but if not I can avoid it and
accumulate a few more goat-feathers as Member of the Book Committee
and Executive Committee of the Queensboro Public Library, Member of
the Queensboro Committee on Training Camp Activities, Executive
Committeeman of the Vigilantes, Authors' Committeeman of the
American Defense Society, and so on for hours and hours and hours.
I am a member of everything but the Mothers' Club of Public School
20, and everything takes time from my legitimate work. I estimate
that in the last twenty years I have gathered twenty thousand
pounds of goat-feathers at a cost of about five dollars a pound,
and the whole lot is worth about twenty cents.

What I marvel at is that I make a living at all. My telephone rings
seven thousand eight hundred and six times a day, and only once in
the last eight years has it been rung by any one who wanted to buy
a story from me. The other eighty-two million times it was rung by
people who wanted me to gather a new crop of goat-feathers.

At one time I moved out to the barn to get away from the telephone.
The result was that I had to come down out of the second story of
the barn, walk across my property, enter the house, and go upstairs
every time the telephone rang. I did this eighty-two times a day,
and then moved back to the house and had an extension telephone put
in my workroom so close to my desk that every time I flexed a
muscle I knocked the 'phone off its table. This made it much
handier for the goat-feather distributers, so they called me up
oftener. They call me before I am out of bed, when I am in the
bathtub, and after I go to bed. Usually they call me to the 'phone
and then tell me to wait a minute until Mr. Jonesky comes. The
favorite times for calling me are when I am in the bathtub, when I
am at meals, and when I am trying to concentrate on my writing.

I am not blaming any one for this. I did not have to rent a
telephone. I could have let people come to the house. A great many
do come to the house. On the average, it takes the person who comes
to the house just one hour to state a proposition that cou