ld be put
in a six-word telegram or 'phoned in one minute. The visitor always
begins with a few neat remarks about "Pigs and Pigs," which is not
the name of the story, tells how his grandmother laughed over it
until she swallowed her false teeth, explains that his grandmother
was one of the Tootlecoms of Worcester, but married into the
Blahblah family. About half an hour later the visitor remarks, "I
know you are very busy and I hate to ask you, but----" Then he asks
me to do some little trifle like raising $80,000,000 in Flushing
for the War Fund of the One-Legged Gardeners' League, which has a
plan for planting sweet peas in the trenches in Mesopotamia. "We
know you can do it," he says pleasantly. I know I can do it, too. I
feel the great urge of ability rise within me. I don't care a hang
for Mesopotamia, or for sweet peas in the trenches there; but it is
something I can do, and I go ahead and do it. I gather two quarts
of red, white, and blue goat-feathers, give eighteen magazine
editors a chance to forget I am alive, and find at the end of the
month that I am three hundred and forty dollars deeper in debt than
I was before.

It has come about that people are actually offended if I don't jump
into every mad goat-feather quest that is proposed. I am firmly
convinced that there is now extant an Association to Prevent Butler
Doing a Full Day's Work. I don't want to seem egotistical, but I am
now of the opinion that the Kaiser started the war in order to make
it seem necessary for me to make Four-Minute speeches on Food
Conservation, Give Your Binoculars, and Buy a Thrift Stamp.

Of course, all our patriotic, Liberty Loan, Red Cross, Thrift Stamp
side-lining isn't goat-feathering. The genuine variety is
eagle-feather gathering, and I am as proud of my eagle-feathers as
I am sour on my goat-feathers.

Now it is a fine thing to be treasurer of the Flushing Hospital,
and it is a fine thing to be president of the Flushing Country
Club, but the goat-feathers pall when you know that the reason you
were given those glories was because nobody else would take them.
It's a "grand and glorious feelin'" to know you can take some
affair and make it a success, or a near-success; but it is not
business. A man may make a success of a Flushing Public Playground
and not be making a success of himself. He may be making a goat of
himself. The chances are ten to one that he is making a goat of
himself.

I'll never get the Pulitzer pr