lo. This is parenthetical and,
to at least three observers, whose names for the present I must
conceal, it seems improbable, etc., etc., etc.," until the poor rat of
fiction is at last forced out into the open and the melodrama begins.

MR. ICKY

This has the distinction of being the only magazine piece ever written
in a New York hotel. The business was done in a bedroom in the
Knickerbocker, and shortly afterward that memorable hostelry closed
its doors forever.

When a fitting period of mourning had elapsed it was published in the
"Smart Set."

JEMINA.

Written, like "Tarquin of Cheapside," while I was at Princeton, this
sketch was published years later in "Vanity Fair." For its technique I
must apologize to Mr. Stephen Leacock.

I have laughed over it a great deal, especially when I first wrote it,
but I can laugh over it no longer. Still, as other people tell me it
is amusing, I include it here. It seems to me worth preserving a few
years--at least until the ennui of changing fashions suppresses me, my
books, and it together.

With due apologies for this impossible Table of Contents, I tender
these tales of the Jazz Age into the hands of those who read as they
run and run as they read.

MY LAST FLAPPERS

THE JELLY-BEAN.

Jim Powell was a Jelly-bean. Much as I desire to make him an appealing
character, I feel that it would be unscrupulous to deceive you on that
point. He was a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine
three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean and he grew lazily all during
Jelly-bean season, which is every season, down in the land of the
Jelly-beans well below the Mason-Dixon line.

Now if you call a Memphis man a Jelly-bean he will quite possibly pull
a long sinewy rope from his hip pocket and hang you to a convenient
telegraph-pole. If you Call a New Orleans man a Jelly-bean he will
probably grin and ask you who is taking your girl to the Mardi Gras
ball. The particular Jelly-bean patch which produced the protagonist
of this history lies somewhere between the two--a little city of forty
thousand that has dozed sleepily for forty thousand years in southern
Georgia occasionally stirring in its slumbers and muttering something
about a war that took place sometime, somewhere, and that everyone
else has forgotten long ago.

Jim was a Jelly-bean. I write that again because it has such a
pleasant sound--rather like the beginning of a fairy story--as if Jim
were nice. It som