Judge — March 17, 1923 — page 13: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

were in the office at the time and heard him. It must have been of a Sunday that the brain fever started. All five doctors despaired of me and for the better part of ten days I hung between life and death. Nobody can ever express what I owe to Miss Dorntee. Of course, this was before the days of prohibition and it was the liquor and good nursing which pulled me through. Possibly the cinna- mon helped to check the coughing. But I was still very weak when they sent me to Bermuda. So weak in t that I hardly remembered that the sixth of January had passed while I still lay in a stupor. Indeed that the very day my temperature touched one hundred ven and Peter notified the Associ- Press. I have nothing but the antest. memories of all the news- paper men concerned. Not one of them betrayed a confidence and the Herald man was with me almost constantly while my mind wandered. In fact he sent his bulletins from the telephone in ihe Blue Room. After all, there is nothing like a change of air and before the little yacht left Bermuda behind her I was well again. ‘That is as well as I am ever likely to be under the circumst. By this time the second of Febru had come and gone and_it was merely to kill time that Isat in the chart-room and dictated my Wall Street article to poor old Connelly. You may remember it was called, “How To Make Money and How ‘To Keep It Tn a whimsical mood I put the article an envelope and mailed it to the editor though not, of course, until after the reception at the Battery. rt was weeks later that I ran across the March issue of the magazine as I sat waiting for Dr. Burgess to get rid of the man with the toothache and keep his appointment with me. Quite idly I turned to “How To Make Money And How To Keep It.” There was the familiar heading sure enough and I remember resenting it. “After — all,” I thought, “that is something which has become associated in everybody's mind with me and they might have made the new man think up another title for the March issue.” surprise when T glanced nd found, “You Mr. Man- - Hundred Dollars- To- Invest But-Not-To-Lose, have you ever thought of the possibility of the Benchley fours with the all steel body the annual amortization requirements?” It was my very article and this was the March issue. At first I assumed that the fever had returned and it was not until persistent telephone communication and many personal conferences that I learned that the copy submitted, as the Postmaster General ascertained for me, at half past ten on the morning of the twenty-seventh of February, had made the March issue. He was a boyhood friend of my father’s. Many theories ran through my mind before T hit upon the right one, ‘The editor had lied to me. Even the word “positively” had been only ap! to him. day which he named f an hour earlier than he re and hi F He had been too cynical to needed it. trust me, “A trick of the trade,” he remarked callously when I put the case before him. And ‘as he spoke something snapped inside me. From that day to this T have never told the truth to an editor. It has become easy for me to say, “Positively the first’ thing on Monday morning before ten o'clock” and all the time to have in my heart the mental reservation, “Possibly ‘by or Saturday after- noon if conv Yes, conv passion in Ti by me any more. rience has become my one Nobody sets es The old frank relation- etween me and editors has gone to return. Not one of them believes any promise I may make as to time. There is not even “a pretense any more. The editor mentions a time three weeks earlier than he expects to get the copy and I turn it in two months later. Still, once or twice upon leaving a sanctum a fugitive sensation has assailed Perhaps it is only a memory but I seem to be conscious of a faint fragrance of lilac just as I was back on that for- gotten March morning in the little gra yard on the hill. me. sae “The Pink and Yellow Pieces” by Pearl Spaulding VV ‘andies in a new box of sweets that look so alluring, but when you bite into them you find they are only the pink and yellow ones that no one wants. Perhaps you sample another. That, too, is a total loss. But the house hap- pens to be full of candy and you can afford to be fussy. So, quite unsanitarily you toss the beheaded chocolates to one side in the box, as you impatiently delve for a particularly choice one filled with nuts n’everything. And then one fine day you sit reading JunGeE by the fireside, and as you absently reach out for the candy, you register a disagreeable thrill to discover that the stock is somewhat low. Oh, very, very low, in fact. And you sniff with disap- pointment because you had just felt like eating a piece of candy. Suddenly your dull eye brightens as you behold in a derneath the box’s crumpled paper 1 the once despised pink and yellow pie still bearing your vicious ‘teeth prints, And you reach hungrily for one of them d then for another, and as you go on ing and munching contentedly you find them not so bad after all. Isn't that just like a human? Before our young and eager eyes is opened up Life’s box of sweets. illed to the brim with delectable possibilities all untried— it is ours to choose or discard with youth- ful scorn in the tireless search for the Perfect Piece. But later on, when one “goes there and finds the cupboard is bare”. But why go on—by that time, one is looking for sweets in any form, (Pardon me for writing this on pink and yellow paper—P. S.) ey ALL know them—those odious If a bootlegger gets shot in the boot legs does he then become a game legged bootlegger, or a bootlegged lamelegger? comicbooks.com