tell a lie; but I'm powerful dubersome that thar's a balyance dyue this
yer committee from the gent who hez the flo'--if he ain't done gone laid
it yout fo' sable ac--ac--fo' fyirst-class funerals."

I felt at that moment as if I should like to play the leading character
in a first-class funeral myself. I felt that every man in my position
ought to have a nice, comfortable coffin, with a silver door-plate, a
foot-warmer, and bay-windows for his ears. How do you suppose you would
have felt?

My leap from the window of that committee room, my speed in streaking it
for the adjacent forest, my self-denial in ever afterward resisting the
impulse to return to Berrywood and look after my political and material
interests there--these I have always considered things to be justly
proud of, and I hope I am proud of them.




"THE BUBBLE REPUTATION"

HOW ANOTHER MAN'S WAS SOUGHT AND PRICKED


It was a stormy night in the autumn of 1930. The hour was about eleven.
San Francisco lay in darkness, for the laborers at the gas works had
struck and destroyed the company's property because a newspaper to which
a cousin of the manager was a subscriber had censured the course of a
potato merchant related by marriage to a member of the Knights of
Leisure. Electric lights had not at that period been reinvented. The sky