THIMBLE, THIMBLE


These are the directions for finding the office of Carteret & Carteret,
Mill Supplies and Leather Belting:

You follow the Broadway trail down until you pass the Crosstown Line,
the Bread Line, and the Dead Line, and come to the Big Cañons of the
Moneygrubber Tribe. Then you turn to the left, to the right, dodge a
push-cart and the tongue of a two-ton four-horse dray and hop, skip,
and jump to a granite ledge on the side of a twenty-one-story synthetic
mountain of stone and iron. In the twelfth story is the office of
Carteret & Carteret. The factory where they make the mill supplies and
leather belting is in Brooklyn. Those commodities--to say nothing of
Brooklyn--not being of interest to you, let us hold the incidents within
the confines of a one-act, one-scene play, thereby lessening the toil
of the reader and the expenditure of the publisher. So, if you have the
courage to face four pages of type and Carteret & Carteret's office boy,
Percival, you shall sit on a varnished chair in the inner office and
peep at the little comedy of the Old Nigger Man, the Hunting-Case Watch,
and the Open-Faced Question--mostly borrowed from the late Mr. Frank
Stockton, as you will conclude.

First, biography (but pared to the quick) must intervene. I am for the
inverted sugar-coated quinine pill--the bitter on the outside.

The Carterets were, or was (Columbia College professors please rule), an