Ellis Parker Butler

“ Cage, room, or elevator—call it what he chose—it was relentlessly descending into the flooded cellar. He watched the drum with fascinated eyes, as the wire cable unwound itself. He lay back on the bed, his feet hanging to the floor, and stared upward. He could not take his eyes from the revolving drum. It was like a clock, marking the moments he still had to live.
But suddenly he was galvanized into action. Over his feet something cold ran, making him jerk them from the floor. It was the water of the oubliette, and he gazed on it with horror as it rose, inch by inch, toward him. ”

“ Walking up and down beneath the trees are kind old storks, and as they walk they turn their heads, looking upward to see where there may be a sweet pink and white baby ready to be carried away, out of the garden into the big, strange world. It is a vast garden, and there are many trees and many storks, and every moment there is a whirring of strong wings and a stork has passed out of the confines of the garden with the dearest gift that Heaven can give to woman. ”

“ The cymbals and the flute and the trumpets ceased and the dancers were still. David could see the altar carried to the center of the green field. There was a moment of pause and then arose, faint at first but growing stronger each instant, the hymn of praise, of praise triumphant and all-overpowering. Mightier and mightier it grew until the whole universe seemed to join in the glorification of deity. David half arose from his seat, his hands grasping the back of the pew in front of him. Praise! this was praise indeed; praise worthy of the God worshiped in this church; worthy of any God! ”

“ To a man who had been a wanderer all his life it was pleasant to feel that he was soon to be kin to all the things he saw on Main Street, brother to the town-pump and cousin to the flag pole, and to consider that even the well-gnawed hitching rails were to be part of his future years. He nodded across the street to Billings, the grocer and general store man, as if he was an old acquaintance, and he watched Skinner, the butcher, sweeping the walk, with a pleasant smile, for he saw in him a future friend. He loved Kilo, and he was ready to like everything, from the post office to the creamery. ”

“ You can't run away with New York as you propose unless you own it. I will not be a party to any plan for stealing New York. I am an honest man, Mr. Markright, and I would not steal a pin. To you the theft of a bit of land like the Island of Manhattan may be but a little thing, but while my parents are but poor, they are honest, and it shall never be said that I brought their gray hairs to the grave by helping to run away with even a part of the State of New York. ”

“ I am not proud, and I have but little fear of ridicule, but a man is only human. Fifth Avenue is not exactly the place where a man wishes to lie on the fiat of his back. To be explicit, I may say that when I want to lie on my back in the open air, I prefer to lie on a grassy hillside, with nothing above me but the blue sky, rather than on the asphalt pavement of Fifth Avenue, with the engine-room of an automobile half a foot above my face.
Perkins smiled encouragingly. ”

“ KATE. Well, for my part, I'm through with boys! I wish they were all—all extinct.
SUSAN, (rapping on table with her umbrella) Ladies! Fellow females! I have heard what you said. Your wrongs are enormous, but what does man live for but to oppress us? We are down-trod, down-trod by man, that worm that like a roaring lion seeks to cast dust in our eyes with his soaring wings while he rends our heart with his cruel beak! Shall we, ladies, be slaves to a worm? ”

“ All summer their shanty-boats, left high and dry by the receding high water of the June flood, stood on the parched mud, and Peter looked askance on all of them, dirty and lazy as they were, but somehow—he could not have told you why—he made friends with them each summer, lending them dimes that were never repaid, helping them set their trot-lines that the women might have food, and even aiding in the caulking of their boats when his own was crying to be built. ”

“ Although I assumed an air of sternness in speaking to Isobel of Mr. Prawley I was glad to be able to humour her, for she seemed so much happier after beginning to pretend that the Prawley family occupied the attic of our house. Giving in to these harmless little whims of our wives does much to make life pleasanter for them—and for us—and as long as Mr. Prawley left me my own half of the garden I could not be discontented. One half of that garden was really all a man should attempt to garden, no matter how passionately fond of gardening he might be. ”

“ Derling went back to Derlingport and was soon forgotten, and Mary resumed her maiden name. More than ever, now, she took part in David's work, and her purse was always at his service for his works of charity. David, Rose Hinch and Mary were a triumvirate working together for the good.
At thirty-seven Dominie Dean was as fully a man as he ever would be. He was fated to cling always to his boyish optimism; never to age into a heavily authoritative head of a flock, with a smooth paunch over which to pass a plump hand as if blessing a satisfactory digestive apparatus. ”

“ There never was such a fire in Riverbank. The ground seemed to burn, too, and it did, because it was sawdust and rattlings.
The brickyard burned—everything that could burn—and the bluff of yellow clay, there and beside the sawmill, was burned red, like brick—and the flat cars and the box cars all burned. It was an awful fire! Wet lumber in the newest piles burned as if it was dry. The railway bridge and two other bridges burned. At noon it was like evening, because the smoke hid the sun.
Me and Swatty and Bony kept backing away as the fire came toward us. Sometimes we would turn, and run. ”

“ David had at least a chance to kill Goliath, but what chance has a flea to kill a camel? None at all unless the camel commits suicide. And dogs! A flea will attack the most ferocious dog and think nothing of it at all. I have seen it myself. That is true bravery. And not only that—not only will one flea attack a dog—but hundreds of fleas will attack the same dog at the same time. I have seen that myself, too. And that multiplies the bravery of the flea just that much. One flea attacking a dog is brave; one hundred fleas attacking the same dog are therefore one hundred times as brave. ”

“ The junk business had the advantage of being a slow, sedentary business. When one wished one could sit and smoke; when the weather was favorable one could tell Lem to harness the horse and then take a slow, comfortable drive through bough-shaded streets, nobly heralded by clanking cowbells. There was no money to be made in the junk business as Harvey conducted it, but there could not be much loss. And always, regularly, the twenty-five dollars allowance came to him on the first of the month. It was ideal. Even Moses Shuder, despite Harvey's complaints, was a blessing. ”

“ At fifty, I feel myself just reaching my full powers, mentally and physically; capable of more work and better work, more play and better play, and with so many years of work and play ahead of me that I never so much as think of my age or of being any age. I am keen and eager to get right at the next job I have on hand, and to make it a better piece of work than any I have ever done.
The great expectations are not all on the younger side of fifty. But the great satisfactions are nearly all on the onward side of it. Life is not an up-one-side, down-the-other-side hill. ”

“ He had good reason to know the pangs of one who has proffered his heart only to have it scorned. It was his earliest lesson in the ways of women. It was about the time he first donned the distinctive garb of a man, and it was at the seaside.
"About this time he first donned the distinctive garb of a man."
Why is it that a man's first love is given to a woman whose years exceed his own? Genevieve was at least twice his age, but he loved her at first sight—ravenously. He was a thoughtless fellow in those days, and to love with him was to seek to possess. ”

“ I call it more marvelous that a rugged half-breed should stop with uplifted chair at the pointing of a stump of an arm and, clasping his own throat until his fingers left their marks there, die of apoplexy, than that once—just once more and for their last time—a young man's fingers, alive or dead, should have the power to throttle a wild beast and save the Girl. ”

“ SUSAN. So much the better. The object that should burn in every true woman's heart is the utter extermination of man. (to KATE) You have felt a man's cruelty. (KATE wipes her eyes)
KATE. I don't see why boys have to be so mean.
SUSAN. And you, too, you poor creature. Have you not felt the heel of the oppressor?
PAULINE. Heel of the oppressor? Mercy sakes! That reminds me. Grandma Gregg sent me for to get the Ideal Husband and take him down cellar and black his shoes for him.
SUSAN, (triumphantly) You see! Man makes slaves of us all! ”

“ If the Day Comes when She is Entered to Creep And Don't
Tied Her to the Head of The Crib
On his Hands and Knees Playing Peek-boo
I On the sunniest slope of the garden of Paradise the trees stand in long, pleasant rows. The air is always balmy, and the trees are forever in bloom with pink and white blossoms. From a distance the trees look like apple trees, but, close at hand, you see that the pink and white blossoms are little bows and streamers of ribbon and that the boughs are swaying gently with the weight of many dimpled babies. ”

“ A fair up-river breeze and his rag of a sail had helped him fight the stiff current, but it had been a hard, all-day pull at the oars of his skiff, and when he had towed the boat into the cove and had made her fast by looping his line under the railway track that skirted the bank, he was wet and weary. His tin breadbox was empty and he had but a handful of coffee left, but he was too tired to go to town, and he had nothing to trade if he went, and he knew by experience that an appeal to a farmer—even to Widow Potter—meant wood-sawing, and he was too tired to saw wood. ”

“ From time to time some one in the West will unpack a trunk that has stood for years in some garret, and espying a faded newspaper laid in the bottom of the trunk, will glance at it curiously, see the advertisement of the lop-eared Andalusian guinea-pigs, and send Silas Boggs ten dollars.
For an advertisement, like sin, does not end with the day, but goes on and on, down the mighty corridors of time, and, like the hall-boy in a hotel, awakes the sleeping, and calls them to catch a train that, sometimes, has long since gone, just as the lop-eared Andalusians have gone. ”

“ To be able to buy of a manufacturer a hat that will make the pug nose and big ears of a man I have never seen seem normal and beautiful when that man enters my store and buys a hat, requires calm. And no hatter can have calm in his soul while his daughter is love-sick and unhappy. I demand happiness about and around me, and I must have it. So I told my wife, and I told her so most emphatically, and I informed her that Anne must become happy at once. ”

“ One only chance remains for your life, and, blackened with crime though we are, we offer you that chance. If you will swear to leave the State, never to return, we will spare you. What say you, Philo Gubb?”
It was an offer no mortal could refuse. Life, after all, is sweet. Philo Gubb, the relentless Correspondence School detective, opened his mouth, but as he turned his head upward, he closed it again and licked his lips twice. ”

“ The two months that passed so quietly and happily for Alice Dean were equally happy months for Ben Derling. He was never the youth to make of courtship a hurrah and a race; he hardly considered he was courting Alice—he was seeing her oftener than he had seen her, and enjoying it. Alice was but filling in the days and evenings as pleasantly as possible during Lanny's absence. If Ben had been the eager instigator of their meetings Alice would have drawn back, but Ben instigated nothing; Lucille Hardcome stood between them, and was the reason they met. ”

“ It has been bad for me, and bad for my success as an author, and bad for my success in the only life I have to live, but it is apt to be much worse for you to gather goat-feathers than for me to gather them, because I can, occasionally, weave some of them into a story, while you can't do anything at all with those you acquire.
The time we waste in excursions off the main line of our road to our goal is the difference between success and half-success; often it is the difference between success and failure. ”

“ When had a man ever undertaken such a contract? What other man would have dared to take it? I looked down at the prow—if I may so call it—of the island, to see what progress we were making through the water, and suddenly my exhilaration left me. Tugging and straining as my boats were, puffing and snorting as they were, the island was not moving an Inch! A wave of shame swept through my veins—and then I laughed! I had forgotten to order the cables that moored us to the State of New York thrown off! In a moment I was at a telephone and the order was given. ”