Don Marquis

“ Squint went over to where Jack was lying and took hold of the scruff of Jack's neck. Jack winked at me in his good-natured way, and made a show of pulling back some, but finally let Squint pitch him into the deepest part of the swimming-hole. His head went clear under—which is a thing no dog likes, let alone being picked up that way and tossed about. Every boy there set up a shout, and when Jack scrambled up the bank, wagging his tail and shaking the water off himself, the humans all yelled, “Sling him in again, Squint!” ”

“ Poor? Yes, Nell! And you have the heart to cast it in my teeth! You, Nellie! You, from whom I once expected sympathy and understanding. You, whom I chose from all the world, and took into my life because I fancied that you, too, saw the vision! Yes, Elinor, I dreamed that once!”
II Mr. Wimple achieved pathos... almost tragedy. To a trivial mind, however, the effect might have been somewhat spoiled by the fact that in his fervour he gesticulated wildly with the wooden paddle in one hand and an undergarment belonging to Ronald in the other. ”

“ Ordinarily she frowned on slang; but when Ferdinand's soul leaped into the arena she found slang a weapon strangely facile to her clutch.
“Coming down to brass tacks on this money thing, Ferdy,” said Mrs. Wimple, “you're not the downy peach you picture in the ads. I'll tell the world you're not! You kid yourself, Ferdy. Some of your bloom has been removed, Ferdy. Don't go so far upstage when you speak to me about the dross the world calls gold. The reason we can't afford a maid now is because you got swell-headed and kicked over that perfectly good magazine job you used to have. ”

“ But now that Uncle Bainbridge and Lady Agatha were getting along so well together my wife had begun to hope that Uncle Bainbridge would never marry anybody. We both thought the friendship might become an ideal, but none the less overmastering, passion; one of those sacred things, you know, of the sort that keeps a man single all his life. If Uncle Bainbridge remained unmarried out of regard for Lady Agatha, we agreed, it would be much better for him at his time of life than to wed Miss Sophia. ”

“ Another proud and haughty dog I knew belonged to the dog and pony part of a circus that came to our town once. He sat in a little cart in the street parade, with a clown's hat and jacket on, and drove a Shetland pony. You couldn't get him into a fight; he would just grin and say he was worth too much money to risk himself in a fight, especially as the money he was worth did not belong to him anyhow, but to the circus that owned him. He said it wouldn't be honest to risk other people's money just because he wanted to fight; but I have never believed that he really wanted to fight. ”

“ They warmed, they expanded, half unconsciously they projected those breaths and breezes which thrilled our Ferdinand and wrought upon his mood. If a woman, idle and mature, cannot find romance anywhere else or anyhow other she will pick upon a preacher or an artist.
Mrs. Watson collected Ferdinands. Just how seriously she took them—how she regarded himself, specifically—Mr. Wimple could not be quite certain.
“She is a woman of mystery,” Mr. Wimple often murmured to himself. And he wondered a good deal about her... sometimes he wondered if she were not in love with him. ”

“ She could haunt us, as Americans, and not feel that the social question mattered so much, in spite of what the American ghost had hinted. We Americans are so unclassified that the English often take chances with individuals, quite regardless of what each individual's class would naturally be if he had a class. Even while they do this they make us feel very often that we are hopelessly American; but they do it, and I, for one, am grateful. Lady Agatha sympathized with our desire to become as English as possible, she could quite understand that. ”

“ Well, I was so flabbergasted that my skin stiffened up on me, and it stayed stiff for the rest of that day. I never said a word, but I turned away from there a sad man with a broken heart in my bosom. And I quit bein' an artist. I didn't have the sperrit to be in a show any more.
And through all the years since then I been a saddened man. But as time went by there come a kind of sweetness into that sadness, too. It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, like the poet says. I was one of the saddest men in the world, but I sort o' enjoyed it, after a few years. ”

“ Watch him!” shouted Parrot Feathers. “Don't let him do that again! When he has you under water he whacks your eye with his tail. He's trying to blind you!”
And, indeed, these seemed to be the desperate oyster's tactics. If he could once destroy our hero's sight, the end would soon come.
“Probably—do you hear me?”
He nodded his head; he was beyond speech.
“Take a long breath and dive! Do you get me? Dive! Dive at your own feet! Grab your feet in your hands and roll under water in a bunch! ”

“ A boy hasn't got much sense, anyhow; and a boy without a dog to keep him steered right must have a pretty tough time in the world.
If he was low in his mind then, he was lower in his mind before the day was through. For after breakfast there was Stevie Stevenson and Tom Mulligan waiting for him outside, and in spite of his promise, Stevie has told everything to Tom. And Tom has a wart and offers some wart blood to write that letter in. But Freckles says another person's blood would not be fair and honourable. ”

“ Being an aristocrat may sound easy. And it may look easy to outsiders. And it may really be easy for them that are used to it. But it wasn't easy for me. It came on me suddenly, the knowledge that I was one, and without warning. I didn't have any time to practise up being one. One minute I wasn't one, and the next minute I was; and while, of course, I felt important over it, there were spells when I would get kind of discouraged, too, and wish I could go back to being a common dog again. ”

“ Miss Sophia, although certain now that she would receive no assistance from my wife in her siege of Uncle Bainbridge, did not swerve from her determination to subjugate him. I imagine it is rather difficult to give battle when your rival is a ghost: the very intangibility of the tie makes it hard to attack. Yet the person who is in the earth life has certain advantages also. I do not know whether I have mentioned it or not, but Miss Sophia could scarcely be called beautiful. ”

“ Suppose you bring that Blind Man's Dog around here. And if he ain't got a spiked collar on to him, I'll fight him. I won't fight a spike-collared dog to please anybody.”
And I wouldn't, neither, without I had one on myself, If you can't get a dog by the throat or the back of his neck, what's the use of fighting him? You might just as well try to eat a blacksmith shop as fight one of those spike-collared dogs.
“Hey, there!” Freckles yelled at Tom Mulligan, who is Mutt Mulligan's boy. “You get your fool dog away from the lion-eaters cage!” ”

“ There is the melancholy sadness that has been with you for so long that you have got used to it and kind o' enjoy it in a way. And then there's the kind o' sadness where you go back on yourself, where you make your own mistakes and fall below your own standards, and that is a mighty bitter kind of sadness. ”

“ There have always been these critical periods when the two highest species in the world were about equal in intelligence, and it was touch and go as to which would survive and carry on the torch, and which species would lose the lead and become subservient. There have always been exact instants when the spirit of progress hesitated as between the forms of life, doubtful as to which one to make its representative. ”

“ The idea of a married woman entering into a perfectly open flirtation with a man, as this Lady Agatha Pelham has done! Not that I blame Hiram Bainbridge; for men are susceptible when skillfully practised upon—especially with arts which I have never stooped to employ. It is shameless, Cousin Henry, shameless! If Cousin Marian's mother were alive, she would at least see that the children were sent back to America before they become contaminated by this atmosphere. ”

“ Mankind, up to that time, had had sharp toenails like the claws of birds. But the flat, shell-like toenails, the symbols of man's triumph over, and trampling down of, the oyster were inherited from the children of this happy couple.
They persist to this day.
“IF WE COULD ONLY SEE” I Lunch finished, Mr. Ferdinand Wimple, the poet, sullenly removed his coat and sulkily carried the dishes to the kitchen sink. He swore in a melodious murmur, as a cat purrs, as he turned the hot water on to the plates, and he splashed profanely with a wet dishcloth. ”

“ But Elmira only answered: “You was drunk when you fell in there, Hank Walters. And you can stay in there till you get a better temper on to you.” And all the women laughed and said: “That's right, Elmira! Spunk up to him!”
There was considerable splashing around in the water for a couple of minutes. And then, of a sudden, a live fish came a-whirling out of that hole in the floor, which he catched with his hands. It was a big bullhead, and its whiskers around its mouth was stiffened into spikes, and it landed kerplump on to Mis' Rogers' lap, a-wiggling, and it horned her on the hands. ”

“ Squeals have been heard coming from Uncle Zeb's kitchen, but the rest of the pigs never seem to learn.
But no self-respecting dog would be jealous if his boss scratched a pig. For after all, what is a pig? It is just a pig, and that is all you can say for it. A pig is not a person; a pig is something to eat. But Burning Deck is a peculiar dog, and he gets ideas into his head. And so, right in the midst of the show, when I chased that coloured man across the stage, Burning Deck all of a sudden jumped up on to the platform and grabbed me. ”

“ Uncle Bainbridge is very fond of apple dumplings. His final test of a woman is her ability to make good apple dumplings. Several women might have married him had they been able to pass that examination. He can pay no higher compliment to a woman than to be willing to believe her able to make good dumplings.
“Aggie, in there!” he roared again, impatient because I was slow in answering. “Dumplings! That kind of woman—could have made—good dumplings!”
I felt, somehow, that it was going a bit too far to imagine Lady Agatha at so plebeian a task as making apple dumplings. ”

“ There's no telling what I would have done to that Blind Man's Dog, tight-skinned as he was, if he hadn't run away before I got my second wind.
Well, there's some mighty peculiar dogs in this world, let alone boys and humans. The word got around town, in spite of his running away like that before I got my second wind, that that Blind Man's Dog, so called, had actually licked me! Many pretended to believe it. Every time Freckles and me went down the street someone would say:
“Well, the dog that licked the lion got licked himself, did he?” ”

“ But a kid will always lie, not meaning particular to lie, if you sort of invite him with questions like that, and get him scared by the way you're acting. Besides, I says to myself, so long as Hank has turned into a corpse, and being a corpse makes him dead, what's the difference whether he's in the blacksmith shop or in the cistern? I hadn't had any plain idea before that being a corpse meant the same thing as being dead. ”

“ I followed them, and sat down on a grave beside a tombstone to watch the fight. I guess they were pretty much scared of that graveyard, both of those boys; but us dogs had dug around there too much, making holes after gophers, and moles, and snakes for me to mind it any. They hadn't hit each other more than half a dozen times, those boys, when a flea got hold of me right in the middle of my back, up toward my neck—the place I never can reach, no matter how hard I dig and squirm. It wasn't one of my own fleas, by the way it bit; it must have been a tramp flea that had been starved for weeks. ”

“ I'll say you will! You used to be a good sport about that sort of thing, Ferdy, but it looks to me as if you were getting spoiled rotten. You've had a rush of soul to the mouth, Ferdy. Those talcum-powder seances of yours have gone to your head. You take those orgies of refinement too seriously. You begin to look to me like you had a streak of yellow in you, Ferdy... and if I ever see it so plain I'm sure of it, I'll leave you flat. I'll quit you, Ferdy, twins and all.”
“Quit, then!” cried Mr. Wimple.
And then the harplike voice burst into song again, an offering rich with rage:
“Woman! ”

“ You can't do anything to a freak without changing his or her disposition some way. You take a freak that was born that way and go to operating on him, and if he is good-natured he'll turn out a grouch, or if he was a grouch he'll turn out good-natured. I knowed a dog-faced boy one time who was the sunniest critter you ever seen. But his folks got hold of a lot of money and took him out of the business and had his features all slicked up and made over, and what he gained in looks he lost in temper and disposition. ”