Ellis Parker Butler

“ You are as tickled as if you had discovered a five-dollar gold-piece in an old vest. In a little while you walk the streets in a fog of long-forgotten memories. I say "fog" because it is all dim and dreamy and unreal. You are neither yourself nor the person you were twenty years before. You are like a Mohammed suspended between the floor of to-day and the ceiling of your youth, but as you hang suspended there the tracings on the ceiling grow clearer and clearer.
I remember I walked down to the river and sat on the water-logged dock of the old ferry-boat Silas William. ”

“ So he started a saloon—a liquor saloon."
"Bad business, but profitable," I ventured.
"And two days after he got her opened up," said the sunburned old fellow, "they passed the prohibition law and he had to take all his liquor out in the street and smash it in the gutter. It saddened Hennery K. Lunk, that did. Yes, sir! It did so. I guess he lost a good thousand dollars by that deal, and I don't know what he would have done if he hadn't had a chance to buy Thomas Doherty's crockery-store. ”

“ He told me that if a man fell overboard the saw-back whales would go "swish! swish!" twice—once to cut the man in two length-wise and once to cut the man-strips cross-wise, because saw-back whales could not swallow a man unless ne was cut into four pieces. Then the captain—Captain Hennery K. Lunk—dug into his pocket and gave me two peppermint lozenges and told me to eat them immediately. ”