Irvin S. Cobb

“ He cured the cellar walls of rickets, the roof of baldness, and the inside woodwork of tetter; and he so wrought with hammer and saw and nails, with lime and cement, with paintbrush and putty knife, that presently what had been a most disreputable blot on the landscape became not only a livable little house but an exceedingly picturesque one, what with its wide overhanging gables, its cocky little front veranda, and its new complexion of roughcast stucco. ”

“ If an amateur tiller of the soil and his wife drop in on us on a fine spring evening to announce that yesterday they had their first mess of green peas, whereas our pea vines are still in the blossoming state; or if in midsummer they come for the express purpose of informing us that they have been eating roasting ears for a week—they knowing full well that our early corn has suffered a backset—we compliment them with honeyed words, and outwardly our manner may bespeak a spirit of friendly congratulation, but in our souls all is bitterness. ”

“ These times, when, going along the road, I pass a manure heap I am filled with envy of the plutocrat who owns it, though, at the same time, deploring the vulgar ostentation that leads him to spread his wealth before the view of the public. When I see a masonry wall along the front of an estate I begin to make mental calculations, for I understand now what that masonry costs, and know that it is cheaper, in the long run, to have your walls erected by a lapidary than by a union stonemason. ”

“ One could not have swung one's cat in our dining room in the flat with any expectation of doing the cat any real good. And the hallway we had in our flat was like nearly all halls in New York flats. It was comfortably filled when you hung a water-color picture up on its wall and uncomfortably crowded if you put a clarionet in the corner. It would have been bad luck to open an umbrella anywhere in our flat—bad luck for the umbrella if for nothing else. Despite its enormous capacity for inhaling furniture it had been, when you came right down to cases, a form-fitting fiat. ”

“ With such historic examples behind us, what cared we though the tongue of slander wagged while we inhabited our site with the leaky heavens for a roof to our parlor and the far horizons for its wall. Not to every one is vouchsafed the double boon of spending long happy days in one's home and at the same time keeping out in the open air. ”

“ If his new swimming pool won't hold water, or his new road won't hold anything else; if his hired help all quit on him in the busy season; if the spring freshets flood his cellar; if his springs go dry in August; if his horses succumb to one of those fatal diseases that are so popular among expensive horses; if his prize Jersey cow chokes on a turnip; if his blooded hens are so busy dying they have no time to give to laying—why, then, under any one or more of these heads he is welcomed into the fold. ”

“ To us water had always been a matter of course. But now the situation was different. With each succeeding day the flow from our spring was slackening. In its present puniness it was no more than a reminder of the brave stream of the springtime.
There was a water witch, so called, in the neighborhood—a gentleman water witch. We were recommended to avail ourselves of his services. It was his custom, we were told, to arm himself with a forked peach-tree switch and walk about over the land, holding the wand in front of him by its two prongs, meantime muttering strange incantations. ”

“ We crave what our grandparents owned but our parents did not. Our grandchildren will crave what we had but our own children won't. They'll junk it. To-day's monstrosity is day-after-tomorrow's art treasure just as today's museum piece is day-before-yesterday's monstrosity. Therefore, I repeat, let us remain calm. I figure that when we actually get into that house our grandchildren will be of a proper age to appreciate the belongings now appertaining to us, and all will be well. ”

“ One of the prime desires now, in consolidating the entire narrative within these covers, is to round out, from inception to finish, the record of our strange adventures in connection with our quest for an abandoned farm and on our becoming abandoned farmers, trusting that others, following our examples, may perhaps profit in some small degree by our mistakes as here set forth and perhaps ultimately when their dreams have come true, too, share in that proud joy of possession which is ours. ”

“ And if our strawberries turn out well or our apple trees bear heavily or our cow has twin calves, both of the gentler sex, we lose no time in going about the countryside to spread the tidings, leaving in our wake saddened firesides and hearts all abrim with the concentrated essence of envy.
Practically all our little group specialize. We go in for some line that is absolutely guaranteed to be profitable until the expense becomes too great for a person of limited means any longer to bear up under. ”

“ But gentle bone-dry Sahara is just a plain ordinary cow of undistinguished ancestry. In the preceding generations of her line scandal after scandal must have occurred; were she a bagpipe solo instead of a cow scarcely could she have in her more mixed strains than she has. We acquired her at a bargain in an auction sale; she is a bargain to any one desiring a cow of settled and steady habits, regular at her meals, always with an unfailing appetite and having a deep far-reaching voice. ”

“ For a while the major was in a fair way to spoil the present century for me. If the inhabitants of the countryside were in a conspiracy to strip the pelfry off a fresh arrival and divide it among them as souvenirs, if there was no honesty left anywhere in a corrupted world, what, then, was the use of living? Why not commit suicide according to one of the standard methods and have done with the struggle, trusting that the undertaker would not be too much of a gouge and that the executors of the estate would leave a trifle of it for the widow and the orphan? ”

“ And we believed it until the hens we had purchased themselves offered proof to the absolute contrary.
It was enough almost to break one's heart to see a great broad-beamed, full-busted husky hen promenading round the chicken run, eating her head off, gadding with her sister idlers, wasting the precious golden hours of daylight in idle social pursuits and at intervals saying to herself: “Lay an egg? Well, I guess not! Why should I entail a strain on my nervous system and deny myself the pleasures of the gay life for the sake of these people? ”

“ It gave one the feeling of being a pioneer and a pathfinder—no, not a pathfinder; a pathmaker—to stand by, superintending in a large, broad, general, perfectly ignorant fashion the job of opening up those thickets of ours to the sunlight that had not visited them for ever so long. Off of one segment of our property, a slope directly behind the main house, we took over four hundred wagonloads of stumps, roots, trunks, boughs and brush—the fruitage of nearly two months of steady labor on the part of men and horses.
The brambles were shorn down and piled in heaps to be burned. ”

“ Than the auction rooms in the Fifth Avenue district I know of no places better adapted for studying patina, wormholing and human nature in a variety of interesting phases. To such an establishment, on the days when a sale is announced—which means two or three times a week for a good part of the year—repair wealthy patrons, patrons who were wealthy before the mania for bidding in things came upon them, as it does come upon so many, and patrons who are trying to look as though they were wealthy. ”

“ Judging by the present rate of non-progress—of static advancement, if I may use such a phrase—long before we have a place to set them up in our furnishings will be so entirely out of style that they'll be back in style all over again, if you get me. These things move in cycles, you know. One generation buys furniture and uses it. The next generation finding it hopelessly old-fashioned and out of date burns it up or casts it away or gives it away or stores it in the attic—anything to get rid of it. ”

“ When you meet a well-bred native Bostonian who has been through Harvard it is as though you had met an egg which had enjoyed the unique distinction of having been laid twice and both times successfully. ”

“ Rich women drive up in their town cars and shabby purveyors of antique wares from little clutter-hole shops on cross streets at the fringe of the East Side shamble in on their fiat arches. Then, too, there are the habitués of the auction room habit; women mostly, but some men too, unfortunate creatures who have fallen victim to an incurable vice and to whom the announcement in the papers of an unusual sale is lure sufficient to draw them hither whether or not they hope to buy anything ”

“ In my youth the only cream separator commonly in vogue was the type of drooping mustache worn by the average deputy sheriff, and anyhow, with it, cream separating was merely incidental, the real purposes of the mustache being to be ornamental and impressive and subtly to convey a proper respect for the majesty of the law. Often a town marshal wore one too. But the modern separator is a product of science and not a gift of Nature skillfully elaborated by the art of the barber. It costs a heap of money and it operates by machinery and no really stylish dairy farm is complete without it. ”

“ Amateur collectors come, on the lookout for lace fans or Japanese bronzes or Chinese ceramics or furniture or pictures or hangings or rugs or tapestries, or whatever it is that constitutes their favorite hobby. There are sure to be prominent actor folk and author folk in this category. Dealers are on hand, each as wise looking as a barnful of hoot-owls and talking the jargon of the craft. ”

“ There was a sale of desirable household effects advertised to take place up at Blank's on West Forty-fifth Street and of course I went. I've spent so much of my time at Blank's these last few months I suppose people are beginning to think I live there. Well, anyway, I was one of the first arrivals and just as I got settled the auctioneer put up a basket; a huge, fiat, curious-looking, wickerwork affair, it was. You never in all your life saw such a basket! ”

“ For the job had reached that stage so dismally familiar to any one who ever started a house with intent to live in it when completed, if ever. I refer to the stage when a large and variegated assortment of hired help are ostensibly busy upon the premises and yet everything seems practically to be at a standstill. From the standpoint of a mere bystander whose only function is to pay the bills, it seems that the workmen are only coming to the job of a morning because they hate the idea of hanging round their own homes all day with nothing to do. ”

“ However, I will say that I did not thoroughly master the cardinal principles of this art until after I had studied under one of the leading wormhole experts in this country—a man who has devoted years of his life just to wormholes. True, like most great specialists he is a person of one idea. Get him off of wormholes and the conversation is apt to drag, but discussing his own topic he can go on for hours and hours. ”

“ A sob rises in his throat, choking his utterance to a degree where it becomes impossible for him to speak more than three or four hundred words per minute; grief dims his eye; regret—not on his own account but for others—droops his shoulders. ”

“ I calculated that if we bought this place it would cost me about seven thousand dollars a year for five years ahead in order to enjoy three weeks of pink-and-white beauty in the blossoming time each spring.
Besides, it occurred to me that by the time the trees did begin to bear plentifully the fashionable folk in New York might quit eating apples; in which case everybody else would undoubtedly follow suit and quit eating them too. Ours is a fickle race, as witness the passing of the vogue for iron dogs on front lawns, and for cut-glass vinegar cruets on the dinner table ”

“ The everlasting shooting of the human rapids, the everlasting portages about the living whirlpools, the everlasting bucking of the human cross currents—these are the things that, in due time, turn the thoughts of the sojourner to mental pictures of peaceful fields and burdened orchards, and kindfaced cows standing knee-deep in purling brooks, and bosky dells and sylvan glades. ”