Wallace Irwin

“ It was on the Wednesday before my hurried trip to America's metropolis that Mr. Parker, head of our tinware novelty enterprise in Sycamore Creek, called me to his private office.
"Mr. Sprigg, I want you to take the afternoon train to New York, go to the Interplanetary Tin-Plate offices there, and sell our South Furia Pie-Dish Mills for the best figure you can get."
I evinced my astonishment, and protested that there were gentlemen connected with our company who understood New York and its ways far better than I.
"That's just the point," protested Mr. Parker. ”

“ He had been married and divorced twice, had been barber for a traveling circus, had been cured of rheumatism by the sting of a bee, and believed the powder trust was behind all this preparedness talk.
"I 'ain't always been in this part of town," he confided, his tongue and his razor-strop clattering with equal velocity. "Up to five years ago I worked in a flossy joint, twenty-five for the shave, seventy-five for the shampoo, extra for the tonic. But I ain't anxious to get rich. This is the life! ”

“ I held my peace.
"J. Whiffington Whack got to liking the big noise—all the horse-power in the city pounding in his ears. Changed his offices to a building where he could be under the elevated road when he worked. Always hires office-boys that whistle, stenographers that sing, and the janitor in his building says he won't listen unless you holler like a mule-driver."
Hamilcar O'Brine slightly lifted my head, so that I could inspect his work. After a glance in the mirror I was strangely surprised by my youthful appearance. Hamilcar shared my delight. ”

“ Wouldn't let us boys in the shop say a word to customers. They got the wrong idea, those guys. It ain't healthy for a barber to keep still while he's shaving a customer. It's like filling a man with hot whisky and then stopping his pores. The death-rate among barbers has shot up like a rocket since that style came in."
By now a solid mask of thick lather covered my face, so, without fear of interruption, Hamilcar O'Brine, my gallant rescuer, was going full swing.
"No, sir, there's too much being said about silence in New York nowadays. ”

“ I was alone, a leper, avoided by a city of five million souls.
[Illustration: I APPROACHED A FAT, JOLLY-LOOKING PERSON WHO LOLLED IN A PADDED CHAIR]
In my bitterness of spirit I thought of returning at once to Sycamore Creek with its entirely human population. No one is alone in Sycamore Creek. There one may be the most unpopular man in town, but people will stop you in the post-office to tell you so. There is no such word as "stranger" in Sycamore Creek ”

“ I once had a customer who shaved his neck so high that his back view looked like a caterpillar on a grape-fruit. There's no law against wearing what you want, so long as it don't interfere with other people's happiness. Shave? Sure. And, say, you ought to have a shampoo with Gunn's Germ Debilitator—anti-phlogistic, prophylactic antidote for the mollicules of the hair. No, I never studied to be a doctor, but I get a lot of education reading the labels off the tonic-bottles. ”

“ What couldn't J. Whiffington Whack accomplish before five o'clock, if he could only flam his wife into keeping his flat quiet for a while? Sure, he could cut a ripe intellectual cheese all right, all right.
"Well, still groaning and mumbling to himself, J. Whiffington paid the taxi man at his door and went up in the elevator. And he'd no sooner entered his flat than he hears the sound of sobbing—hic-hic—just like that. And there was Mrs. Whack with her face laid against the furniture. ”

“ The Anti-Noise League is trying to put a Maxim silencer on the elevated road, and they've made the Brooklyn Bridge so quiet that you can almost hear a lady scream when she's knocked down by a conductor. The trouble is, people are getting sensitive about having New York called the loudest city in the world. And then there's a lot of sound-proof cranks like J. Whiffington Whack used to be—they make a lot of trouble. ”

“ It seems the company was suing somebody's heirs for about half the real estate in Long Island, and they'd given J. Whiffington the biggest job of his life—summing up alibis and ad valoriums which the company positively had to see by five o'clock that afternoon. J. Whiffington got down to his office before the janitor was up, and was just biting his teeth into page three-thirty-three of the law-book when in comes the office-boy and, standing in the hallway outside, began an imitation of Frank Tinney. ”

“ There's nothing in the world so silent as the inside of a submarine under water. If you got any thinking to do, or want to pull off something in the murder line, hire a submarine. Charges, ten dollars an hour as long as you want, inside a year.'
"'Who'll run her?' asks Whiff, still sort of doubtful.
"'Me,' says Ike. ”

“ I agreed. "Did you say this J. Whiffington Whack had become entirely noisy in his ideas?"
"He believes," explained Hamilcar, "in doing business on the Diamond Jim Brady principles with a little dash of Roosevelt on the side."
By now the old-fashioned barber was combing my hair college-boy style. The face I saw in the mirror was pleasingly strange to me. I put my spectacles in their case.
Hamilcar was visibly affected. "Honest," he exclaimed, "you dropped twenty years with them whiskers. Go buy yourself a hurrah suit of clothes now, and a burnt-orange necktie, and—gee! ”

“ Here a man can open his trap and let out a little dialogue without a spotter coming along and putting you on the carpet. I used to work at the Grand Babel Hotel. That's a choice morgue."
"It certainly is," I agreed, just as he lathered my mouth. ”