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234695 74885 135564 327539 76407 150719 15443 90682 316299 84766 128321 60038 81326 141870 190105 107160 29348 103349 21614 326908 3289 78174 259329 228808 225022 276590 80359 30742 260627 207599 236556 189317 182128 206371 294129 195535 195383 285111 273767 227997 208531 145028 182382 133071 155854 302991 254467 16041 146232 141944 97631 160652 130359 220336 20380 243151 118110 85444 236084 245047 308694 244950 155098 58517 324490 223933 125524 38726 189412 99250 216910 295908 74205 99140 247950 248732 268749 10536 64845 237661 168825 151578 121286 32258 48733 127137 184541 171286 75718 168999 295748 289705 306310 43228 14830 5032 162446 118695 42194 292323 251893 330314 11473 24055 232003 307091 163549 232256 143717 279407 121876 205061 56449 94896 109308 62301 244701 141444 135678 105245 81150 58106 95616 126493 47907 196500 302559 238255 250323 55989 292364 21021 241122 121978 205928 292422 5969 179384 272463 159403 85218 230860 131846 213185 197136 195882 335189 53433 143342 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64487 134383 66199 327866 174853 158607 240910 241617 210946 166092 246215 224405 242409 181568 36537 156980 159944 339328 275432 143518 267848 232540 247697 225876 65361 133386 206988 235324 23066 297614 46401 155962 120591 199055 87541 64709 164220 244947 20409 325255 125996 117680 124706 106644 232644 40690 174124 313789 165962 229204 281180 72348 245913 280549 286211 307265 270782 166442 145568 338146 242776 324364 208007 27377 104079 101971 63749 287756 25882 162786 204242 117360 46250 163566 191835 146172 201723 172500 28105 45252 22860 170591 233511 51112 88982 142548 25972 196472 208145 252974 4371 256178 113547 90900 12125 247420 60309 161353 286487 302665 153877 27623 239678 136303 258747 106127 340039 5165 303135 245457 47448 285315 215283 170029 91986 124360 90906 96167 52243 100445 235471 203589 211707 282813 224381 147213 291495 272061 183588 15343 98908 280410 212772 51901 2535 7672 229768 279609 260694 39127 13957 39844 100354 254247 295518 247759 137655 238390 332819 249172 281084 138158 315045 143740 216418 143844 135649 215471 118589 39533 25345 15178 42975 85483 287335 207375 216549 216339 286769 123060 199306 90996 65082 125638 253629 257414 102236 251603 317933 131725 307622 76047 174205 105295 329219 314259 289825 210538 213460 61044 50281 193582 128472 282248 107360 93380 137091 46532 257228 286936 330811 151226 298998 260312 261604 172383 93391 240451 174096 38945 30276 106550 6020 225509 264458 25212 142676 259148 336933 275732 246392 325708 295200 260995 63358 126833 51725 313381 238386 318984 193651 65039 123771 331897 97486 157303 268354 34675 230113 261728 289531 211207 329124 141477 310828 148834 28778 328911 290046 159945 235171 253565 103634 49461 332292 44933 311003 50529 262399 106192 215576 90807 87260 214084 93240 232033 274666 283082 157676 283505 248224 108799 34830 328211 43500 48972 334087 218158 102688 90780 74098 336143 218241 294480 102720 239586 85635 220143 169911 48846 130852 124630 292197 68789 97923 269300 226528 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promised himself. "This here wrinkled outfit is some too woolly for the big town. It's a good suit yet--'most as good as when I bought it at the Boston Store in Tucson three years ago. But I reckon I'll save it to go home in." To a policeman directing traffic at a crossing he applied for information. "Can you tell me where there's a dry-goods store in this man's town?" he asked. "I fell into this here Broadway and got kinda messed up." "Watchawant?" "Suit o' clothes." The traffic cop sized him up in one swift glance. "Siventh Avenue," he said, and pointed in that direction. Clay took his advice. He stopped in front of a store above which was the legend "I. Bernstein, Men's Garments." A small man with sharp little eyes and well-defined nose was standing in the doorway. "Might you would want a good suit of qvality clothes, my friendt," he suggested. "You've pegged me right," agreed the Westerner with his ready smile. "Lead me to it." Mr. Bernstein personally conducted his customer to the suit department. "I wait on you myself on account you was a stranger to the city," he explained. The little man took a suit from a rack and held it at arm's length to admire it. His fingers caressed the woof of it lovingly. He evidently could bring himself to part with it only after a struggle. "Worsted. Fine goods." He leaned toward the range-rider and whispered a secret. "Imported." Clay shook his head. "Not what I want." His eyes ranged the racks. "This is more my notion of the sort of thing I like." He pointed to a blue serge with a little stripe in the pattern. The eyes of Mr. Bernstein marveled at the discrimination of his customer. "If you had taken an advice from me, it would have been to buy that suit. A man gets a chance at a superior garment like that, understan' me, only once in a while occasionally." "How much?" asked Lindsay. The dealer was too busy to hear this crass question. That suit, Clay gathered, had been the pride of his heart ever since he had seen it first. He detached the coat lovingly from the hanger and helped his customer into it. Then he fell back, eyes lit with enthusiastic amazement. Only fate could have brought together this man and this suit, so manifestly destined for each other since the hour when Eve began to patch up fig leaves for Adam. "Like a coat of paint," he murmured aloud. The cowpuncher grinned. He understood the business that went with selling a suit in some stores. But it happened that he liked this suit himself. "How much?" he repeated. The owner of the store dwelt on the merits of the suit, its style, its durability, the perfect fit. He covered his subject with artistic thoroughness. Then, reluctantly, he confided in a whisper the price at which he was going to sacrifice this suit among suits. "To you, my friendt, I make this garment for only sixty-five dollars." He added another secret detail. "Below wholesale cost." A little devil of mirth lit in Lindsay's eye. "I'd hate to have you rob yoreself like that. And me a perfect stranger to you too." "Qvality, y' understan' me. Which a man must got to live garments like I done to appreciate such a suit. All wool. Every thread of it. Unshrinkable. This is a qvality town. If you want the best it costs a little more, but you got anyhow a suit which a man might be married in without shame, understan' me." The Arizonan backed off in apparent alarm. "Say, is this a weddin' garment you're onload'n' on me? Do I have to sashay down a church aisle and promise I do?" Mr. Bernstein explained that this was not obligatory. All he meant was that the suit was good enough to be married in, or for that matter to be buried in. "Or to be born anew in when Billy Sunday comes to town and I hit the sawdust trail," suggested the purchaser. Mr. Bernstein caressed it again. "One swell piece of goods," he told himself softly, almost with tears in his eyes. "All wool, you say?" asked Clay, feeling the texture. He had made up his mind to buy it, though he thought the price a bit stiff. Mr. Bernstein protested on his honor that there was not a thread of cotton in it. "Which you could take it from me that when I sell a suit. . . . . . .
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had proprietors who backed them right or wrong, and specially when they were wrong (which is the sole secret of journalism), and that their fate did not hang on any passing owner's passing mood, they did miracles. But we did not neglect Huckley. As Ollyett said our first care was to create an 'arresting atmosphere' round it. He used to visit the village of week-ends, on a motor-bicycle with a side-car; for which reason I left the actual place alone and dealt with it in the abstract. Yet it was I who drew first blood. Two inhabitants of Huckley wrote to contradict a small, quite solid paragraph in _The Bun_ that a hoopoe had been seen at Huckley and had, 'of course, been shot by the local sportsmen.' There was some heat in their letters, both of which we published. Our version of how the hoopoe got his crest from King Solomon was, I grieve to say, so inaccurate that the Rector himself--no sportsman as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy--wrote to us to correct it. We gave his letter good space and thanked him. 'This priest is going to be useful,' said Ollyett. 'He has the impartial mind. I shall vitalise him.' Forthwith he created M.L. Sigden, a recluse of refined tastes who in _The Bun_ demanded to know whether this Huckley-of-the-Hoopoe was the Hugly of his boyhood and whether, by any chance, the fell change of name had been wrought by collusion between a local magnate and the railway, in the mistaken interests of spurious refinement. 'For I knew it and loved it with the maidens of my day--_eheu ab angulo!_--as Hugly,' wrote M.L. Sigden from Oxf. Though other papers scoffed, _The Bun_ was gravely sympathetic. Several people wrote to deny that Huckley had been changed at birth. Only the Rector--no philosopher as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy--had his doubts, which he laid publicly before Mr. M.L. Sigden who suggested, through _The Bun_, that the little place might have begun life in Anglo-Saxon days as 'Hogslea' or among the Normans as 'Argil�,' on account of its much clay. The Rector had his own ideas too (he said it was mostly gravel), and M.L. Sigden had a fund of reminiscences. Oddly enough--which is seldom the case with free reading-matter--our subscribers rather relished the correspondence, and contemporaries quoted freely. 'The secret of power,' said Ollyett, 'is not the big stick. It's the liftable stick.' (This means the 'arresting' quotation of six or seven lines.) 'Did you see the _Spec._ had a middle on "Rural Tenacities" last week. That was all Huckley. I'm doing a "Mobiquity" on Huckley next week.' Our 'Mobiquities' were Friday evening accounts of easy motor-bike-_cum_-side-car trips round London, illustrated (we could never get that machine to work properly) by smudgy maps. Ollyett wrote the stuff with a fervour and a delicacy which I always ascribed to the side-car. His account of Epping Forest, for instance, was simply young love with its soul at its lips. But his Huckley 'Mobiquity' would have sickened a soap-boiler. It chemically combined loathsome familiarity, leering suggestion, slimy piety and rancid 'social service' in one fuming compost that fairly lifted me off my feet. 'Yes,' said he, after compliments. 'It's the most vital, arresting and dynamic bit of tump I've done up to date. _Non nobis gloria!_ I met Sir Thomas Ingell in his own park. He talked to me again. He inspired most of it.' 'Which? The "glutinous native drawl," or "the neglected adenoids of the village children"?' I demanded. 'Oh, no! That's only to bring in the panel doctor. It's the last flight we--I'm proudest of.' This dealt with 'the crepuscular penumbra spreading her dim limbs over the boskage'; with 'jolly rabbits'; with a herd of 'gravid polled Angus'; and with the 'arresting, gipsy-like face of their swart, scholarly owner--as well known at the Royal Agricultural Shows as that of our late King-Emperor.' '"Swart" is good and so's "gravid,"' said I, 'but the panel doctor will be annoyed about the adenoids.' 'Not half as much as Sir Thomas will about his face,' said Ollyett. 'And if you only knew what I've left out!' He was right. The panel doctor spent his week-end (this is the advantage of Friday articles) in overwhelming us with a professional counterblast of no interest whatever to our subscribers. We told him so, and he, then and there, battered his way with it into the _Lancet_ where they are keen on glands, and forgot us altogether. But Sir Thomas Ingell was of sterner stuff. He must have spent a happy week-end too. The letter which we received from him on Monday proved him to be a kinless loon of upright life, for no woman, however remotely interested in a man would have let it pass the home wastepaper-basket. He objected to our references to his own herd, to his own labours in his own village, which he said was a Model Village, and to our infernal insolence; but he objected most to our invoice of his features. We wrote him courtously to ask whether the letter was meant for publication. He, remembering, I presume, the Duke of Wellington, wrote back, 'publish and be damned.' 'Oh! This is too easy,' Ollyett said as he began heading the letter. 'Stop a minute,' I said. 'The game is getting a little beyond us. To-night's the Bat dinner.' (I may have forgotten to tell you that our dinner with Bat Masquerier in the Red Amber Room of the Chop Suey had come to be a weekly affair.) 'Hold it over till they've all seen it.'. . . . . . .
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THE DIGNITY OF DOLLARS Man is a blind, helpless creature. He looks back with pride upon his goodly heritage of the ages, and yet obeys unwittingly every mandate of that heritage; for it is incarnate with him, and in it are embedded the deepest roots of his soul. Strive as he will, he cannot escape it--unless he be a genius, one of those rare creations to whom alone is granted the privilege of doing entirely new and original things in entirely new and original ways. But the common clay-born man, possessing only talents, may do only what has been done before him. At the best, if he work hard, and cherish himself exceedingly, he may duplicate any or all previous performances of his kind; he may even do some of them better; but there he stops, the composite hand of his whole ancestry bearing heavily upon him. And again, in the matter of his ideas, which have been thrust upon him, and which he has been busily garnering from the great world ever since the day when his eyes first focussed and he drew, startled, against the warm breast of his mother--the tyranny of these he cannot shake off. Servants of his will, they at the same time master him. They may not coerce genius, but they dictate and sway every action of the clay-born. If he hesitate on the verge of a new departure, they whip him back into the well-greased groove; if he pause, bewildered, at sight of some unexplored domain, they rise like ubiquitous finger-posts and direct him by the village path to the communal meadow. And he permits these things, and continues to permit them, for he cannot help them, and he is a slave. Out of his ideas he may weave cunning theories, beautiful ideals; but he is working with ropes of sand. At the slightest stress, the last least bit of cohesion flits away, and each idea flies apart from its fellows, while all clamour that he do this thing, or think this thing, in the ancient and time-honoured way. He is only a clay-born; so he bends his neck. He knows further that the clay-born are a pitiful, pitiless majority, and that he may do nothing which they do not do. It is only in some way such as this that we may understand and explain the dignity which attaches itself to dollars. In the watches of the night, we may assure ourselves that there is no such dignity; but jostling with our fellows in the white light of day, we find that it does exist, and that we ourselves measure ourselves by the dollars we happen to possess. They give us confidence and carriage and dignity--ay, a personal dignity which goes down deeper than the garments with which we hide our nakedness. The world, when it knows nothing else of him, measures a man by his clothes; but the man himself, if he be neither a genius nor a philosopher, but merely a clay-born, measures himself by his pocket-book. He cannot help it, and can no more fling it from him than can the bashful young man his self-consciousness when crossing a ballroom floor. I remember once absenting myself from civilization for weary months. When I returned, it was to a strange city in another country. The people were but slightly removed from my own breed, and they spoke the same tongue, barring a certain barbarous accent which I learned was far older than the one imbibed by me with my mother's milk. A fur cap, soiled and singed by many camp-fires, half sheltered the shaggy tendrils of my uncut hair. My foot-gear was of walrus hide, cunningly blended with seal gut. The remainder of my dress was as primal and uncouth. I was a sight to give merriment to gods and men. Olympus must have roared at my coming. The world, knowing me not, could judge me by my clothes alone. But I refused to be so judged. My spiritual backbone stiffened, and I held my head high, looking all men in the eyes. And I did these things, not that I was an egotist, not that I was impervious to the critical glances of my fellows, but because of a certain hogskin belt, plethoric and sweat-bewrinkled, which buckled next the skin above the hips. Oh, it's absurd, I grant, but had that belt not been so circumstanced, and so situated, I should have shrunk away into side streets and back alleys, walking humbly and avoiding all gregarious humans except those who were likewise abroad without belts. Why? I do not know, save that in such way did my fathers before me. Viewed in the light of sober reason, the whole thing was preposterous. But I walked down the gang-plank with the mien of a hero, of a barbarian who knew himself to be greater than the civilization he invaded. I was possessed of the arrogance of a Roman governor. At last I knew what it was to be born to the purple, and I took my seat in the hotel carriage as though it were my chariot about to proceed with me to the imperial palace. People discreetly dropped their eyes before my proud gaze, and into their hearts I know I forced the query, What manner of man can this mortal be? I was superior to convention, and the very garb which otherwise would have damned me tended toward my elevation. And all this was due, not to my royal lineage, nor to the deeds I had done and the champions I had overthrown, but to a certain hogskin belt buckled next the skin. The sweat of months was upon it, toil had defaced it, and it was not a creation such as would appeal to the aesthetic mind; but it was plethoric. There was the arcanum; each yellow grain conduced to my exaltation, and the sum of these grains was the sum of my mightiness. Had they been less, just so would have been my stature; more, and I should have reached the sky. And this was my royal progress through that most loyal city. I purchased a host of things from the tradespeople, and bought me such pleasures and diversions as befitted one who had long been denied. I scattered my gold lavishly, nor did I chaffer over prices in mart or exchange. And, because of these things I did, I demanded homage. Nor was it refused. I moved through wind-swept groves of limber backs; across sunny glades, lighted by the beaming rays from a thousand obsequious eyes; and when I tired of this, basked on the greensward of popular approval. Money was very good, I thought, and for the time was content. But there rushed upon me the words of Erasmus, "When I get some money I shall buy me some Greek books, and afterwards some clothes," and a great shame wrapped me. . . . . . .
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