Tobin and me, the two of us, went down to Coney one day, for there was four dollars between us, and Tobin had need of distractions. For there was Katie Mahorner, his sweetheart, of County Sligo, lost since she started for America three months before with two hundred dollars, her own savings, and one hundred […]

My wife and I parted on that morning in precisely our usual manner. She left her second cup of tea to follow me to the front door. There she plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership) and bade me to take care of my cold. […]

The poet Longfellow–or was it Confucius, the inventor of wisdom?–remarked: “Life is real, life is earnest;And things are not what they seem.” As mathematics are–or is: thanks, old subscriber!–the only just rule by which questions of life can be measured, let us, by all means, adjust our theme to the straight edge and the balanced […]

When the inauguration was accomplished–the proceedings were made smooth by the presence of the Rough Riders–it is well known that a herd of those competent and loyal ex-warrriors paid a visit to the big city. The newspaper reporters dug out of their trunks the old broad-brimmed hats and leather belts that they wear to North […]

The other day I ran across my old friend Ferguson Pogue. Pogue is a conscientious grafter of the highest type. His headquarters is the Western Hemisphere, and his line of business is anything from speculating in town lots on the Great Staked Plains to selling wooden toys in Connecticut, made by hydraulic pressure from nutmegs […]

Mysteries follow one another so closely in a great city that the reading public and the friends of Johnny Bellchambers have ceased to marvel at his sudden and unexplained disappearance nearly a year ago. This particular mystery has now been cleared up, but the solution is so strange and incredible to the mind of the […]

The other day a poet friend of mine, who has lived in close communion with nature all his life, wrote a poem and took it to an editor. It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine breath of the fields, the song of birds, and the pleasant chatter of trickling streams. When the poet […]

The ranks of the Bed Line moved closer together; for it was cold. They were alluvial deposit of the stream of life lodged in the delta of Fifth Avenue and Broadway. The Bed Liners stamped their freezing feet, looked at the empty benches in Madison Square whence Jack Frost had evicted them, and muttered to […]

I can see the artist bite the end of his pencil and frown when it comes to drawing his Easter picture; for his legitimate pictorial conceptions of figures pertinent to the festival are but four in number. First comes Easter, pagan goddess of spring. Here his fancy may have free play. A beautiful maiden with […]

A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience. Therefore let us have the moral first and be done with it. All is not gold that glitters, but it is a wise child that keeps the stopper in […]

I suppose you know all about the stage and stage people. You’ve been touched with and by actors, and you read the newspaper criticisms and the jokes in the weeklies about the Rialto and the chorus girls and the long-haired tragedians. And I suppose that a condensed list of your ideas about the mysterious stageland […]

On an east-bound train I went into the smoker and found Jefferson Peters, the only man with a brain west of the Wabash River who can use his cerebrum cerebellum, and medulla oblongata at the same time. Jeff is in the line of unillegal graft. He is not to be dreaded by widows and orphans; […]

I I never got inside of the legitimate line of graft but once. But, one time, as I say, I reversed the decision of the revised statutes and undertook a thing that I’d have to apologize for even under the New Jersey trust laws. Me and Caligula Polk, of Muskogee in the Creek Nation, was […]

The first time my optical nerves was disturbed by the sight of Buckingham Skinner was in Kansas City. I was standing on a corner when I see Buck stick his straw-colored head out of a third-story window of a business block and holler, “Whoa, there! Whoa!” like you would in endeavoring to assuage a team […]

Across our two dishes of spaghetti, in a corner of Provenzano’s restaurant, Jeff Peters was explaining to me the three kinds of graft. Every winter Jeff comes to New York to eat spaghetti, to watch the shipping in East River from the depths of his chinchilla overcoat, and to lay in a supply of Chicago-made […]

“I never could hold my partner, Andy Tucker, down to legitimate ethics of pure swindling,” said Jeff Peters to me one day. “Andy had too much imagination to be honest. He used to devise schemes of money-getting so fraudulent and high-financial that they wouldn’t have been allowed in the bylaws of a railroad rebate system. […]

“I hope some day to retire from business,” said Jeff Peters; “and when I do I don’t want anybody to be able to say that I ever got a dollar of any man’s money without giving him a quid pro rata for it. I’ve always managed to leave a customer some little gewgaw to paste […]

Jeff Peters was always eloquent when the ethics of his profession was under discussion. “The only times,” said he, “that me and Andy Tucker ever had any hiatuses in our cordial intents was when we differed on the moral aspects of grafting. Andy had his standards and I had mine. I didn’t approve of all […]

“Satan,” said Jeff Peters, “is a hard boss to work for. When other people are having their vacation is when he keeps you the busiest. As old Dr. Watts or St. Paul or some other diagnostician says: ‘He always finds somebody for idle hands to do.’ “I remember one summer when me and my partner, […]

“As I have told you before,” said Jeff Peters, “I never had much confidence in the perfidiousness of woman. As partners or coeducators in the most innocent line of graft they are not trustworthy.” “They deserve the compliment,” said I. “I think they are entitled to be called the honest sex.” “Why shouldn’t they be?” […]