He was named Sidney, for the sake of elegance, just as his parents had for elegance in their Brooklyn parlor a golden-oak combination bookcase, desk, and shield-shaped mirror. But Sidney Dow was descended from generations of Georges and Johns, of Lorens and Lukes and Nathans. He was little esteemed in the slick bustle of his […]

Doctor Selig was an adventurer. He did not look it, certainly. He was an amiable young bachelor with thin hair. He was instructor in history and economics in Erasmus College, and he had to sit on a foolish little platform and try to coax some fifty young men and women, who were interested only in […]

I Bates lay staring at the green-shaded light on his desk and disgustedly he realized that he must have been sleeping there for hours on the leather couch in his office. His eyes were peppery, his mouth dry. He rose, staggering with the burden of drowsiness, and glanced at his watch. It was three in […]

The fatalities have been three thousand, two hundred and ninety-one, to date, with more reported in every cable from San Coloquin, but it is not yet decided whether the ultimate blame is due to the conductor of Car 22, to Mrs. Simmy Dolson’s bland selfishness, or to the fact that Willis Stodeport patted a sarsaparilla-colored […]

Donald Patrick Dorgan had served forty-four years on the police force of Northernapolis, and during all but five of that time he had patrolled the Forest Park section. Don Dorgan might have been a sergeant, or even a captain, but it had early been seen at headquarters that he was a crank about Forest Park. […]

The grandfather was Zebulun Dibble. He had a mustache like a horse’s mane; he wore a boiled shirt with no collar, and he manufactured oatmeal, very wholesome and tasteless. He moved from New Hampshire out to the city of Zenith in 1875, and in 1880 became the proud but irritated father of T. Jefferson Dibble. […]

I dare say there’s no man of large affairs, whether he is bank president or senator or dramatist, who hasn’t a sneaking love for some old rum-hound in a frightful hat, living back in a shanty and making his living by ways you wouldn’t care to examine too closely. (It was the Supreme Court Justice […]

Wakamin is a town with a soul. It used to have a sentimental soul which got thrills out of neighborliness and “The Star–Spangled Banner,” but now it wavers between two generations, with none of the strong, silly ambition of either. The pioneering generation has died out, and of the young men, a hundred have gone […]

At two in the morning, on Main Street of a Nebraska prairie town that ought to have been asleep since ten, a crowd was packed under a lone arc-light, chattering, laughing, and every moment peering down the dim street to westward. Out in the road were two new automobile tires, and cans of gasoline, oil, […]

I This is not the story of Theodora Duke and Stacy Lindstrom, but of a traveling bag with silver fittings, a collection of cloisonn, a pile of ratty school-books, and a fireless cooker that did not cook. Long before these things were acquired, when Theo was a girl and her father, Lyman Duke, was a […]

I From the drawer of his table Jasper Holt took a pane of window glass. He laid a sheet of paper on the glass and wrote, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party. ” He studied his round business-college script, and rewrote the sentence in a […]

The cottonwood is a tree of a slovenly and plebeian habit. Its woolly wisps turn gray the lawns and engender neighborhood hostilities about our town. Yet it is a mighty tree, a refuge and an inspiration; the sun flickers in its towering foliage, whence the tattoo of locusts enlivens our dusty summer afternoons. From the […]

In front of the Y Wurry Gas & Fixit Station, at Mechanicville, New York, the proprietor, Mr. Rabbit Tait, sat elegantly upon a kitchen chair. He was a figure, that Rabbit Tait—christened Thomas. His trousers might be spotty, and their hem resembled the jagged edges of magnified razor blades shown in the advertisements, but his […]