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Goat-Feathers By: Ellis Parker Butler (1869-1937) |
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BY Ellis Parker Butler BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY ELLIS PARKER BUTLER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE
THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM
G oat F eathers
GOAT FEATHERS
No human being ever tells the whole truth about himself. We seem to
be born liars in that particular, all of us, and I am no different.
I'm starting out now to tell the bitter, agonizing truth about
myself, but before I am through I shall probably be lying at the
rate of a mile a minute and cracking myself up something awful! A
man can tell only so much truth; then he begins to wabble. The truth is, I ought to be making as much money as Robert W.
Chambers, and winning prizes of honor like Ernest Poole, and I'm
not. I ought to be better known as a humorist than George Ade and
Mark Twain rolled into one, and I'm not. The trouble with me is
that I am always too ready and eager to break away and go gathering
goat feathers. If it had not been for that I might be a millionaire
or the President of the United States or the leading American
Author, bound in Red Russia leather. I might have been a Set of
Books, like Sir Walter Scott or Dickens or Balzac, and when people
passed my house the natives would say, "No, that isn't the city
hall or the court house; that's where Butler lives." Of course some
strangers would say, "Butler, the grocer?" but that would be the
ignorant few. The real people would whisper, "Butler, the Author!"
in a sort of subdued awe and remove their hats. Some of them would
pick a blade of grass from my lawn and take it home to hand down to
their children's children as the most treasured family possession.
As it is, I have gathered so many goat feathers that half the
people introduce me as Ellis Butler Parker and the other half as
Butler Parker Ellis, and if there is a ton of hay growing on my
lawn nobody bothers to pick a pint. My father has to cut it and
rake it away. Goat feathers, you understand, are the feathers a man picks and
sticks all over his hide to make himself look like the village
goat. It often takes six days, three hours and eighteen minutes to
gather one goat feather, and when a man has it and takes it home it
is about as useful and valuable to him as a stone bruise on the
back of his neck. I have recently spent several days over a month
gathering one goat feather, and as a reward I was grabbed and
chased after another that ate up two weeks and three days of my
time. Goat feathers are the distractions, side lines and
deflections that take a man's attention from his own business and
keep him from getting ahead. They are the Greatest Thing in the
World to make a man look like a goat. I think I can claim, without fear of dispute, to have gathered more
goat feathers in a fifty year career, and to look more like a goat,
than any other man living, and not excepting Pooh Bah, who added
such a pleasing, goat like character to Gilbert and Sullivan's
"Mikado." Pooh Bah, poor amateur! could boast only that he was
First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chief Justice, Commander in Chief,
Lord High Admiral, Master of the Buck Hounds, Groom of the Back
Stairs, Archbishop of Titipu, Lord Mayor, Lord Chamberlain,
Attorney General, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Privy Purse, Private
Secretary, Lord High Auditor, First Commissioner of Police,
Paymaster General, Judge Ordinary, Master of the Rolls, Secretary
of State for the Home Department, Groom of the Second Floor Front,
and Registrar. I can beat that all to pieces. When I wake in the morning as President of the Authors' League Fund
I can give some attention to my work as Publicity Manager of the
Liberty Loan Committee while preparing to devote an hour or two to
the Secretaryship of the Armenian Relief and the Treasurership of
the Volunteer Committee for the Fatherless Children of France,
before I consider my duties as Vice President of the Flushing
Savings and Loan and as Vice President, Director and Member of the
Discount Committee of the Flushing National Bank... Continue reading book >>
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Genres for this book |
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Humor |
Literature |
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