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. As a Councillor
and Member of the Executive Committee of the Authors' League, and
one of the Membership Committee of the City Club, Governor of the
Tuscarora Club and Publicity Manager for the Flushing Red Cross,
Flushing Red Cross Drive and Queensboro Red Cross Drive I can put
in a few hours of goat-feather gathering. Night may come without my
having to do any real work, but if not I can avoid it and
accumulate a few more goat-feathers as Member of the Book Committee
and Executive Committee of the Queensboro Public Library, Member of
the Queensboro Committee on Training Camp Activities, Executive
Committeeman of the Vigilantes, Authors' Committeeman of the
American Defense Society, and so on for hours and hours and hours.
I am a member of everything but the Mothers' Club of Public School
20, and everything takes time from my legitimate work. I estimate
that in the last twenty years I have gathered twenty thousand
pounds of goat-feathers at a cost of about five dollars a pound,
and the whole lot is worth about twenty cents.
What I marvel at is that I make a living at all. My telephone rings
seven thousand eight hundred and six times a day, and only once in
the last eight years has it been rung by any one who wanted to buy
a story from me. The other eighty-two million times it was rung by
people who wanted me to gather a new crop of goat-feathers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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