Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns)Riley, James Whitcomb
General
Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns)
Riley, James Whitcomb
American wit and humor
No one realizes more fully than I the great power of the press for good
or evil. Rightly used the newspaper can make or unmake men, and wrongly
used it can be even more sinister. I might say, knowing this as I do, I
want to be placed right before the people. The above is not a correct
illustration or description of my house, for several reasons. In the
first place, it is larger and more robust in appearance, and in the
second place it has not the same _tout ensemble_ as my residence. My
house is less obtrusive and less arrogant in its demeanor than the
foregoing, and it has no elevator in it.
My house is not the kind that seems to crave an elevator. An elevator in
my house would lose money. There is no popular clamor for one, and if I
were to put one in I would have to abolish the dining-room. It would
also interfere with the parlor.
I have learned recently that the correspondent who came here to write up
this matter visited the town while I was in the South, and as he could
not find me he was at the mercy of strangers. A young man who lives here
and who is just in the heyday of life, gleefully consented to show the
correspondent my new residence not yet completed. So they went over and
examined the new Oliver Wendell Holmes Hospital, which will be completed
in June and which is, of course, a handsome structure, but quite
different from my house in many particulars.
For instance, my residence is of a different school of architecture,
being rather on the Scandinavian order, while the foregoing has a
tendency toward the Ironic. The hospital belongs to a very recent
school, as I may say, while my residence, in its architectural methods
and conception, goes back to the time of the mound builders, a time when
a Gothic hole in the ground was considered the _magnum bonum_ and the
scrumptuous thing in art. If the reader will go around behind the above
building and notice it carefully on the east side, he will not discover
a dried coonskin nailed to the rear breadths of the wood-shed. That
alone ought to convince an observing man that the house is not mine. The
coonskin regardant will always be found emblazoned on my arms, together
with a blue Goddess of Liberty and my name in green India ink.
[Illustration]
Above I give a rough sketch of my house. Of course I have idealized it
somewhat, but only in order to catch the eye of the keenly observant
reader. The front part of the house runs back to the time of Polypus the
First, while the L, which does not show in the drawing, runs back as far
as the cistern.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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