sheets of The Post under the man’s nose, and in a torrential harangue, sown thickly with stuttering speech, buffoonery, and ingratiation, delivered so rapidly that the man could neither accept nor reject the magazine, hound him before a grinning public down the length of a street, backing him defensively into a wall, and taking from the victim’s eager fingers the five-cent coin that purchased his freedom.
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir,” he would begin in a sonorous voice, dropping wide-leggedly into the “prospect’s” stride. “This week’s edition of The Saturday Evening Post, five cents, only a nickel, p-p-p— purchased weekly by t-t-two million readers. In this week’s issue you have eighty-six pages of f-f-fact and fiction, to say n-n— nothing of the advertisements. If you c-c-c-can’t read you’ll get m-m-more than your money’s worth out of the p-p-pictures. On page 13 this week, we have a very fine article, by I-I-I-Isaac F. Marcosson, the f-f-f-famous traveller and writer on politics; on page 29, you have a story by Irvin S. Cobb, the g-g-g-greatest living humorist, and a new story of the prize-ring by J-J-Jack London. If you b-b-bought it in a book, it’d c-c-cost you a d-d— dollar-and-a-half.”
He had, besides these chance victims, an extensive clientry among the townsfolk. Swinging briskly and cheerily down the street, full of greetings and glib repartee, he would accost each of the grinning men by a new title, in a rich stammering tenor voice:
“Colonel, how are you! Major—here you are, a week’s reading hot off the press. Captain, how’s the boy?”
“How are you, son?”
“Couldn’t be better, General—slick as a puppy’s belly!”
And they would roar with wheezing, red-faced, Southern laughter:
“By God, he’s a good’un. Here, son, give me one of the damn things. I don’t want it, but I’ll buy it just to hear you talk.”
He was full of pungent and racy vulgarity: he had, more than any of the family, a Rabelaisian earthiness that surged in him with limitless energy, charging his tongue with unpremeditated comparisons, Gargantuan metaphors. Finally, he wet the bed every night in spite of Eliza’s fretting complaints: it was the
