Читать книгу The Four-Masted Cat-Boat, and Other Truthful Tales онлайн

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“Here are points for pointless jokes. We don’t have much sale for them. Most persons prefer an application of Jokoleine. A recent issue of a comic weekly had sixty jokes and but one point, showing conclusively that points are out of fashion in some editorial rooms.

“A man came in yesterday,” rattled on the senior member, “and asked if we bought hand-made jokes, and before we could stop him he said that by hand-made jokes he meant jokes about servant-girls. We gave him the address of ‘Punch.’”

At this point I shook hands with Mr. Cose, and as I left he was saying: “For a suitable consideration we will guarantee to call anything a joke that you may bring in, and we will place it without hypnotic aid or the use of Jokoleine. It has been done before.”

And as I came away from the sound of his voice, I reflected that it had.

The other day I met Griggs on the cars. Griggs is the man with the mind. Other people have minds, but they’re not like Griggs’s. He lives in Rutherford, New Jersey, and is, like me, a commuter, and as neither of us plays cards nor is interested in politics, and as we have tabooed the weather as a topic, it almost always happens that when we meet, we, or rather he, falls back on his mind as subject for conversation. For my part, my daily newspaper would be all-sufficient for my needs on the way to town; but it pleases Griggs to talk, and it’s bad for my eyes to read on the cars, so I shut them up and cultivate the air of listening, the while Griggs discourses.