René had never before searched for a colored man in the Negro residential quarter of an American city. As time passed, he had more and more a sense that he was pursuing a phantom; it began to shame him to ask the whereabouts of such ghostly, blatantly immaterial lodgings as the house of Aquilla’s brother.
But he came back because the herd (society) is all we have and we cannot stray without shortly finding that the wolves have to eat us, too. He preached his special gospel to the herd. They (let us assume) liked it or half liked it. It worked.
Then there’s Emily. You know what happened to her; one night her husband came home and told her she was acting cold to him, but that he’d fix that up. So he built a bonfire under her bed, made up of shoes and things, and set fire to it. And if the leather hadn’t smelled so terrible, she’d have been burned to death.
The absent-minded gentleman on the train started to get off at the wrong station. As he walked back to his seat he assumed a mirthless smile and said aloud as though he were talking to himself: “I thought this was Great Neck.”
But he couldn’t smooth over his mistake—we all knew that he had made a fool of himself and looked upon him with distaste and contempt.
A man wrapped up some domestic rats in small blankets cut from an old carpet, lest they should spread germs. A few months after he had turned them loose he found young rats around the house with carpet patterns on their fur.
“How peculiar!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t suspect it would turn out that way when I wrapped up those rats.”
But it did.
Story of the ugly aunt in album.
Jimmy the 95 pd. center.
The girl who fell off the shelf.
Once there was a whole lot of bird seed around the room because an author had adopted a chicken. It was impossible to explain to anyone just why he had adopted the chicken, but still more impossible to know why he had bought the bird-seed for the chicken. The chicken was later broiled and the bird-seed thrown out, but the question of whether the man was an author or a lunatic was still unsolved in the minds of the hotel servants who had to deal with the situation. The hotel servants didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand how months later the author could write a story about it, but they all bought the magazine.