Best Short Stories eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 175 pages of information about Best Short Stories.

Best Short Stories eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 175 pages of information about Best Short Stories.

Last summer a young married couple from Chicago camped in a luxurious lodge three miles above old Haskins’s place.  A baby was born at the lodge, and the only scales the father could obtain on which to weigh the child was that with which Andy Haskins had weighed all the big fish he had caught in ten years.

The baby tipped the scales at thirty-five pounds!

EVIDENCE

Circumstantial evidence is not always conclusive.  But certain kinds of it cannot be disputed.  In the following colloquy the policeman appears to have the best of it.

“Not guilty, sir,” replied the prisoner.

“Where did you find the prisoner?” asked the magistrate.

“In Trafalgar Square, sir,” was the Bobby’s reply.

“And what made you think he was intoxicated?”

“Well, sir, he was throwing his walking-stick into the basin of one of the fountains and trying to entice one of the stone lions to go and fetch it out again.”

A FUTURE STATESMAN

All the talk of hyphenated citizenship has evidently had its effect upon a San Francisco youngster, American born, who recently rebelled fiercely when his Italian father whipped him for some misdemeanor.

“But, Tomaso,” said one of the family, “your father has a right to whip you when you are bad.”

Tomaso’s eyes flashed.  “I am a citizen of the United States,” he declared.  “Do you think that I am going to let any foreigner lick me?”

SMARTY!

William Dean Howells, at a dinner in Boston, said of modern American letters:  “The average popular novel shows, on the novelist’s part, an ignorance of his trade, which reminds me of a New England clerk.  In a New England village I entered the main-street department store one afternoon and said to the clerk at the book counter:  ’Let me have, please, the “Letters of Charles Lamb".’  ’Post-office right across the street, Mr. Lamb,’ said the clerk, with a polite, brisk smile”

HOW TO TELL A WELL-BRED DOG

If he defies all the laws of natural beauty and symmetry,

If he has a disease calling for specialists,

If he cannot eat anything but Russian caviar and broiled sweetbreads,

If he costs more than a six-cylinder roadster,

If he must be bathed in rose water and fed out of a cutglass bowl,

If he cannot be touched by the naked hand, or patted more than twice a day,

If he refuses to wear anything but imported leather collars,

If he has to sleep on a silk cushion.

If he dies before you can get him home.

Then he is a well-bred dog.

TRY IT AND SEE

A few years ago, while watching a parade in Boston in which the Stars and Stripes were conspicuous, a fair foreigner with strong anti-American proclivities turned to a companion, and commenting on the display, pettishly remarked: 

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Best Short Stories from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.