NEVER met it myself, but I knew Whibley very well indeed, so that I came to hear a goodish deal about it. It appeared to be devoted to Whibley, and Whibley was extremely fond of it. Personally, I am not interested in spirits, and no spirit has ever interested…

I have a perfect horror of pianos," said Frémecourt, "of those hateful boxes which fill up a drawing-room, and have not even the soft sound and the queer shape of the mahogany or veneered spinets, to which our grandmothers sighed out exquisite, long-forgotten…

  "Satan," said Jeff Peters, "is a hard boss to work for. When other people are having their vacation is when he keeps you the busiest. As old Dr. Watts or St. Paul or some other diagnostician says: 'He always finds somebody for idle hands to do.    "I remember…

In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called "places." These "places" make strange angles and curves. One street crosses itself a time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable…

Once there was a bad little boy whose name was Jim — though, if you will notice, you will find that bad little boys are nearly always called James in your Sunday-school books. It was strange, but still it was true that this one was called Jim.    He didn't…

IT has been told me by those in a position to know—and I can believe it—that at nineteen months of age he wept because his grandmother would not allow him to feed her with a spoon; and that at three and a half he was fished, in an exhausted condition, out…

"There, my friend," I said to Labarbe, "you have just repeated those five words, 'That pig of a Morin.' Why on earth do I never hear Morin's name mentioned without his being called a pig?" Labarbe, who is a Deputy, looked at me with eyes like an owl's, and…

"At that time I was editor of the 'Fanal des Charentes,' and I used to meet Morin every day at the Café du Commerce. The day after his adventure he came to see me, as he did not know what to do. I did not hide my opinion from him, but said to him: 'You are…

"Dinner made me lose my head altogether. I sat beside her, and my hand continually met hers under the table-cloth, my foot touched hers, and our looks encountered each other. "After dinner we took a walk by moonlight, and I whispered all the tender things…

 The conversation drifted smoothly and pleasantly along from weather to crops, from crops to literature, from literature to scandal, from scandal to religion; then took a random jump, and landed on the subject of burglar alarms. And now for the first time…

THE first time we met—to speak—he was sitting with his back against a pollard willow, smoking a clay pipe. He smoked it very slowly, but very conscientiously. After each whiff he removed the pipe from his mouth and fanned away the smoke with his cap. “Feeling…

Jeff Peters was always eloquent when the ethics of his profession was under discussion.    "The only times," said he, "that me and Andy Tucker ever had any hiatuses in our cordial intents was when we differed on the moral aspects of grafting. Andy had his…

THERE were three of us in the smoke room of the Alexandra; a very good friend of mine, myself, and, in the opposite corner, a shy-looking, unobtrusive man, the editor, as we subsequently learned, of a New York Sunday paper. My friend and I were discussing…

"I hope some day to retire from business," said Jeff Peters; "and when I do I don't want anybody to be able to say that I ever got a dollar of any man's money without giving him a quid pro rata for it. I've always managed to leave a customer some little gewgaw…

YOU ask him to dine with you on Thursday to meet a few people who are anxious to know him. “Now don’t make a muddle of it,” you say, recollectful of former mishaps, “and come on the Wednesday.” He laughs good-naturedly as he hunts through the room for his…

 "I never could hold my partner, Andy Tucker, down to legitimate ethics of pure swindling," said Jeff Peters to me one day.    "Andy had too much imagination to be honest. He used to devise schemes of money-getting so fraudulent and high-financial that they…

NOT the Mr. ——, really?” In her deep brown eyes there lurked pleased surprise, struggling with wonder. She looked from myself to the friend who had introduced us with a bewitching smile of incredulity, tempered by hope. He assured her, adding laughingly:…

 Across our two dishes of spaghetti, in a corner of Provenzano's restaurant, Jeff Peters was explaining to me the three kinds of graft.    Every winter Jeff comes to New York to eat spaghetti, to watch the shipping in East River from the depths of his chinchilla…

BUMP. Bump. Bump-bump. Bump. I sat up in bed and listened intently. It seemed to me as if someone, with a muffled hammer, were trying to knock bricks out of the wall. “Burglars,” I said to myself (one assumes, as a matter of course, that everything happening…

 The first time my optical nerves was disturbed by the sight of Buckingham Skinner was in Kansas City. I was standing on a corner when I see Buck stick his straw-colored head out of a third-story window of a business block and holler, "Whoa, there! Whoa!"…