Sir Thomas Browne said that Eve was "edified out of the rib of
Adam." This little book was edified (for the most part) out of
the ribs of two friendly newspapers, The New York _Evening Post_
and The Philadelphia _Evening Public Ledger_. To them, and to
_The Bookman_, _Everybody's_, and _The Publishers' Weekly_, I am
grateful for permission to reprint.
Tristram Shandy said, "When a man is hemm'd in by two indecorums,
and must commit one of 'em let him chuse which he will, the world
will blame him." Now it is one indecorum to let this collection
of small sketches go out (as they do) unrevised and just as they
assaulted the defenceless reader of the daily prints; and the
other indecorum would be to take fragments of this kind too
gravely, and attempt by more careful disposition of their pallid
members to arrange them into some appearance of painless decease.
As Gilbert Chesterton said (I wish I could say, on a similar
occasion): "Their vices are too vital to be improved with a blue
pencil, or with anything I can think of, except dynamite."
These sketches gave me pain to write; they will give the
judicious patron pain to read; therefore we are quits. I think,
as I look over their slattern paragraphs, of that most tragic
hour--it falls about 4 P. M. in the office of an evening
newspaper--when the unhappy compiler tries to round up the
broodings of the day and still get home in time for supper. And
yet perhaps the will-to-live is in them, for are they not a naked
exhibit of the antics a man will commit in order to earn a
living? In extenuation it may be pleaded that none of them are so
long that they may not be mitigated by an accompanying pipe of
tobacco.