In Room 4 was a man who had fallen out of a rug and broken three ribs. We sent him spareribs for his supper.
Room 6A was occupied by a ball player with Charley horse. We sent him some oats.
I have forgotten what ailed the woman in Room 11 and what we did to her.
Those are just a few of the pranks we played in Polyandry Hospital on Halloween, 1896.
XIX
A Soft Job
Dr. Pearson, on the day of my release from the hospital, warned me that I would have to be careful for at least a year and advised me not to return to the nerve wracking profession of journalism.
“Get into some calmer line of work,” he said, “something that won’t be much of a physical or mental strain.”
“What, for instance, Duck?”42 I inquired.
“The calmest, most leisurely calling I can think of,” replied the doctor, “is that of a ticket agent in a large railroad terminal.”
In compliance with this hint, I investigated and found that applicants for such a position were required to take a week’s training. The training outfit consisted of a ticket rack in which were tickets to every town in the country, arranged in alphabetical order; a flat shelf equipped with date stamps, pencils and pens, and an iron grating which separated the student from the practice customers.
The applicant had to report at 8 o’clock in the morning. His first duty was to break the points of the pens and pencils and set the date stamp either six months behind or ahead of the current date. Then, all day long until 6 in the evening, crowds of practice customers kept coming up and standing in front of the grating. The applicant was instructed to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the floor except twice during the day, when he might look at a customer and wait on him, there being a rule that no one agent might sell more than two tickets per diem.
The first practice customer whom the applicant deigned to notice would, we will say, ask for a ticket to Baltimore. The applicant would look through the T’s, M’s, K’s and any other six letters; then turn his attention to the B part of the rack and produce a ticket to Baltimore. He would then twirl his date stamp six months ahead or behind as the case might be, and stamp the ticket. If the fare to Baltimore was $4.10, he would have to borrow a good pencil or pen from another applicant and write one under the other, the figures $4.00 and .10, on an envelope; then scratch his head and add them and write down the total—$4.10. The practice customer would then submit a five dollar bill and the applicant would repeat to himself the names of all his friends in a painstaking effort to think of somebody who might have change.
I learned all these tricks easily and was given a position at one of the windows in Grand Central Station, New York. On the first day I lived up to the rules, looked at only two people and sold two tickets. But after that, my natural imaginativeness and individuality overcame my sense of duty and I proceeded to revolutionize the ticket selling industry. One or two samples of my methods, and their results, may prove interesting.
A beautiful widow with two children asked for tickets to Peekskill.
“Madam,” I said, “Peekskill has many attractions, but I think you would find Ardsley just as nice, and it’s nearer and cheaper.”
“All right, make it Ardsley,” said she. “And how about my kiddies? Are they half fare?”
“Not half as fair as their mummy,” said I. “But joking to one side, I think it is a mistake to take them at all. I know a fellow in Ardsley who wants to marry a widow and I will gladly give you a letter of introduction to him. But he hates children and if you were to show up with those two, well, to put it mildly, whelps, your chances of matrimony would go glimmering.”
“Mamma,” whined one of the whelps, “let’s go glimmering.”
This remark may have settled the issue; at any rate, the little lady made the trip alone, leaving her children in the waiting room, where, I heard later, they were quite a nuisance for a couple of days; after which they disappeared. Their mother married the Ardsley wight, who left her, in four years, with three new children, or one up on what she had before, to say nothing of the superior quality of the later litter.
On another occasion, my frankness led me into a lasting comradeship with Nora Bayes, who came to my window one afternoon and demanded a ticket to Albany and a lower berth to Syracuse.
“But, Miss Bayes,” I remonstrated, “if you are only going to Albany, why do you want a berth to Syracuse?”
“Because I always sleep past my station,” was her reply.
This struck me as so comical that I hurried up to the athletic field of the University of Columbia and watched some of the men practice broad jumping.
XX
Dan Boone’s Joke
One of the traits or characteristics for which the writer has been noted in recent years is dignity, self-possession. Only the other day I was complimented on this by no less a personage than Mr. Charles M. Schwab.
“Lardy,” he said in his enchanting southern drawl, “you certainly have a lot of poise.”
“Yes,” I replied lightly. “Three are at home and one is away at school.”
But at the time of which I am now writing, I was so playful and “flighty” that it had never occurred to me to enter a vocation where solemnity and composure were deemed essential and it was a shock to me when my good friend Daniel Boone suggested that I go into politics.
“Lardy,” he said, “why don’t you run for an office?”
“Why? Do you think it is going
