It rained the night before the wedding, but the park had been covered with tarpaulin and when this had been removed, Judge Landis examined the turf and ruled that the ceremony must go on. Hugga was greeted with commingled boos and cheers. She seemed perfectly calm. I learned afterward that this was the sixth time she had tempted Hymen. Mayor Walker of New York and Dudley Field Malone presented her with the keys to Key West and McKeesport and everybody stood up and bared their chests while the band played the Lapland national anthem.47
Nick Altrook and Al Schacht next put on their comical burlesque channel swim and then I entered leaning on the arm of a taxi driver. It was all he could do to hold me up.48
The one ring service was read by an official of the Lotus club and we adjourned to the wedding breakfast, consisting of half a grapefruit, cereal, choice of bacon or ham and eggs, or country sausage and wheat cakes, toast, rolls or muffins, coffee, tea, milk, cocoa, Kaffee Hag, open 7 to 9:30. Sundays, 7:30 to 10.
XXII
On My Honeymoon
After the wedding breakfast, my first act was to get a shave and a shine. Then I sought out my bride and broached her on the subject of a honeymoon.
“Where would you like to go on your honeymoon?” I broached her.
“I don’t care,” she rebroached, “as long as it is a place where we can be by ourselves.”
So I hailed a taxi and we caught the eleven o’clock express for Philadelphia and visited the Sesquicentennial Exposition. Hugga remarked that it reminded her of her native town, Skulk, in Lapland.49
We strolled up and down the Gladway and she asked me why it was so named. I replied that it was named in honor of the people who had backed the Exposition.
“And when is it going to open?” she asked.
“Who?” I rejoined.
“The Exposition,” said Hugga.
“It opened early last summer,” I told her.
“Oh!” said Hugga.
She was always making mistakes, but was always quick to acknowledge them.
I showed her the huge stadium in which Jack Dempsey had lost his title and I my shirt. I pointed out the spot where the ring had been located and the spot, six feet away from it, where I had sat. She was amazed when I informed her that the “house” had been sold out that night and exclaimed at the vast distance between the scene of battle and the most remote seats.
“Why, the people in some of those seats,” she said, “couldn’t really tell whether it was a fight or a schottische!”
“Neither could I,” I replied, laughingly.
Hugga had brought me a dowry of $3,500 and as we both preferred small towns to large, we decided to invest in some business in a desirable residential community upstate from New York. Through a friend of Hugga’s father we learned that the post office in a place called Gluten was for sale. Gluten had a population of nearly two thousand, of whom more than eight hundred were dogs.
“It’s a great little town!” said Hugga’s father’s friend. “It’s got running water and two spigots.”
Hugga was quite practical.
“Don’t let’s be carried away by blurbs,” she said. “It seems to me that the post office in a town where the inhabitants are forty percent dogs is not likely to be very profitable. Dogs, or at least the dogs I have known (she flushed) are not great letter writers.”
“But the dogs of Gluten are male dogs,” retorted her father’s friend.50
“Of course,” put in my father-in-law, Mr. Much, “you can’t expect big profits from a small town post office if you run it solely as a post office. The idea is to sell stamps, post cards, envelopes, etc., only when necessary and depend on other kinds of merchandise for your main source of revenue.”
“And the town being what it is, I would advise you to carry a large line of canine accessories,” added his friend.51
Thus it was that my young wife and I began a mercantile career which netted us over a thousand dollars the first year and attracted the attention of the then Postmaster General, Basil Paunch. On our front window was inscribed a small sign, “United States Post Office,” and under it, a much larger sign, “Everything for the Dog.” It was a simple matter to divert customers from their original intention of purchasing stamps and persuade them to buy something doggy, at a much greater profit to us. One example of our method will suffice. On our first day, a Mrs. Femur came in and asked for a two-cent stamp.
“You don’t want a stamp,” said Hugga. “What you need is a muzzle.”
“Perhaps you are right,” said Mrs. Femur, and before she had left the place we had sold her a $12.00 amber muzzle which netted us $10.45.
Another of our big winners, which we usually sold in place of post cards, was fleabane concocted by Hugga herself out of drippings from Queen Marie’s diary.
XXIII
My Romance Blasted
This chapter is one I would not have written but for the insistence of my relatives and friends who are aware of the injustice done me by the press and have persuaded me that it is only fair to myself and them that I state, for once and all, the true facts of the case.
The subject is my divorce from my first wife, Hugga Much, or rather (thanks to perjured evidence and a “judge” so crooked that the state automobile association had fairly plastered his body with signs reading “Danger! Reverse Curve Ahead!”) her divorce from me.
We had been married only a few years when the storm broke. We were living in Gluten, NY, and while nominally proprietors of the post office there, were cleaning up a tidy fortune through the barter of dog muzzles, assorted leashes and fleabane. It netted us so little
