Frenzied Fiction, Stephen Leacock [books to read in a lifetime txt] 📗
- Author: Stephen Leacock
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So the Chief of Police shut up Tomlinson in the calaboose and then sent him down to Mexico City under a guard. By the time the police were done with him he was dead broke, and it took him four months to get back to Toronto; when he got there, the place in Mexico had been filled long ago.
But I can imagine that some of my readers might suggest that I have hitherto been dealing only with success in a very limited way, and that more interest would lie in discussing how the really great fortunes are made.
Everybody feels an instinctive interest in knowing how our great captains of industry, our financiers and railroad magnates made their money.
Here the explanation is really a very simple one. There is, in fact, only one way to amass a huge fortune in business or railway management. One must begin at the bottom. One must mount the ladder from the lowest rung. But this lowest rung is everything. Any man who can stand upon it with his foot well poised, his head erect, his arms braced and his eye directed upward, will inevitably mount to the top.
But after all—I say this as a kind of afterthought in conclusion—why bother with success at all? I have observed that the successful people get very little real enjoyment out of life. In fact the contrary is true. If I had to choose—with an eye to having a really pleasant life—between success and ruin, I should prefer ruin every time. I have several friends who are completely ruined—some two or three times—in a large way of course; and I find that if I want to get a really good dinner, where the champagne is just as it ought to be, and where hospitality is unhindered by mean thoughts of expense, I can get it best at the house of a ruined man.
XVII. In Dry Toronto A LOCAL STUDY OF A UNIVERSAL TOPIC
Note.—Our readers—our numerous readers—who live in Equatorial Africa, may read this under the title “In Dry Timbucto”; those who live in Central America will kindly call it “In Dry Tehauntepec.”
It may have been, for aught I know, the change from a wet to a dry atmosphere. I am told that, biologically, such things profoundly affect the human system.
At any rate I found it impossible that night—I was on the train from Montreal to Toronto—to fall asleep.
A peculiar wakefulness seemed to have seized upon me, which appeared, moreover, to afflict the other passengers as well. In the darkness of the car I could distinctly hear them groaning at intervals.
“Are they ill?” I asked, through the curtains, of the porter as he passed.
“No, sir,” he said, “they’re not ill. Those is the Toronto passengers.”
“All in this car?” I asked.
“All except that gen’lman you may have heard singing in the smoking compartment. He’s booked through to Chicago.”
But, as is usual in such cases, sleep came at last with unusual heaviness. I seemed obliterated from the world till, all of a sudden, I found myself, as it were, up and dressed and seated in the observation car at the back of the train, awaiting my arrival.
“Is this Toronto?” I asked of the Pullman conductor, as I peered through the window of the car.
The conductor rubbed the pane with his finger and looked out.
“I think so,” he said.
“Do we stop here?” I asked.
“I think we do this morning,” he answered. “I think I heard the conductor say that they have a lot of milk cans to put off here this morning. I’ll just go and find out, sir.”
“Stop here!” broke in an irascible-looking gentleman in a grey tweed suit who was sitting in the next chair to mine. “Do they stop here? I should say they did indeed. Don’t you know,” he added, turning to the Pullman conductor, “that any train is compelled to stop here. There’s a by-law, a municipal by-law of the City of Toronto, compelling every train to stop?”
“I didn’t know it,” said the conductor humbly.
“Do you mean to say,” continued the irascible gentleman, “that you have never read the by-laws of the City of Toronto?”
“No, sir,” said the conductor.
“The ignorance of these fellows,” said the man in grey tweed, swinging his chair round again towards me. “We ought to have a by-law to compel them to read the by-laws. I must start an agitation for it at once.” Here he took out a little red notebook and wrote something in it, murmuring, “We need a new agitation anyway.”
Presently he shut the book up with a snap. I noticed that there was a sort of peculiar alacrity in everything he did.
“You, sir,” he said, “have, of course, read our municipal by-laws?”
“Oh, yes,” I answered. “Splendid, aren’t they? They read like a romance.”
“You are most flattering to our city,” said the irascible gentleman with a bow. “Yet you, sir, I take it, are not from Toronto.”
“No,” I answered, as humbly as I could. “I’m from Montreal.”
“Ah!” said the gentleman, as he sat back and took a thorough look at me. “From Montreal? Are you drunk?”
“No,” I replied. “I don’t think so.”
“But you are suffering for a drink,” said my new acquaintance eagerly. “You need it, eh? You feel already a kind of craving, eh what?”
“No,” I answered. “The fact is it’s rather early in the morning—”
“Quite so,” broke in the irascible gentleman, “but I understand that in Montreal all the saloons are open at seven, and even at that hour are crowded, sir, crowded.”
I shook my head.
“I think that has been exaggerated,” I said. “In fact, we always try to avoid crowding and jostling as far as possible. It is generally understood, as a matter of politeness, that the first place in the line is given to the clergy, the Board of Trade, and the heads of the universities.”
“Is it conceivable!” said the gentleman in grey. “One moment, please, till I make a note. ‘All clergy—I think you said all, did you not?—drunk at seven in the morning.’ Deplorable! But here we are at the Union Station—commodious, is it not? Justly admired, in fact, all over the known world. Observe,” he continued as we alighted from the train and made our way into the station, “the upstairs and the downstairs, connected by flights of stairs; quite unique and most convenient: if you don’t meet your friends downstairs all
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