Why
not? A story of the modern wanderlust. Anyway, they're not averse to
publicity seeing they've got two 'coast to coast' pennants on the back of
their machine. What they've seen. Why they've journeyed. A tirade against
the monotony of business. And I'll stick in one of Hovey's stanzas, the
one that goes:
"There's a schooner in the offing
With her topsails shot with fire.
And my heart has gone aboard her
For the Islands of Desire."
"You can say," said the spokesman of the wanderers, "that this is Martin
S. Stevers and party. I am Mr. Stevers of the Stevers Linseed Oil Company
in San Francisco. Here's my card."
"Thanks," said the newspaper man, taking the card.
"And now," spake on the spokesman of the wanderers, "what can I do for
you?"
Newspaper men are perhaps the only creatures who as a type never learn how
to ask questions. An embarrassment caused by the stupidity of the gabby
great whom they interrogate daily puts a crimp into their tongues. Their
questions wince in anticipation of the banalities they are doomed to
elicit. Their curiosity collapses under the shadow of the inevitable,
impending bromide.
Thus the newspaper man, wearily certain that regardless of what he asks or
how he asks it, he will hear for answers only the clumsy asininities
behind which the personalities, leaders and sacred white cows pompously
attitudinize, gets so that he mumbles a bit incoherently.
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