As for her subscription, you, of course,
never received it, for, with difficulty, I finally extracted the fact
from her that she pinned a dollar bill to a postal card and dropped it
in a street postal box. And she doesn't yet see that she has done
anything extraordinary, or that she had a faith in Uncle Sam that I call
sublime."
The Journal had been calling the attention of its readers to the
defacement of the landscape by billboard advertisers. One day on his way
to New York he found himself sitting in a sleeping-car section opposite
a woman and her daughter.
The mother was looking at the landscape when suddenly she commented:
"There are some of those ugly advertising signs that Mr. Bok says are
such a defacement to the landscape. I never noticed them before, but he
is right, and I am going to write and tell him so."
"Oh, mamma, don't," said the girl. "That man is pampered enough by
women. Don't make him worse. Ethel says he is now the vainest man in
America."
Bok's eyes must have twinkled, and just then the mother looked at him,
caught his eye; she gave a little gasp, and Bok saw that she had
telepathically discovered him!
He smiled, raised his hat, presented his card to the mother, and said:
"Excuse me, but I do want to defend myself from that last statement, if
I may. I couldn't help overhearing it."
The mother, a woman of the world, read the name on the card quickly and
smiled, but the daughter's face was a study as she leaned over and
glanced at the card.
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