Not an Absoluter

 Matt Coburn did not believe that it was when his time came that he would die. With the harsh realism that was typical of him, he believed he would cash in his chips whenever he became careless.

(from The Empty Land, by Louis L'Amour)

Sydney Ducks

 In his novel, The Empty Land, Louis L'Amour makes reference to the Sydney Ducks. According to Wikipedia:

The Sydney Ducks was the name given to a gang of criminal immigrants from Australia in San Francisco, during the mid-19th century. Because many of these criminals came from the well-known British penal colonies in Australia, and were known to commit arson, they were blamed for an 1849 fire that devastated the heart of San Francisco, as well as the rampant crime in the city at the time.

The Sydney Ducks were criminals who operated as a gang, in a community that also included sailors, longshoremen, teamsters, wheelwrights, shipwrights, bartenders, saloon keepers, washerwomen, domestic servants, and dressmakers. The largest proportion (44%) were born in Ireland and migrated during the Great Irish Famine, first to Australia as laborers and then to California as part of the Gold Rush.

The criminality of the Sydney Ducks was the catalyst for the formation of the first Committee of Vigilance of 1851. The vigilantes usurped political power from the corrupt or incompetent officials in the city, conducted secret trials, lynchings, and deportations, which effectively decimated the Sydney Ducks. The area where the Sydney Ducks clustered at the base of Telegraph Hill was originally known as "Sydney-Town," but by the 1860s was called exclusively by its better-known name, the Barbary Coast.

Give us men who can think!

     "Fife, I want a city council of responsible men," Felton said. "Will you join us?"

    "It ain't fitten, son. I want to stand clear to call names and tell you when you're wrong. But if you're right, I will say that, too."

    He studied the type through his steel-rimmed glasses, then looked at Felton over them. There's a mighty lot about grammar that I don't know, and a lot of book learnin' I'll never have, but I know what I figure to be honest, and I'll say it."

(from The Empty Land, by Louis L'Amour)

A man to trust

 "You'll get no marshal. Not when they hear that Big Thompson and Peggoty Gorman are in town. They eat marshals for breakfast," Cohan said.

"They should be ordered out of town."

"Don't try it, Dick. I know you're game, but you're not that good and you're not that fast."

"And Coburn is?"

"If any man is."

"He'd be another Thompson, then."

"Not Matt Coburn," Buckwalter said. "I'd stake my life on him. In fact," he said wryly, "I already have. Several times."

(from The Empty Land, by Louis L'amour)

Velocipede

 The years rob us of our boyish accomplishments. There had been a time, back in the distant past, when Sebastian Beach had yielded to none as a performer on the velocipede - once, indeed, actually emerging victorious in the choir boys' handicap at a village sports meeting, open to all whose voices had not broken before the second Sunday in Epiphany. But those days were gone forever. (from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

A velocipede is a "human-powered land vehicle with one or more wheels." In Beach's youth it probably would have been the variety with a large front wheel.

Least favorite surprise

 It is not easy to state offhand what is the last thing a young man starting out in life would wish to find on the premises of the furnished villa ready for immediate occupancy which he had just begun to occupy. Bugs? Perhaps. Cockroaches? Possibly. Maybe defective drains. One cannot say. But a large black pig in the kitchen would unquestionably come quite high up on the list.

(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Enough is enough

     At nine o'clock on the following night Beach, seated in his pantry, was endeavouring with the aid of a glass of port to still the turmoil which recent events at Blandings Castle had engendered in his soul, and not making much of a go of it. Port, usually an unfailing specific, seemed for once to have lost its magic.

    Beach was no weakling, but he had begun to feel that too much was being asked of one who, though always desiring of giving satisfaction, liked to draw the line somewhere. A butler who has been compelled to introduce his niece into his employer's home under a false name and on top of that to remove a stolen pig from a gamekeeper's cottage in a west wood and convey it cross country to the detached villa Sunnybrae on the Shrewsnbury Road is a butler who feels that enough is sufficient. There were dark circles under Beach's eyes and he found himself starting at sudden noises.

(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Why bother?

 "There you have Clarence in a nutshell," he said. "There is a school of thought that holds that he got that way from being dropped on his head when a baby. I maintain that when you have a baby like Clarence, you don't need to drop it on its head. You just let Nature take its course and it develops automatically into the sort of man who says 'right' when he means 'left.'"

(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

A good deal too much Baronet

 Strolling through the jungles of Brazil, the traveller sometimes sees a barefoot native halt with a look of horror, his body rigid except for a faint vibration of the toes. He has seen a scorpion in his path. It was with such a look of horror that Gloria gazed at the photograph of Sir Gregory Parsloe. Very imprudently, he had had himself taken side face and, eyeing those chins, she winced and caught her breath sharply. She took another look, and her mind was made up. She had thought it could be done, but she saw now that it could not be done. There are shots which are on the board, and shots which are not. It might be that some day some girl, veiled in white, would stand at the altar rails beside this vast expanse of Baronet while the organ played "The Voice That Breathed o'er Eden" but that girl would not be G. Salt.

(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

A unique sympathy card

     "Did I ever tell you the story of Clarence and the Arkwright wedding?"

    "I don't think so."

    "Odd It happened about the time I was a regular client of yours at the Criterion and I told it to everybody else. I wonder why I discriminated against you. The Arkwrights lived out Bridgnorth way, and their daughter Amelia was getting married, so Clarence tied a knot in his handkerchief to remind him to send the bride's mother a telegram on the happy day."

    "And he forgot?"

    "Oh, no, he sent it. 'My heartfelt congratulations to you on this joyous occasion,' he said."

    "Well, wasn't that all right?"

    "It was fine. Couldn't have been improved upon. Only the trouble was that in one of his distrait moments he sent it, not to Mrs. Arkwright but to another friend of his, a Mrs. Cartwright, and her husband had happened to die that morning. Diabetes. Very sad. We were all very sorry about it, but no doubt the telegram cheered her up."

(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

But a baa-lamb?

 Seeing the object of Penny's affections at closed range, he found himself favourably impressed. For an author, Jerry Vail was rather nice-looking, most authors, as is widely known, resembling in appearance the more degraded types of fish, unless they look like birds, when they could pass as vultures and no questions asked. His face, while never likely to launch a thousand ships, was not at all a bad sort of face, and Gally could readily picture it casting a spell in a dim light on a boat deck. Looking at him, he found it easy to understand why Penny should have described him as a baa-lamb. From a cursory inspection he seemed well entitled to membership in that limited class.

(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

A life well misspent

     "Thank you, dear," she said. "I call that very nice of you. You don't look so bad yourself," she added, with that touch of surprise which always came into the voices of those who, meeting Gally after a lapse of years, found him so bright and rosy.

    This man's fitness was one of the eternal mysteries. Speaking of him, a historian of Blandings Castle had once written: "A thoroughly misspent life had left the Hon. Galahad Threepwood in what appeared to be perfect, even exuberantly perfect physical condition. How a man who ought to have had the liver of the century could look as he did was a constant source of perplexity to his associates. It seemed incredible that anyone who had had such an extraordinarily good time all his life should, in the evening of that life, be so superbly robust."

    Striking words, but well justified. Instead of the blot on a proud family which his sister Constance, his sister Julia, his siter Dora and all his other sisters considered him, he might have been a youngish teetotaller who had subsisted from boyhood on yogurt yeast, wheat germ, and blackstrap molasses. He himself attributed his health to steady smoking, plenty of alcohol, and his lifelong belief that it was bad form to go to bed before three in the morning.

(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

She made quite an impression

     "Well, well, well!" he said, gazing at her with undisguised admiration. "Do you know you positively don't look a dashed day older, Maudie? It's amazing."

    And indeed the years had dealt lightly with the erstwhile Maudie Montrose. A little more matronly, perhaps, than the girl with the hourglass figure who had played the Saint Bernard dog to the thirsty wayfarers at the old  Criterion, she still made a distinct impression on the eye, and the landlord of the Emsworth Arms, his growing son Percy, and the half dozen Shropshire lads who were popping up the establishment's outer wall had stamped her with the seal of their popeyed approval. Her entrance had been in the nature of a social triumph.

    "It's astounding," said Gally. "One gasps. Put you in a bathing suit, add you to the line of contestants at any seaside beauty competition, and you would still have the judges whooping and blowing kisses and asking you if you were doing anything next Saturday night."

    It was the sort of tribute a thousand mellowed clients had paid her across the bar in the old days, and Maudie, who had simpered indulgently then, simpered indulgently now.

(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Reason enough to love her

 For Gloria Salt he felt that gentle affection which men feel for women who could have married them and didn't.

(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

When your partner gets out of line

 "We were playing in the mixed doubles, and I admit that I may have been slightly off my game, but that was no reason why, after we had dropped the first set, he should have started barging into my half of the court, taking my shots for me as if I were some elderly aunt with arthritis in both legs who had learned tennis in the previous week at a correspondence school."

(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

That's the end of THAT engagement!

     "If Orlo Vosper in his formative years had been thoroughly kicked twice a day, Sundays included, he might not have grown up the overbearing louse he has become."

    "Would you call him an overbearing louse?"

    "I did. To his face."

    "When was this?"

    "On the tennis court at Eastbourne, and again when entering the club house. I'd have done it in the dressing-room, too, only he wasn't there. They separate the sexes. Of all the overbearing lice that ever overbore, I told him, you are the undisputed champion, and I gave him back his ring."

    "Oh, you were engaged?"

    "Don't rub it in. We all make mistakes."

(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

    

Love at sea

     "Well, I don't know quite what to say. You have rather stunned your greyhaired old friend. You really love this chap?"

    "Haven't you been listening?

    "But you can't have known him for more than about four days."

    "So what?"

    "Well, I was just thinking . . . Heaven knows I'm not the man to counsel prudence and all that sort of thing. The only woman I ever wanted to marry was a music-hall serio who sang songs in pink tights. But -"

    "Well?"

    "I think I'd watch my step, if I were you, young Penny. There are some queer birds knocking around in this world. You can't always go by what fellows say on ocean liners. Many a man who swears eternal devotion on the boat deck undergoes a striking change in his outlook when he hits dry land and gets among the blondes."

    "Gally, you make me sick."

    "I'm sorry. I just thought I'd mention it. Facts of life and all that sort of thing."

    "If I found Jerry was like that, I'd give him the air in a second, though it would break my heart into a million quivering pieces. We Donaldsons have our pride."

    "You betcher."

    "But he isn't. He's a baa-lamb. And you can't say a baa-lamb isn't a nice thing to have around the house."

(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

The wrong girl for a pig man

     "For mark this, Clarence, and mark it well. The girl who carelessly dismisses Empress of Blandings as a piggy-wiggy today is a girl who may quite easily forget to give her lunch tomorrow. Whatever induced you, my dear fellow, to entrust a job that calls for the executive qualities of a Pierpont Morgan to the popeyed daughter of a rural vicar?"

    Lord Emsworth did not actually wring his hands, but he came very near to it.

    "It was not my doing," he protested. "Connie insisted on my engaging her. She is some sort of a protegee of Connie's. Related to someone she wanted to oblige, or something like that. Blame Connie for the whole terrible situation."

    "Connie!" said Gally. "The more I see of this joint, the more clearly do I realize that what Blandings Castle needs, to make it an earthly Paradise, is fewer and better Connies. Sisters are a mistake, Clarence. You should have set your face firmly against them at the outset."

(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

It doesn't help his career

There was a silence. He sat tapping his finger with the pen. I, if memory serves me correctly, straightened my tie. I was deeply concerned. The thought of poor old Stinker being bunged into the Bastille was enough to disturb anyone with a kindly interest in his career and prospects. Nothing retards a curate's advancement in his chosen profession more surely than a spell in the jug.

(from The Code of the Woosters, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

A no nonsense pooch

     I was standing there, hoping for the best, when my meditations were broken in upon by an odd, gargling sort of noise, something like static and something like distant thunder, and to cut a long story short this proved to proceed from the larynx of the dog Bartholomew.

    He was standing on the bed, stropping his front paws on the coverlet, and so easy was it to read the message in his eyes that we acted like two minds with but a single thought. At the exact moment when I soared like an eagle onto the chest of drawers, Jeeves was skimming like a swallow onto the top of the cupboard. The animal hopped from the bed and, advancing into the middle of the room, took a seat, breathing through the nose with a curious whistling sound and looking at us from under his eyebrows like a Scottish elder rebuking sin from the pulpit.

    And there for a while the matter rested.

(from The Code of the Woosters, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Just keep cool

 The whole situation recalled irresistibly to my mind something that had happened to me once up at Oxford, when the heart was young. It was during Eights Week, and I was sauntering on the river bank with a girl named something that has slipped my mind, when there was a sound of barking and a large, hefty dog came galloping up, full of beans and buck and obviously intent on mayhem. And I was just commending my soul to God and feeling that this was where the old flannel trousers got about thirty bobs' worth of value bitten out of them, when the girl, waiting till she saw the whites of its eyes, with extraordinary presence of mind suddenly opened a coloured Japanese umbrella in the animal's face. Upon which, it did three back somersaults and retired into private life.

(from The Code of the Woosters, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Per Wikipedia, Eights Week, also known as Summer Eights, is a four-day regatta of bumps races which constitutes the University of Oxford's main intercollegiate rowing event of the year. The regatta takes place in May of each year, from the Wednesday to the Saturday of the fifth week of Trinity Term. Men's and women's eights compete in separate divisions for their colleges.

Only from a distance

 "You will understand," I said, "that I am implying nothing derogatory to your cousin Madeline when I say that the idea of being united to her in the bonds of holy wedlock is one that freezes the gizzard. The fact is in no way to her discredit. I should feel just the same about marrying many of the world's noblest women. There are certain females whom one respects, admires, reveres, but only from a distance. If they show any signs of attempting to come closer, one is prepared to fight them off with a blackjack. It is to this group that your cousin Madeline belongs. A charming girl, and the ideal mate for Augustus Fink-Nottle, but ants in the pants to Bertram."

(from The Code of the Woosters, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Large-size curate

     I had watched Harold Pinker through the formative years of his life, and I knew him for what he was - a large, lumbering, Newfoundland puppy of a chap - full of zeal, yes - always doing his best, true; but never quite able to make the grade; a man, in short, who if there was a chance of bungling an enterprise and landing himself in the soup, would snatch at it. At the idea of him being turned on to perform the extraordinarily delicate task of swiping Constable Oates's helmet, the blood froze. He hadn't a chance of getting away with it.

    I thought of Stinker, the youth. Built rather on the lines of Roderick Spode, he had played Rugby football not only for his university but also for England, and at the art of hurling an opponent into a mud puddle and jumping on his neck with cleated boots he had few, if any, superiors. If I had wanted someone to help me out with a mad bull, he would have been my first choice. If by some mischance I had found myself trapped in the underground den of the Secret Nine, there was nobody I would rather have seen coming down the chimney than the Rev. Haarold Pinker.

    But mere thews and sinews did not qualify a man to pinch policemen's helmets. You need finesse.

(from The Code of the Woosters, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

No difference that could tell

     "Every day I find myself discovering some new facet of his extraordinary character. For instance . . . You have seen him quite lately, have you not?"

    "Oh, rather. I gave him a dinner at the Drones only the night before last."

    "I wonder if you noticed any difference in him?"

    I threw my mind back to the binge in question. As far as I could recollect, Gussie had been the same fish-faced freak I had always known."

(from The Code of the Woosters, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

AA for flowerpot throwers

 "If I were you," said Psmith, "and I offer the suggestion in the most cordial spirit of goodwill, I would use every effort to prevent this passion for flinging flower-pots from growing upon me. I know you will say that you can take it or leave it alone; that just one more pot won't hurt you; but can you stop at one? Isn't it just that first insidious flower-pot that does all the mischief? Be a man, Comrade Baxter!" He laid his hand appealingly on the secretary's shoulder. "The next time the craving comes on you, fight it. Fight it! Are you, the heir of the ages, going to become a slave to a habit? Tush! You know and I know that there is better stuff in you than that. Use your will-power, man, use your will-power."

(from Leave  It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Sprained his brain

     He put on his glasses and hopped out of bed and trotted to the window. And it was while he was on his way there that memory stirred in him, as some minutes ago it had stirred in the Efficient Baxter. He recalled that odd episode of a few days back, when that delightful girl, Miss What's-her-name, had informed him that his secretary had been throwing flower-pots at that poet fellow, McTodd. He had been annoyed, he remembered, that Baxter should so far have forgotten himself. Now, he found himself more frightened than annoyed. Just as every dog is permitted one bite without having its sanity questioned, so, if you consider it in a broad-minded way, may every man be allowed to throw one flower-pot. But let the thing become a habit, and we look askance.

    This strange hobby of his appeared to be growing on Baxter like a drug, and Lord Emsworth did not like it at all. He had never before suspected his secretary of an unbalanced mind, but now he mused, as he tiptoed cautiously to the window, that the Baxter sort of man, the energetic, restless type, was just the kind that does go off his head. Just some such calamity as this, his lordship felt, he might have foreseen. Day in, day out, Rupert Baxter had been exercising his brain ever since he had come to the castle - and now he had gone and sprained it. Lord Emsworth peeped timidly out from behind a curtain.

    His worst fears were realized. It was Baxter, sure enough; and a towsled, wild-eyed Baxter incredibly clad in lemon-coloured pyjamas.

(from Leave It To Psmith,  by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

WHY did I wear these pyjamas?

 To find oneself locked out of a country-house at half-past two in the morning in lemon-coloured pyjamas can never be an unmixedly agreeable experience, and Baxter was a man less fitted by nature to endure it with equanimity than most men. His was a fiery and an arrogant soul, ad he seethed in furious rebellion against the intolerable position into which Fate had manoeuvred him. He even went so far as to give the front door a petulant kick.

Finding, however, that this hurt his toes and accomplished no useful end, he addressed himself to the task of ascertaining whether there was any way of getting in - short of banging the knocker and rousing the house, a line of action which did not commend itself to him. He made a practice of avoiding as far as possible the ribald type of young man of which the castle was now full, and he had no desire to meet them at this hour in his present costume.

(from Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Baxter descends

     He could not analyse the sound, but the fact that there was any sound at all in such a place at such an hour increased his suspicions that dark doings were toward which would pay for investigation. With stealthy steps he crept to the head of the stairs and descended.

    One uses the verb "descended" advisedly, for what is required is some word suggesting instantaneous activity. About Baxter's progress from the second floor to the first there was nothing halting or hesitating. He, so to speak, did it now. Planting his foot firmly on a golf ball which the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, who had been practicing putting in the corridor before retiring to bed, had left in his casual fashion just where the steps began, he took the entire staircase in one majestic, volplaning sweep. There were eleven stairs in all separating his landing from the landing below, and the only ones he hit were the third and the tenth. He came to rest with a squattering thud on the lower landing, and for a moment or two the fever of the chase left him.

(From Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse. This is from the chapter entitled "Almost Entirely About Flower-Pots," which is perhaps Wodehouse's best.)

Well, Freddie?

    "Well, Freddie?" said Eve resignedly.

    The Hon. Frederick Threepwood was a young man who was used to hearing people say, "Well, Freddie?" resignedly when he appeared. His father said it; his Aunt Constance said it; all his other aunts and uncles said it. Widely differing personalities in every other respect, they all said, "Well, Freddie?" resignedly directly they caught sight of him. Eve's words, therefore, and the tone in which they were spoken, did not damp him as they might have damped another. His only feeling was one of solemn gladness at the thought that at last he had managed to get her alone for half a minute.

    The fact that this was the first time he had been able to get her alone since her arrival at the castle had caused Freddie a good deal of sorrow. Bad luck was what he attributed it to, thereby giving the object of his affection less credit than was her due for a masterly policy of evasion. 

(from Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

She's not so bad

 She was alone. It is a sad but indisputable fact that in this imperfect world Genius is too often condemned to walk along - if the earthier members of the community see it coming and have time to duck. Not one of the horde of visitors who had arrived overnight for the County Ball had shown any disposition whatever to court Miss Peavey's society.

One regrets this. Except for that slight bias towards dishonesty which led her to steal everything she could lay her hands on that was not nailed down, Aileen Peavey's was an admirable character; and, oddly enough, it was the noble side of her nature to which these coarse-fibred critics objected. Off Miss Peavey, the purloiner of other people's goods, they knew nothing; the woman they were dodging was Miss Peavey, the poetess.

(from Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Don't ask his name!

 "I have only just found out your name, Mr. McTodd," she said at length.

Psmith nodded. "It is always thus," he said. "Passing through this life, we meet a fellow-mortal, chat awhile, and part; and the last thing we think of doing is to ask him in a manly and direct way what his label is. There is something oddly furtive and shamefaced in one's attitude towards people's names. It is as if we shrank from probing some hideous secret. We say to ourselves, 'This pleasant stranger may be a Snooks or a Buggins. Better not inquire.'"

(from Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Dishing out the baloney

 "You know Miss Peavey's work, of course?" said Lady Constance, smiling pleasantly on her two celebrities.

"Who does not?" said Psmith courteously.

"Oh do you?" said Miss Peavey, gratification causing her slender body to perform a sort of ladylike shimmy down its whole length. "I scarcely hoped that you would know my name. My Canadian sales have not been large."

"Quite large enough," said Psmith. "I mean, of course," he added with a paternal smile, "that, while your delicate art may not have a universal appeal in a young country, it is intensely appreciated by a small and select body of the intelligentsia."

And if that was not the stuff to give them, he reflected with not a little complacency, he was dashed.

(from Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Rough on hangovers

 Miss Peavy often had this effect on the less soulful type of man, especially in the mornings, when such men are not at their strongest and best. When she came into the breakfast-room of a country house, brave men who had been up a bit late the night before quailed and tried to hide behind newspapers. She was the sort of woman who tells a man who is propping his eyes open with his fingers and endeavouring to correct a headache with strong tea, that she was up at six watching the dew fade off the grass, and didn't he think that those wisps of morning mist were the elves' bridal-veils. She had large, fine, melancholy eyes, and was apt to droop dreamily.

(from Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

The confidence of the amateur criminal

 "Even if the little enterprise meets with disaster, the reflection that I did my best for the young couple will be a great consolation to me when I am serving my bit of time in Wormwood Scrubbs. It will cheer me up. The jailers will cluster outside the door to listen to me singing in my cell. My pet rat, as he creeps out to share the crumbs of my breakfast, will wonder why I whistle as I pick the morning's oakum. I shall join in the hymns on Sundays in a way that will electrify the chaplain. That is to say, if anything goes wrong and I am what I believe is technically termed 'copped.' I say 'if,'" said Psmith, gazing solemnly at his companion. "But I do not intend to be copped. I have never gone in largely for crime hitherto, but something tells me I shall be rather good at it. I look forward confidently to making a nice, clean job of the thing. And now, Comrade Threepwood, I must ask you to excuse me while I get the half-nelson on this rather poisonous poetry of good old McTodd's.

(from Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

For the uninformed, Wormwood Scrubbs is a prison London for adult males. Oakum is a preparation of tarred fibers used in shipbuilding.

Such an insignificant task

 "You'll do it?"

"I will."

"Of course," said Freddie awkwardly, "I'll see that you get a bit all right. I mean . . . ."

Psmith waved his hand deprecatingly. "My dear comrade Threepwood, let us not become sordid on this glad occasion. As far as I am concerned, there will be no charge."

"What! But look here . . . ."

"Any assistance I can give will be offered in a purely amateur spirit. I would have mentioned before, only I was reluctant to interrupt you, that Comrade Jackson is my boyhood chum, and that Phyllis, his wife, injects into my life the few beams of sunshine that illumine the dreary round. I have long desired to do something to ameliorate their lot, and now that the chance has come I am delighted. It is true that I am not a man of affluence - my bank manager, I am told, winces in a rather painful manner whenever my name is mentioned - but I am not so reduced that I must charge a fee for performing, on behalf of a pal, a simple act of courtesy like pinching a twenty thousand pound necklace."

(from Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

But not fish!

 "I suppose you get ideas for your poetry from all sorts of things," said Lord Emsworth, nobly resisting the temptation to collar the conversation again. He was feeling extremely friendly towards this poet fellow. It was deuced civil of him not to be put out and huffy at being left alone in the smoking-room.

 "From practically everything," said Psmith, "except fish."

"Fish?"

"I have never written a poem about fish."

"No?" said Lord Emsworth, again feeling that a pin had worked loose in the machinery of the conversation.

"I was once offered a princely sum," went on Psmith, now floating happily along on the tide of his native exuberance, "to write a ballad for the Fishmonger's Gazette entitled 'Herbert the Turbot.' But I was firm. I declined."

"Indeed?" said Lord Emsworth.

"One has one's self-respect," said Psmith.

"Oh, decidedly," said Lord Emsworth.

"It was painful, of course. The editor broke down completely when he realized that my refusal was final. However, I sent him on with a letter of introduction to John Drinkwater, who, I believe, turned him out quite a good little effort on the theme."

(from Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Oh, you meant a carnation!

 "I asked you to wear a pink chrysanthemum. So I could recognize you, you know."

"I am wearing a pink chrysanthemum. I should have imagined that that was a fact that the most casual could hardly have overlooked."

"That thing?" The other gazed disparagingly at the floral decoration. "I thought it was some kind of cabbage. I meant one of those little what-d'you-may-call-its that people do wear in their button-holes."

"Carnation, possibly?"

"Carnation! That's right."

Psmith removed the chrysanthemum and dropped it behind his chair. He looked at his companion reproachfully.

"If you had studied botany at school, comrade," he said, "much misery might have been averted. I cannot begin to tell you the spiritual agony I suffered, trailing through the metropolis behind that shrub."

(from Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Anything but fish!

 "But my uncle and I are about to part company. From now on he, so to speak, will take the high road and I'll take the low road. I dine with him tonight, and over the nuts and wine, I shall hand him the bad news that I propose to resign my position in the firm. I have no doubt that he supposed he was doing me a grand turn by starting me in his fish business, but even what little experience I have had of it has convinced me that it is not my proper sphere. The whisper flies round the clubs, 'Psmith has not found his niche.'"

(from Enter Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Of butlers and pigs

 Beach was in his pantry. From time to time he sipped port, from time to time raised his eyes thankfully heavenwards. He, too, was thinking kindly of Gally. Mr. Galahad might ask a man to steal rather more pigs than was agreeable, but in the larger affairs of life, such as making cheques for five hundred pounds grow where none had been before, he was a rock to lean on.

(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Move a pig? Who couldn't!

 "Yes," said Penny. "Isn't Parsloe's pig pretty big?"

"Enormous. It bestrides the narrow world like a Colossus."

"Then how are you going to remove it?"

"My dear child, pigs have rings through their noses. This facilitates pulling and hauling."

"You'll never be able to do it."

"What do you mean, "I'll never be able to do it? Of course I'll be able to do it. When Puffy Benger and I stole old Wivenhoe's pig the night of the Bachelor's Ball at Hammer's Easton, we had to get it up three flights of stairs before we could put it in Plug Basham's bedroom, and we found the task an absurdly easy one. A little child could have led it. Why, my nephew Ronald, from motives which I have not the leisure to go into now, once stole the Empress, and I resent the suggestion that I am incapable of performing a task within the scope of a young poop like Ronnie Fish. Never be able to do it, forsooth!" said Gally, burning with honest indignation. "I can do it on my head. I can do it blindfolded, with one arm tied behind me. So if you wish to be in on this, Penny Donaldson, get moving.  Come, Watson, come. The game is afoot!"

(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

More in depth than we are

 During the last fifteen years of [William Jenning Bryan's] life, he again found a series of issues which proved susceptible to easy dichotomization: entry into war, prohibition, soman suffrage, the teaching of evolution as fact. So far as he was concerned, all these issues had but two sides. Most other politicians of the day shared that view. In a day when politicians think routinely of the thirty-second television commercial, it seems peculiar to criticize Bryan for oversimplifying issues, for his favorite campaign tactic was to present himself to as many people as possible, to speak to them for an hour or more, then to publish those speeches and distribute them as widely as possible.

(from A Righteous Cause, by Robert W. Czerny)

He left a big footprint

 [William Jennings] Bryan's compelling voice and engaging smile won a personal following in 1896, which he could call upon in future years in support of his principles. By that dramatic campaign, he became the symbol of the transformation taking place within his party, and hence, within politics more generally. By spending the next twenty-nine years traveling about the nation, speaking to grass-roots leaders of his party, lecturing to throngs of citizens, sending out his views through his newspaper, The Commoner, and boldly battling in convention after convention, he built upon the following he had created in 1896 to carve out an unusual role in American politics. He spent little time in office - only four years in the House of Representatives and twenty-seven months as secretary of state. Nonetheless, the Commoner left a greater impression on public policy than at least ten of the fifteen presidents who held office during his lifetime.

(from A Righteous Cause, by Robert W. Czerny)

Let them do their own stumbling

 [William Jennings Bryan] did not claim that the majority could do no wrong, only that "the people have a right to make their own mistakes."

(from A Righteous Cause, by Robert W. Cherny)

Whom does the government serve?

 "Shall the people control their own Government and use that Government for the protection of their rights and for the promotion of their welfare? Or shall the representatives of predatory wealth prey upon a defenseless public, while the offenders secure immunity from subservient officials whom they raise to power by unscrupulous methods?" (William Jennings Bryan)

I wish we had someone with the eloquence and boldness of Bryan today.

The foundation of tyranny

 "Once admit that some people are capable of self-government and that others are not and that the capable people have a right to seize upon and govern the incapable and you make force - brute force - the only foundation of government and invite the reign of a despot." (William Jennings Bryan)

Name them after me

More than seven hundred babies were named for [William Jennings] Bryan during the year [of his first presidential campaign], including three sets of triplets, each named "William," "Jennings," and "Bryan."

(from A Righteous Cause, by Robert W. Cherny)