The Four-Masted Cat-Boat, and Other Truthful Tales - Charles Battell Loomis

In introducing my book to the reader (how like a book-agent that sounds!) I wish to say that the only bond of union between the various sketches is that they were all done by the same hand—or hands, as they were written on a typewriter.

Whether it would have added to their interest to have placed the same characters in each sketch is not for me to say, but it would have been a great bother to do it, and in getting up a book the thing to avoid is bother. It hasn’t bothered me to write it. I hope it won’t bother you to read it, for I’d hate to have you bothered on my account.

C. B. L.

	A FEW IDIOTISMS
		PAGE
[I.]	The Four-Masted Cat-Boat	1
[II.]	The Poor was Mad	7
[III.]	A Peculiar Industry	10
[IV.]	Griggs’s Mind	14
[V.]	The Signals of Griggs	21
[VI.]	À la Sherlock Holmes	25
[VII.]	My Spanish Parrot	30
[VIII.]	“To Meet Mr. Cavendish”	35
[IX.]	Instinct Supplied to Hens	41
[X.]	A Spring Idyl	46
[XI.]	An Inverted Spring Idyl	49
[XII.]	At the Chestnuts’ Dinner	52
[XIII.]	The Rough Words Society	57
[XIV.]	A New Use for Horses	63
[XV.]	A Calculating Bore	67
[XVI.]	An Urban Game	71
[XVII.]	“De Gustibus”	75
[XVIII.]	“Buffum’s Bustless Buffers”	79

	AT THE LITERARY COUNTER
[XIX.]	“The Father of Santa Claus”	85
[XX.]	The Dialect Store	92
[XXI.]	“From the French”	100
[XXII.]	On the Value of Dogmatic Utterance	107
[XXIII.]	The Sad Case of Deacon Perkins	112
[XXIV.]	The Missing-Word Bore	118
[XXV.]	The Confessions of a Critic	122
[XXVI.]	How ’Rasmus Paid the Mortgage	128
[XXVII.]	’Midst Armed Foes	137
[XXVIII.]	At the Sign of the Cygnet	141
[XXIX.]	A Scotch Sketch	146

	UNRELATED STORIES—RELATED
[XXX.]	Ephrata Symonds’s Double Life	153
[XXXI.]	A Stranger to Luck	161
[XXXII.]	Cupid on Runners	173
[XXXIII.]	My Truthful Burglar	183
[XXXIV.]	The Man without a Watch	189
[XXXV.]	The Wreck of the “Catapult”	201

	ESSAYS AT ESSAYS
[XXXVI.]	The Bull, the Girl, and the Red Shawl	211
[XXXVII.]	Concerning Dish-Washing	219
[XXXVIII.]	A Perennial Fever	225
[XXXIX.]	“Amicus Redivivus”	231
[XL.]	The Proper Care of Flies	236

NOTE

I am indebted to the editors of the “Century”, the “Saturday Evening Post,” “ Harper’s Bazaar,” “Puck,” the “Critic,” the “Criterion,” and the S. S. McClure Syndicate for permission to use the articles which first met printers’ ink in their columns.

C. B. L.

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