I once asked a fellow who ran a cannery why he used such expensive labels.
"To please the goats," he answered.
And so his business is largely human nature, too. We laugh at the foolish goats for eating the label off a can—we eat the same thing ourselves. When I come to drink the bitter hemlock, I pray it may be labeled so as to take the pucker out of it.
I would rather starve than board, so I started out to find my desert island.
"You advertise rooms for light housekeeping," said I to a sad-faced, middle-aged woman, who answered my ringing of the bell of a three-story brownstone house in East Thirty-eighth Street. Some prosperous merchant had probably lived there twenty years before, but it had been converted into a nest for workers.
"YOU ADVERTISE ROOMS FOR LIGHT HOUSEKEEPING."
"Yes, sir," she replied. "Two back rooms."
"What floor?" I asked, having in mind the force of gravity.