“I wonder you don’t write another Baedeker,” said the Bibliomaniac—”The Idiot’s Hand-book to the Horse Show, or Who’s Who at the Garden.”
“It would be a good idea,” said the Idiot. “But the show people must take the initiative. The whole thing needs a live manager.”
“A sort of Ward MacAllister again?” asked Mr. Brief.
“No, not exactly,” said the Idiot. “Society has plenty of successors to Ward MacAllister. What they seem to me to need most is a P. T. Barnum. A man like that could make society a veritable Klondike, and with the Horse Show as a nucleus he wouldn’t have much trouble getting the thing started along.”
XVII
SUGGESTION TO CHRISTMAS SHOPPERS
BY Jingo!” said the Idiot, as he wearily took his place at the breakfast-table the other morning, “but I’m just regularly tuckered out.”
“Late hours again?” asked the Lawyer.
“Not a late hour,” returned the Idiot. “Matter of fact, I went to bed last night at half-after seven and never waked until nine this morning. In spite of all that sleep and rest I feel now as if I’d been put through a threshing-machine. Every bone in my body from the funny to the medulla aches like all possessed, and my joints creak like a new pair of shoes on a school-boy in church, they are so stiff.”