Ladies
and Gentlemen
By
IRVIN SHREWSBURY COBB
First Published 1927
To my friend
G. W. LILLIE
PAGE | |
---|---|
A Lady and a Gentleman | 1 |
The Order of the Bath | 28 |
Two of Everything | 67 |
We of the Old South | 99 |
Killed with Kindness | 136 |
Peace on Earth | 161 |
Three Wise Men of the East Side | 202 |
The Cowboy and the Lady and Her Pa | 226 |
A Close Shave | 259 |
Good Sam | 270 |
How to Choke a Cat without Using Butter | 300 |
Ladies
and Gentlemen
Ladies and Gentlemen
There were the hotel lobbies; they roaredand spun like whirlpools with the crowdsthat were in them. But the streets outsidewere more like mill-races, and the exits from the railroadstations became flumes down which all morningand all afternoon the living torrents unceasingly hadpoured. Every main crossing was in a twist of opposingcurrents. Overhead, on cornices and acrosswindow-ledges and against house-fronts and on ropeswhich passed above the roadway from one building toanother, hung buntings and flags and streamers, theprevalent colors being red and white; and also manygreat goggle-eyed and bewhiskered portraits of deadwarriors done on sail-cloth in the best styles of twodomestic schools—sign-painting and election-bannering.Numbers of brass bands marched to and fro,playing this, that, and the next appropriate air, butwhen in doubt playing “Dixie”; and the musicianswaded knee-deep through an accumulating wreckage of[2]abandoned consonants—softly dropped g’s, eliminatedr’s. In short, the United Confederate Veterans wereholding their annual reunion, t