Fancies and Goodnights Read Free Page B

ON A THEME
    A young man, with a bowler hat, cane, flaxen mustache, and blue
suit, was looking at a gorilla in a zoo. All about him were cages
floored with squares of desert. On these yellow flats, like precise
false statements of equatorial latitudes, lay the shadows of bars.
There were nutshells, banana skins, fading lettuce; there were the
cries of birds who believed themselves mewed up because they were
mad, the obeisances of giraffes, the yawns of lions. In an
imitation of moon crags, mountain goats bore about ignobly eyes
that were pieces of moon. The elephants, grey in a humidity of
grass and dung, shifted from one foot to another. Jurassic days, it
seemed, would quite definitely never be here again. Mice, moving
with the speed of a nervous twitch, were bold in the freedom of a
catastrophe of values.
    Perceiving that they were alone, the gorilla addressed the young
man in an imitation of the American accent, which he affected for
reasons of his own.

NIGHT YOUTH PARIS AND THE MOON
    Annoyed with the world, I took a large studio in Hampstead. Here
I resolved to live in utter aloofness, until the world should
approach me on its knees, whining its apologies.
    The studio was large and high; so was the rent. Fortunately my
suit was strongly made, and I had a tireless appetite for herrings.
I lived here happily and frugally, pleased with the vast and
shadowy room, and with the absurd little musicians

THE STEEL CAT
    The Hotel Bixbee is as commercial an hotel as any in Chicago.
The brass-rail surmounts the banisters; the cuspidor gleams dimly
in the shade of the potted palm. The air in the corridors is very
still, and appears to have been de-odorized a few days ago. The
rates are moderate.
    Walter Davies

SLEEPING BEAUTY
    Edward Laxton had everything in the world that he wanted except
a sweetheart, fianc

INTERPRETATION OF A DREAM
    A young man entered the office of a well-known psychiatrist,
whom he addressed as follows:

MARY
    There was in those days

HELL HATH NO FURY
    As soon as Einstein declared that space was finite, the price of
building sites, both in Heaven and Hell, soared outrageously. A
number of petty fiends, who had been living in snug squalor in the
remoter infernal provinces, found themselves evicted from their
sorry shacks, and had not the wherewithal to buy fresh plots at the
new prices. There was nothing for it but to emigrate. They
scattered themselves over the various habitable planets of our
universe; one of them arrived in London at about the hour of
midnight in the October of last year.
    Some angels in like case took similar measures, and by a
coincidence one of them descended at the same hour into the same
northern suburb.
    Beings of this order, when they take on the appearance of
humans, have the privilege of assuming whichever sex they choose.
Things being as they are, and both angels and devils knowing very
well what

IN THE CARDS
    The Vascal System is the most reliable, the most up-to-date, and
the most scientific method of foretelling the future by cards. It
is true the operator cannot tell his own fortune, but that drawback
seems to be common to all methods, and in every other way the
successes of the Vascal System have been prodigious.
    A wife, who studied a Vascal in her spare time, laid out the
cards for her husband on the breakfast table. She revealed to him
that he would be involved in an unfortunate collision, and suffer a
severe jolt at the very least, if by any chance he drove his car
home between three and five that afternoon. He now regularly
desires his wife to lay out the cards for him, and never drives
home before the hour she announces as propitious, with the result
that he is almost the only person in the whole block who has not
been severely jolted during the period in question.
    A young girl, holder of a Grade A. Vascal Diploma, was able to
warn her still younger sister that she might that evening expect to
lose something she had possessed all her life, through the agency
of a tall,