Danny's Own Story. Don Marquis

to pick out a common, ordinary thing like corn salve right off, wouldn't you?”

      “Danny,” he says, “you don't mean to tell me you can't read anything at all?”

      “I never told you nothing of the kind.”

      He picks out a label.

      “If you can read so fast, what's that?” he asts.

      She is a pink one. I thinks to myself; she either is corn salve or else she ain't corn salve. And it ain't natcheral he will pick corn salve, fur he would think I would say that first off. So I'm betting it ain't. I takes a chancet on it.

      “That,” says I, “is mighty easy reading. That is Siwash Injun Sagraw.” I lost.

      “It's corn salve,” he says. “And Great Scott! They call this the twentieth century!”

      “I never called it that,” says I, sort o' mad-like. Fur I was feeling bad Doctor Kirby had found out I was such a ignoramus.

      “Where ignorance is bliss,” says he, “it is folly to be wise. But all the same, I'm going to take your education in hand and make you drink of life's Peruvian springs.” Or some spring like that it was.

      And the doctor, he done it. Looey said it wouldn't be no use learning to read. He'd done a lot of reading, he said, and it never helped him none. All he ever read showed him this feller Hamlet was right, he said, when he wrote Shakespeare's works, and they wasn't much use in anything, without you had a lot o' money. And they wasn't no chancet to get that with all these here trusts around gobbling up everything and stomping the poor man into the dirt, and they was lots of times he wisht he was a Injun sure enough, and not jest a medical one, fur then he'd be a free man and the bosses and the trusts and the railroads and the robber tariff couldn't touch him. And then he shut up, and didn't say nothing fur a hull hour, except oncet he laughed.

      Fur Doctor Kirby, he says, winking at me: “Looey, here, is a nihilist.”

      “Is he,” says I, “what's that?” And the doctor tells me about how they blow up dukes and czars and them foreign high-mucky-mucks with dynamite. Which is when Looey laughed.