The Project Gutenberg EBook of Further Foolishness, by Stephen Leacock

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Title: Further Foolishness

Author: Stephen Leacock

Release Date: March 7, 2004 [EBook #11504] Last Updated: November 26, 2011

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FURTHER FOOLISHNESS ***

This etext was produced by Gardner Buchanan.

Further Foolishness
Sketches and Satires on The Follies of The Day

by Stephen Leacock

Preface

Many years ago when I was a boy at school, we had over our class an ancient and spectacled schoolmaster who was as kind at heart as he was ferocious in appearance, and whose memory has suggested to me the title of this book.

It was his practice, on any outburst of gaiety in the class-room, to chase us to our seats with a bamboo cane and to shout at us in defiance:

Now, then, any further foolishness?

I find by experience that there are quite a number of indulgent readers who are good enough to adopt the same expectant attitude towards me now.

STEPHEN LEACOCK
McGILL UNIVERSITY
MONTREAL
November 1, 1916

Contents

FOLLIES IN FICTION

I. Stories Shorter Still

II. The Snoopopaths; or Fifty Stories in One

III. Foreign Fiction in Imported Instalments. Serge the Superman: A Russian Novel. (Translated, with a hand pump, out of the original Russian)

MOVIES AND MOTORS, MEN AND WOMEN

IV. Madeline of the Movies: A Photoplay done back
      into Words

V. The Call of the Carburettor; or, Mr. Blinks and
      his Friends

VI. The Two Sexes, in Fives or Sixes
      A Dinner-party Study

VII. The Grass Bachelor's Guide With Sincere Apologies
      to the Ladies' Periodicals

VIII. Every Man and his friends. Mr. Crunch's Portrait
      Gallery (as Edited from his Private Thoughts)

IX. More than Twice-told Tales; or, Every Man his Own
      Hero

X. A Study in Still Life—My Tailor

PEACE, WAR, AND POLITICS

XI. Germany from Within Out

XII. Abdul Aziz has His: An Adventure in the Yildiz
      Kiosk

XIII. In Merry Mexico

XIV. Over the Grape Juice; or, The Peacemakers

XV. The White House from Without In

TIMID THOUGHTS ON TIMELY TOPICS

XVI. Are the Rich Happy?

XVII. Humour as I See It

Follies in Fiction

I. Stories Shorter Still

Among the latest follies in fiction is the perpetual demand for stories shorter and shorter still. The only thing to do is to meet this demand at the source and check it. Any of the stories below, if left to soak overnight in a barrel of rainwater, will swell to the dimensions of a dollar-fifty novel.

(I) AN IRREDUCIBLE DETECTIVE STORY

HANGED BY A HAIR OR A MURDER MYSTERY MINIMISED

The mystery had now reached its climax. First, the man had been undoubtedly murdered. Secondly, it was absolutely certain that no conceivable person had done it.

It was therefore time to call in the great detective.

He gave one searching glance at the corpse. In a moment he whipped out a microscope.

"Ha! ha!" he said, as he picked a hair off the lapel of the dead man's coat. "The mystery is now solved."

He held up the hair.

"Listen," he said, "we have only to find the man who lost this hair and the criminal is in our hands."

The inexorable chain of logic was complete.

The detective set himself to the search.

For four days and nights he moved, unobserved, through the streets of New York scanning closely every face he passed, looking for a man who had lost a hair.

On the fifth day he discovered a man, disguised as a tourist, his head enveloped in a steamer cap that reached below his ears. The man was about to go on board the Gloritania.

The detective followed him on board.

"Arrest him!" he said, and then drawing himself to his full height, he brandished aloft the hair.

"This is his," said the great detective. "It proves his guilt."

"Remove his hat," said the ship's captain sternly.

They did so.

The man was entirely bald.

"Ha!" said the great detective without a moment of hesitation. "He has committed not one murder but about a million."

(II) A COMPRESSED OLD ENGLISH NOVEL

SWEARWORD THE UNPRONOUNCEABLE

CHAPTER ONE AND ONLY

"Ods bodikins!" exclaimed Swearword the Saxon, wiping his mailed brow with his iron hand, "a fair morn withal! Methinks twert lithlier to rest me in yon glade than to foray me forth in yon fray! Twert it not?"

But there happened to be a real Anglo-Saxon standing by.

"Where in heaven's name," he said in sudden passion, "did you get that line of English?"

"Churl!" said Swearword, "it is Anglo-Saxon."

"You're a liar!" shouted the Saxon, "it is not. It is
Harvard College, Sophomore Year, Option No. 6."

Swearword, now in like fury, threw aside his hauberk, his baldrick, and his needlework on the grass.

"Lay on!" said Swearword.

"Have at you!" cried the Saxon.

They laid on and had at one another.

Swearword was killed.

Thus luckily the whole story was cut off on the first page and ended.

(III) A CONDENSED INTERMINABLE NOVEL

FROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE OR A THOUSAND PAGES FOR A DOLLAR

NOTE.-This story originally contained two hundred and fifty thousand words. But by a marvellous feat of condensation it is reduced, without the slightest loss, to a hundred and six words.

(I)

Edward Endless lived during his youth
   in Maine,
      in New Hampshire,
         in Vermont,
            in Massachusetts,
               in Rhode Island,
                  in Connecticut.

(II)

Then the lure of the city lured him. His fate took him to
   New York, to Chicago, and to Philadelphia.

In Chicago he lived,
   in a boarding-house on Lasalle Avenue,
   then he boarded—
   in a living-house on Michigan