The Project Gutenberg EBook of Goat-Feathers, by Ellis Parker Butler

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Title: Goat-Feathers

Author: Ellis Parker Butler

Release Date: March 22, 2009 [EBook #28389]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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GOAT-FEATHERS

BY

_Ellis Parker Butler_

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
_The Riverside Press Cambridge_

COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY ELLIS PARKER BUTLER

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE
THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM

G_oat_-F_eathers_

GOAT-FEATHERS

No human being ever tells the whole truth about himself. We seem to
be born liars in that particular, all of us, and I am no different.
I'm starting out now to tell the bitter, agonizing truth about
myself, but before I am through I shall probably be lying at the
rate of a mile a minute and cracking myself up something awful! A
man can tell only so much truth; then he begins to wabble.

The truth is, I ought to be making as much money as Robert W.
Chambers, and winning prizes of honor like Ernest Poole, and I'm
not. I ought to be better known as a humorist than George Ade and
Mark Twain rolled into one, and I'm not. The trouble with me is
that I am always too ready and eager to break away and go gathering
goat-feathers. If it had not been for that I might be a millionaire
or the President of the United States or the leading American
Author, bound in Red Russia leather. I might have been a Set of
Books, like Sir Walter Scott or Dickens or Balzac, and when people
passed my house the natives would say, "No, that isn't the city
hall or the court-house; that's where Butler lives." Of course some
strangers would say, "Butler, the grocer?" but that would be the
ignorant few. The real people would whisper, "Butler, the Author!"
in a sort of subdued awe and remove their hats. Some of them would
pick a blade of grass from my lawn and t