three
months. Everything I touched on Bois Blanc was new, and all my own.
Anything on Manhattan is everybody's.

But to return to our troubles in New York. The only hope I could see was
to create a line of writing all our own. This determination resulted in
a highly specialized type of "feature" for which we found a market in
the morning New York _World_. It combined novelty with the utmost
essence of timeliness. For example, precluding any possibility of being
anticipated on the opening of Coney Island's summer season, we wrote
early in February:

"If reports from unveracious employees of Coney Island are to be
trusted, the summer season of 1910 is going to bring forth thrilling
novelties for the air and the earth and the tunnels beneath the earth."

We listed then the Biplane Hat Glide (women were wearing enormous hats
that season) and Motor Ten Pins--get in a motor car and run down
dummies which count respectively, a child, ten points; a blind man,
five; a newsboy, one. Then the Shontshover. We explained the Shontshover
in detail because it was supposed to have a particularly strong appeal
to the millions who ride in the subway:

"New York's good-natured enjoyment of its inadequate subway service is
responsible for the third novelty of the season. In honor of a gentleman
who once took a ride in one of his own subway cars during the rush hour,
the device has been named the 'Shontshover' (from 'Shonts' and
'shover'). It is the sublimation of a subway car, a cross between a
cartridge and a sardine can. The passengers are packed into the shell
with a hydraulic ram, then at high speed are shot through a pneumatic
tube against a stone wall. Because of the great number of passengers the
Shontshover can carry in a day, the admission price to the tube is to be
only twenty-five cents."

We suggested on other occasions that new churches should have floors
with an angle of forty-five degrees, on account of the prevailing
fashion of large hats among women; that City Hall employees were
outwitting Mayor Gaynor's time clock by paying the night watchman to
punch it for them at sunrise, and that beauty had become a bar to a job
as waitress in numerous New York restaurants. (O shades of George
Washington, forgive us that one, at least!) These squibs did nobody any
harm, and did us on the average, the good of the price of a week's room
rent. We never meant them to be taken seriously or ever supposed that
any one in the world wou