Archy the Vers Libre Cockroach,
the Aptronymic Scouts, French Without a Struggle, Suggestions to Popular
Song Writers, Our Own Wall Mottoes, and the sequence of Prefaces (to an
Almanac, a Mileage Book, The Plays of Euripides, a Diary, a Book of
Fishhooks, etc.). Some of Marquis's most admirable and delicious fooling
has been poured into these Prefaces: I hope that he will put them
between book-covers.

One day I got a letter from a big engineering firm in Ohio, enclosing a
number of pay-envelopes (empty). They wanted me to examine the aphorisms
and orisonswettmardenisms they had been printing on their weekly
envelopes, for the inspiration and peptonizing of their employees. They
had been using quotations from Emerson, McAdoo, and other panhellenists,
and had run out of "sentiments." They wanted suggestions as to where
they could find more.

I advised them to get in touch with Don Marquis. I don't know whether
they did so or not; but Don's epigrams and bon mots would adorn any
pay-envelope anthology. Some of his casual comments on whiskey would do
more to discourage the decanterbury pilgrims than a bushel of tracts.

By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he
orders, there is little else about him worth knowing.

If you go to sleep while you are loafing, how are you going to know
you are loafing?

Because majorities are often wrong it does not follow that
minorities are always right.

Young man, if she asks you if you like her hair that way, beware.
The woman has already committed matrimony in her own heart.

I am tired of being a promising young man. I've been a promising
young man for twenty years.

In most of Don Marquis's japes, a still small voice speaks in the
mirthquake:

If you try too hard to get a thing, you don't get it.

If you sweat and strain and worry the other ace will not come--the
little ball will not settle upon the right number or the proper
colour--the girl will marry the other man--the public will cry,
Bedamned to him! he can't write anyhow!--the cosmos will refuse its
revelations of divinity--the Welsh rabbit will be stringy--you will
find there are not enough rhymes in the language to finish your
ballade--the primrose by the river's brim will be only a hayfever
carrier--and your fountain pen will dribble ink upon your best
trousers.

But Don Marquis's mind has two yolks (to use one