E-text prepared by
eagkw, David E. Brown, Bryan Ness,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
()
Ladies
and Gentlemen
Ladies and Gentlemen
By
IRVIN SHREWSBURY COBB
First Published 1927
To my friend
G. W. LILLIE
Contents
| PAGE | |
|---|---|
| A Lady and a Gentleman | 1 |
| The Order of the Bath | 28 |
| Two of Everything | 67 |
| We of the Old South | 99 |
| Killed with Kindness | 136 |
| Peace on Earth | 161 |
| Three Wise Men of the East Side | 202 |
| The Cowboy and the Lady and Her Pa | 226 |
| A Close Shave | 259 |
| Good Sam | 270 |
| How to Choke a Cat without Using Butter | 300 |
Ladies
and Gentlemen
Ladies and Gentlemen
A Lady and A Gentleman
There were the hotel lobbies; they roaredand spun like whirlpools with the crowdsthat were in them. But the streets outsidewere more like mill-races, and the exits from the railroadstations became flumes down which all morningand all afternoon the living torrents unceasingly hadpoured. Every main crossing was in a twist of opposingcurrents. Overhead, on cornices and acrosswindow-ledges and against house-fronts and on ropeswhich passed above the roadway from one building toanother, hung buntings and flags and streamers, theprevalent colors being red and white; and also manygreat goggle-eyed and bewhiskered portraits of deadwarriors done on sail-cloth in the best styles of twodomestic schools—sign-painting and election-bannering.Numbers of brass bands marched to and fro,playing this, that, and the next appropriate air, butwhen in doubt playing “Dixie”; and the musicianswaded knee-deep through an accumulating wreckage of[2]abandoned consonants—softly dropped g’s, eliminatedr’s. In short, the United Confederate Veterans wereholding their annual reunion, t